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March Lectures

On Monday, March 14, at 7 pm, Peter Machinist will present the second lecture of the new Trinity Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology Lecture series at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL. He will speak on “Achaemenid Persia as Spectacle.” This lecture is free and open to the public. See the announcement for details.

The website for the Lynn H. Wood Archaeological Museum Lecture Series at the Institute of Archaeology, Southern Adventist University (Collegedale, TN) reports that John Monson will speak on the topic of “Solomon’s Temple: The Center of the Universe Then and Now,” on Wednesday, March 16, at 7 pm. This appears to be a change from our earlier report which had Bryant Wood speaking at this same date and time. The Lynn H. Wood Lectures are free and open to the public. See the website for more information.

Tagged Lectures

Some Missing Objects Found in Cairo Museum

Today, Zahi Hawass, Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs, reported that three objects which were thought to have been taken from the Cairo Museum have turned up on the museum grounds. Four days ago, Hawass issued a press release stating that 18 objects were missing from the museum in connection with a break-in which occurred on January 29 (previously mentioned here and here).

Now, only 15 objects remain missing.

The objects recovered are (1) the Heart Scarab of Yuya, (2) one of the eleven shabti statuettes of Yuya and Thuya, and (3) fragments of the gilded wood statue of Tutankhamun being carried by the goddess Menkaret and all of the fragments of Menkaret. The objects had been dislocated and Hawass believes they were dropped when the looters fled. A final inventory of the museum is still being conducted.

More details can be found on Hawass’s blog (with photos) or in the Ahram Online news report.

HT: Jack Sasson

Tagged Egypt

Beth Haccherem – A Site Identification: Primer

Over the next week or so I will be discussing a topic of considerable interest to this author – the identification of Beth Haccherem. My conclusions are not revolutionary (or new), however, the methodology with which I reached my conclusion has not been used elsewhere (at least according to my knowledge.) With that being said allow the following information to inform and introduce you to the ancient site of Beth Haccherem.

Site Name

Beth Haccherem literally means “the house of the vineyard.” The name testifies to the city’s location and function. The Judean hill country’s vine-producing capabilities are some of the best in the Levant. Beth-Haccherem is within a larger group of sites with names derived from agricultural man-made devices.

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Textual Concordance (source document, available on request)

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1. Joshua 15:59a (LXX) (you can download a free translation of the LXX here)

2. Jeremiah 6:1 (key verse)

3. Nehemiah 3:14 (updated – not 3:1)

4. Genesis Apocryphon 22:13-14 (Dead Sea Scrolls)

5. The Copper Scroll X:47-51 (Dead Sea Scrolls)

6. Midoth 3:4 (Mishna)

7. Niddah 2:7 (Mishna)

8. Jerome – Jeremiah Commentary (v. 6:1)

Proposed Identifications

Herodium (Edward Robinson 1838)
Ein Karem (Edward Robinson 1856 – traditional identification)
Ramat Rachel (Yochanan Aharoni 1950s)

Map of proposed sites (click on images to zoom)

Possible Toponymic Connections

Jebel Fureidis (modern – Herodium) – Arabic meaning “mountain of Herod.”
Ain Karem (modern – Ein Karem) – Arabic meaning “spring of the vineyard.”
Khirbet Salih (modern – Ramat Rahel) – Arabic meaning “ruin of Salih” unlike many place names it is not a variant of some ancient place name.

More to come…

Follow-up to “Sad News from Cairo Museum”

National Geographic has photos of four of the eighteen objects that were reported missing from the Cairo Museum as a result of the break-in just over two weeks ago.

Sandstone head of an Amarna princess (Kenneth Garrett, National Geographic).

Last week, Claude Mariottini drew our attention to other National Geographic photos of damaged artifacts in the Cairo Museum.

CORRECTION: There are eighteen, not eight, objects which were reported missing. There were eight items listed, but one of the items was actually consisted of eleven shabti statuettes.

Tagged Egypt

New Edition of Pritchard’s Anthologies

Princeton University Press has released a new, single-volume edition of The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, edited by James B. Pritchard. It is available in hardback ($81 at Amazon) or paperback ($26 at Amazon).

With more than 130 reading selections and 300 photographs of ancient art, architecture, and artifacts, this volume provides a stimulating introduction to some of the most significant and widely studied texts of the ancient Near East, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Creation Epic (Enuma elish), the Code of Hammurabi, and the Baal Cycle. For students of history, religion, the Bible, archaeology, and anthropology, this anthology provides a wealth of material for understanding the ancient Near East. (publisher’s website)

When we heard about this, we thought there might be a few questions.

Q: What’s the difference between this and ANET?

A: ANET is short for Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. It was also edited by J. Pritchard, but it is larger and contains more texts. The first edition of ANET was published in 1950, the second edition in 1955, and the third edition in 1969.

Pritchard also published a companion volume to ANET entitled The Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament, commonly known as ANEP. The first edition of ANEP was published in 1954 and a second edition was published in 1969.

Pritchard subsequently edited two volumes of anthologies which are abridgments of ANET and ANEP. The first volume, The Ancient Near East, An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, was published in 1958, and the second volume, The Ancient Near East, A New Anthology of Texts and Pictures, was published in 1975.

This new Princeton edition has combined and reformatted the material of these two abridged anthologies. From our perusal of chapter one in Amazon’s “Look Inside!” it appears almost nothing has changed, including even footnotes and cross-references to ANET and the Bible. The differences between this new volume and ANET are: (1) ANET and ANEP contain more translated texts and pictures, (2) they cost a lot more, and (3) the layout of this new anthology will make it easier to find what you are looking for.

Q: Where can I find more information about this?

A: The Princeton University Press page includes the table of contents and a pdf of chapter one, which is John Wilson’s translations of “Egyptian Myths and Tales.” You can also read portions at Amazon and at Google Books.

While we’re on the subject of anthologies of ancient text translations, Kevin Edgecomb a few years ago helpfully compiled a comparison chart listing the translations included in ANET and COS. The chart shows that ANET includes many texts that did not make it into COS. According to Edgecomb’s blog, ANET has 221 texts not included in COS, and COS has 525 texts not included in ANET.

Tagged Resources

Jericho’s Neolithic “Skyscraper”

Over the last 60 years there has been some debate concerning the function of the “oldest building in the world” at Jericho (i.e. the Neolithic tower at Jericho/Tell es Sultan). The Neolithic tower is well-known to visitor’s of Jericho, but its function as a structure has befuddled archaeologists. Amihai Mazar best sums up the various views like this,

“The walls and tower of PPNA (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A) Jericho are a most surprising discovery from a period when almost no public architecture is known elsewhere. They were explained by Kenyon as a fortification system, and they led her to define Jericho as the earliest urban community known. An alternative suggestion, offered by O. Bar-Yosef, is that the massive walls were intended to protect the settlement from the thrust of silt and eroded debris from the wadi to the west. The round tower remains unexplained by this theory, but it could not have had a defensive purpose due to its location on the inner side of the wall. Perhaps it had some ritual function.”*

Neolithic tower with adjoining wall

Enter “worker intimidation” to the list of potential explanations. Arieh O’Sullivan disseminates the theory of Ran Barkai and Roy Liran at The Media Line.

The world’s first skyscraper was built by early farmers, who were frightened into erecting a solar marker by mankind’s early bosses, archaeologists say.

Long before its Biblical walls came tumbling down, Jericho’s residents were being enticed to give up hunting and gathering and start farming for a living. They settled in this oasis next to the Jordan River and built a mysterious 8.5-meter (28-foot) stone tower on the edge of town.

When discovered by archaeologists in 1952, it was dated at over 11,000 years old, making it the first and oldest public building even found. But its purpose and the motivation for erecting it has been debated ever since.

Now, using computer technology, Israeli archaeologists are saying it was built to mark the summer solstice and as a symbol that would entice people to abandon their nomadic ways and settle down.

“The tower was constructed by a major building effort. People were working for a very long time and very hard. It was not like the other domestic buildings in Jericho,” said Ran Barkai of the Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, who was part of a team that did the computer analysis.

Barkai and fellow archaeologist Roy Liran used computers to reconstruct sunsets and found that when the tower was built the nearby mountains cast a shadow on it as the sun set on the longest day of the year. The shadow fell exactly on the structure and then spread out to cover the entire village.

HT: Joe Lauer

*Quote taken from Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1992.