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Weekend Roundup, Part 2

The renewed campus of the Israel Museum was inaugurated yesterday, as reported in articles in the Jerusalem Post and Arutz-7. I don’t like the idea that the amount of display space has doubled but fewer items are on display.

A report at Device Magazine has some additional details about the cuneiform fragments found at Hazor. They date to the 18th-17th centuries and include the words “master,” “slave,” and possibly “tooth.” It is not clear whether the tablet was written at Hazor or brought to the site from somewhere else. The article (and a similar one at Arutz-7) includes photos.

The current excavations of Megiddo are profiled in this Jerusalem Post article. The team had the privilege recently of hosting Lord and Lady Allenby.

The Galilean synagogue discovered this summer at Horvat Kur is the subject of a brief article published by the university excavating the site.

The Second Qumran Institute Symposium will be held October 21-22, 2010 at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The subject is “The Jewish War agaist Rome (66-70/74): Interdisciplinary Perspectives.” Nearly all of the lectures are in English and most sound quite interesting.

Chris McKinny has posted some aerial photos of Tel Burna and labeled some of the observable features on the surface. What a dream to have a site without later periods “in the way.” Chris’s wife
Mindy has some nice photos of the recent excavation of Burna.

The excavations of a temple at Tel Tayinat in Turkey are profiled by the Ottawa Citizen.

A Brazilian mega-church is building a $200 million replica of Solomon’s temple, although unlike the original, this will seat 10,000 people.

HT: Paleojudaica and Joe Lauer

Tagged Dead Sea, Galilee, Jerusalem, Shephelah, Temple Mount

Fire in Jerusalem Hills

A fire started by teenage hikers has destroyed 250 acres in the forested area west of Jerusalem, reports the Jerusalem Post.

Several teenagers were taken in for questioning in connection with a fire near the capital’s southwestern edge that destroyed 1,000 dunams (100 hectares) of forest, forced the partial evacuation of the moshavim of Ora, Aminadav and Even Sapir, and came close to doing the same for Hadassah University Hospital in Ein Kerem, Jerusalem police announced on Sunday night.
According to a police spokesman, students from a haredi school in the Jerusalem area were hiking near Ein Hamdak, inside the Aminadav Forest. Some of the students were apparently playing with fire and started the blaze, which got out of control. The group then allegedly left the scene and continued toward Jerusalem before being found by detectives from the Moriya District.

The full story is here. The Haaretz story is here.

Even Sapir, one of the towns threatened

UPDATE (7/26): A resident of Even Sapir has written that this moshav was not evacuated, contrary to media reports. The JPost article linked to above now reports that the first fire and a second one at Khirbet Sa’adim are both under control and evacuated residents are returning.

Tagged Jerusalem

Weekend Roundup

A couple of fragments of a cuneiform tablet were found recently at the excavations of Hazor. Details released thus far are limited, but the tablet is from the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1500 BC) and has parallels to the Law Code of Hammurabi. The excavators’ notice of the discovery is online here. I have heard that the find was made on the surface, and that publication won’t take long.

Roman period tombs have been discovered in Petra with skeletal remains and ancient artifacts.

A small basalt statue dating from about 4000 BC has been found in Jordan near the border of Saudi Arabia.

Stephen Gabriel Rosenberg has written an “Archaeology in Israel Update,” including summaries of the medieval aqueduct in Jerusalem, graves in Ashkelon, MB artifacts near Jokneam, MB tombs in Nazareth, and the 18th anniversary of the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem.

New excavations begin today at Shiloh and the team is looking for volunteers (article in Hebrew).

If you prefer to “experience” excavations without getting dirty, take a look at the live video feed from Gath (during working hours only).

HT: Roi Brit

Tagged Discoveries, Excavations, Galilee, Jordan, Samaria, Shephelah, Weekend Roundup

Computer Deciphers Ancient Language

From National Geographic:

A new computer program has quickly deciphered a written language last used in Biblical times—possibly opening the door to "resurrecting" ancient texts that are no longer understood, scientists announced last week. Created by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the program automatically translates written Ugaritic, which consists of dots and wedge-shaped stylus marks on clay tablets. The script was last used around 1200 B.C. in western Syria. […] "Traditionally, decipherment has been viewed as a sort of scholarly detective game, and computers weren’t thought to be of much use," study co-author and MIT computer science professor Regina Barzilay said in an email. "Our aim is to bring to bear the full power of modern machine learning and statistics to this problem." The next step should be to see whether the program can help crack the handful of ancient scripts that remain largely incomprehensible. Etruscan, for example, is a script that was used in northern and central Italy around 700 B.C. but was displaced by Latin by about A.D. 100. Few written examples of Etruscan survive, and the language has no known relations, so it continues to baffle archaeologists.

The full story is here and links to other stories can be found via Google. The academic paper on which these stories are based is available at the MIT website (pdf).

Tagged Technology

Israeli Baptism Area Threatened by Poor Water Quality

In recent years Israel has been developing a southern baptism site on the Jordan River in the Jericho area. The country of Jordan opened a counterpart on the eastern side nearly a decade ago. But the poor quality of the water threatens to close the site before it officially opens. From the Jerusalem Post:

The site where tradition holds Jesus was baptized is in danger of being declared off-limits to pilgrims because of pollution in the Jordan River. Qasar al-Yahud, a few miles from where the biblical river spills into the Dead Sea, has drawn over 100,000 tourists each year, most of whom are Christian pilgrims who wish to undergo a baptism like their savior did 2,000 years ago — and in the very same spot. But drought and irrigation have turned the mighty lower Jordan River into a stagnant stream as it makes it way from the Sea of Galilee. The brook then swells with raw sewage as it passes nearby Jericho. Israeli health officials are reportedly considering erecting signs warning: “Polluted Waters. Entry Forbidden.” […] Neglected for decades, the name of the site is Arabic for “Castle of the Jews,” which is also the name of the 5th century monastery. But since 2007, Israel has tried to bring Christian tourists ‘down by the riverside’ and has invested about $2 million to develop the site in order to allow wheelchair accessibility, shade, baptismal decks and other facilities. Entry is free. There is a similar site close-by on the Jordanian side, but the west bank side is considered holier since that’s the side Jesus likely used. […] Despite the heath risks, the Nature and Parks Authority continues to move ahead with restoration efforts including plans to open the site to tourists without the need for coordination with the military.

The JPost article is accompanied by a photo, the caption of which reads, “Pilgrims dunk themselves in stagnant sewage.” The photo, however, was taken at the northern site of Yardenit, where the water quality is good.

Tagged Tourism

NY Times on the Israel Museum

The string of articles on the newly renovated Israel Museum continues, this one from the New York Times:

For the last 45 years, the Israel Museum has been both the crown jewel of this country’s cultural heritage and a bit of a mess. It has the most extensive holdings of land-of-Israel archaeology anywhere (including a heel bone pierced by an iron nail with wood fragments, the world’s only physical evidence of crucifixion), an encyclopedic collection of Judaica and an exceptional group of Modernist artworks. It sits on a 20-acre campus atop a hill at Jerusalem’s western entrance, holding pride of place along with the architectural and national landmarks that surround it, including the Knesset, or parliament, and the Supreme Court. But as any past visitor can attest, finding one’s way around the museum’s art and archaeology has not been easy. Visits have begun with an uphill trek from a parking lot exposed to the hot sun and, inside the galleries, a feeling of being overwhelmed by quantity and mildly perplexed about substance. That is about to change. On Monday the museum opens new galleries and public spaces. There will be far fewer objects on display, with twice the space to view them, as well as richer links and explanations. In some of the new spaces soft light enters through filtered glass walls, the Jerusalem landscape a dreamy background presence. And a climate-controlled path leads to a central concourse from which the works can be reached. The idea is not simply to make the museum easier to navigate but also to suggest interesting connections among objects and between the particular and the universal. That is never an easy task in this city of stones, where each culture has long sought dominance and where the interplay between preservation and transformation causes endless heartache.

The article also notes that the renovation was completed on time and on budget. It’s hard to overstate the significance of this achievement. The full article is here.

Tagged Museums