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BibicalA Perspectiveson the Ancient Worldfrom Mesopotamiato the Mediterranean

IRON

I

Vol.60 No.3

September1997

EMERGING NATIONS PALESTINE:

Biblical Archaeo

to the Mediterranean Perspectiveson the AncientWorldfromMesopotamia A Publicationof the AmericanSchoolsof OrientalResearch

Volume60 Number3

September1997

Archaeological Sources for the History of Palestine 114 THEIRONAGEII PERIOD:EMERGINGNATIONS Larry G. Herr

What were the salient features of the best known archaeological period in the history of Palestine? The three hundred and fifty years of Iron Age II open with the onset of the new millennium as marked by changes in pottery assemblages, architecture, and settlement pattern. The advent of the Persian empire in about 540 BCE-rather than the more traditional marker provided by the Babylonian conquest-brings the period to a close. Herr's presentation of the archaeology of these pivotal centuries encompasses settlement pattern, subsistence system, urban plans, architecture, technology, trade, writing, religion, art, burials, and water systems. It also includes a general treatment of the conservative aspects of everyday life that characterize the period's entire duration. How do history and archaeology intersect in these centuries which abound in literary remains? Produced by both small city states and vast empires, ostraca, clay tablets, stelae, monumental wall reliefs, and a significant portion of the biblical literature offer a tremendous resource and equally high risk. This tension is intrinsic to biblical archaeology, as it is to the broader issue of the relationship between political-historical events and archaeologically observable change in the material culture. Balanced attention to the whole spectrum of data does permit the division of the Iron II era into periods. Each of the three sub-divisions of Iron II merits its own historical and social overview sketched from biblical as well as inscriptional and ethno-archaeological evidence from Egypt, SyroPalestine, and Mesopotamia. The archaeological data then take center stage for each of the polities of the southern Levant: Israel, Judah, Philistia, Phoenicia, Aram, Ammon, Moab, and Edom. Each of these "national" sections includes a list of sites exhibiting the material culture of that people group. The portrait of the material culture of Palestine shows how self-awareness of these small nations grew gradually across the Iron II period so that, by period's end, material culture marks out territories and identifies the nationalities of the peoples of ancient Palestine. 115 116 117 118 119 120

Biblical Archaeology History of Iron II Syntheses Periodization Goals and Organization Archaeology of Everyday Life Iron IIA Tenth Century

132 Iron IIB Ninth to Late Eighth Centuries 151 Iron IIC Late Eighth to MidSixth Centuries 176 Conclusions and Generalizations

184 Arti-Facts A Rejoinder to "Was the Siloam Tunnel Built by Hezekiah?" International Conference in Near Eastern Archaeology Art from the Ancient City of Kerma on View at the National Museum of African Art Spirit Houses Smart Museum of Art to Host Special Exhibition of Sumerian Temple Treasures from the Oriental Institute Museum Reviews of First Civilizations:AncientMesopotamiaand Egypt;Daily Lifeof theEgyptian Gods;MesopotamianCivilization:TheMaterialFoundationsand L'habitatpriv? en Palestine au BronzeMoyen et au BronzeRdcent[Private Dwellings in Middle and LateBronzeAge Palestine]

From

the

Editor

As directorof the Madaba Plains Project'sexcavation of Tallal-cUmayri,LarryHerr,the author of this issue's installment of BA'sseries on the Archaeological Sources for the History of Palestine,insists thatevery gupha of earthgo throughthe sift.Thus,every tiny potsherd, every snail shell, every piece of flint, and every bone fragment ends up in the collection bag or pottery pail. And every seal ends up under Herr's epigraphicallytrainedeye, for he knows that careful sifting has enlarged cUmayri's contribution to the known corpus of seals beyond all expectations. Professor Herr's presentation of the archaeology of Iron II Palestine manifests the same thoroughness and meticulous attention to detail. He both coherently presents the salient featuresof the most profusely known archaeologicalperiod in Palestineand capturesits dominant theme, the emergence of small nations in the midst of a tumultuous era. Herr's article provides an up-to-date overview of the archaeology of the Iron II period and an orientation to the inevitable debate regarding the interplay between literary and material cultural data. The presentation includes a discussion of the archaeology of everyday life, an extraordinarily helpful listingof excavatedsites and theirIronIIremains,as well as an essentialbibliography. Herrinnovates by treatingall of the emerging nations of the IronAge-from Israelto Edom-with the same level of interest.This treatmentleads to extending the end of the IronAge from the more customary date coinciding with Judean political history-the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem-until the mid-sixth century when the centuries-longcontinuity of IronAge material culture manifests its ebb tide. No doubt Herr's perspective has been shaped by two decades of examining the products of the sift in the Ammonite cultural arena. Sorting out the artifactsat the sift demands at least an adjustment of focal length, if not a perspectivalshift. But most diggers are able fairlyrapidly to filterout the "noise"and resolve the "signal,"find the sherds and ignore the stones. Unquestionably,some folks have an extraordinary knack for this, and it is they who regularly turn to their supervisors with seals and beads in hand. But all humans (including archaeologicalvolunteers!)have an especially acute ability at visual discrimination. Our eyes are quickly educated and can learn to pick up the barest hints of signals from, for example, a too nearly symmetrical clump of clay that turns out to be a diminutive spindle whorl. "...[T]he human brain is an incrediblefilter for extracting informationfrom confusion" (P.Thaddeus quoted by S. Hall, MappingtheNextMillennium [Random House: NY, 1992:15]). The cover photos--created by RichardCleave-witness a radical reshaping of the sort of visual informationwe are pressed to process. On the front cover, three-dimensionalhigh resolution satellite data offers a familiar scene from an unfamiliar angle. The image stretches from snow-topped final reaches of the Lebanon Mountain chain to the northernmost tip of the Gulf of Aqaba/Elat. The landscape of "emerging nations" presents itself as a variegated, heavily dissected chaos of plateaus and valleys, plains and mountain heights. On the rearcover, the image becomes more map-like. On the layer-tintimage, height-related colors replace the natural hues. The simplifying color scheme provides for more dramatic separation of topographicvariation.The massive greenhand of the Jezreelvalley,the slivers of passes through the Carmel spur, the block of the Samarian and Judean highlands, and the sharp canyons of the wadis slicing the Transjordanianplateau:all these featurespresent themselves with unmistakable clarity.The tinted terrain enables us observers more readily to separate the useful information from the background noise. The maps that accompany Herr's article have been especially crafted to achieve somewhat the opposite effect:less dramaticseparation of their national particularities.This visual presentation resists the solid-line boundaries that etch conventional maps of the territory. While recognizing the reality of cultural areas on the Iron II Palestinian landscape, the maps' tinting suggests fuzziness or imprecision at the perimetersof these zones. Whetherthe product of the fluidity of "nationalities,"the movement of borders in a competitive world, or just plain archaeologicaluncertainty,ambiguity is what is mapped. Defining a cultural area is simply not as straightforwardas finding a bone bead or bovine tooth in the sift. It requires, nonetheless, its own mode of visual acuity.

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BiblicalArchaeolo Perspectiveson the Ancient Worldfrom Mesopotamiato the Mediterranean

Editor David C. Hopkins Art DirectorBucky Edgett,LuckyProductions Book Review EditorMichel Fortin Arti-FactsEditorsBruceand CarolynRoutledge EditorialAssistants Mary PetrinaBoyd, Ellen Rowse Spero EditorialCommittee KennethG. Hoglund JefferyA. Blakely ElizabethBloch-Smith Douglas A. Knight J. P.Dessel MaryJoan Leith ErnestS. Frerichs GloriaLondon Ronald S. Hendel Jodi Magness RichardS. Hess Gerald L. Mattingly Louise Hitchcock Gaetano Palumbo Paul Zimansky Subscriptions Annual subscriptionratesare $35 for individuals and $45 for institutions.Thereis a special annual rate of $28 for students, those over 65, physically challenged,or unemployed. Biblical is also availableas part of the benefits Archaeologist of some ASORmembershipcategories.Fordetails, contactASORat 617-353-6570.Postage for Canadianand other internationaladdressesis an additional$5. Paymentsshould be sent to ASOR Membership/SubscriberServices,PO. Box 15399, Atlanta,GA 30333-0399Phone 404-727-2345.Email: [email protected]. VISA/Mastercard orders can be phoned in. Back issues Backissues can be obtainedby calling SP CustomerServicesat 800-437-6692or writing SP CustomerServices,PO. Box 6996,Alpharetta, GA 30239-6996. Postmaster Send address changes to Biblical ASORMembership/Subscriber Archaeologist, Services,P.O.Box 15399,Atlanta,GA 30333-0399. Periodicalsclass postage paid at Atlanta,GA and additionaloffices. Copyright? 1997by the AmericanSchools of OrientalResearch. Correspondence All editorialcorrespondence should be addressed to BiblicalArchaeologist, 4500 MassachusettsAvenue NW, Washington,DC 20016-5690(ph:202-885-8699;fax:202-885-8605;email [email protected]).Correspondence regardingsubmissions for Arti-Factscan be sent to Prof.B. Routledge;School of Arts and Sciences, Departmentof Anthropology;325 University Museum;33rd and SpruceStreets;Philadelphia, PA 19104-6398 Book Reviews All books for review should be sent to: ProfessorMichelFortin,Departement d'histoire,UniversiteLaval,Ste-Foy,Quebec, CanadaGIK 7P4.BooksenteringCanadashould be marked:EducationalMaterialfor Review;No CommercialValue-GSTExempt. Advertising Correspondenceshould be addressed to LeighAnderson, ScholarsPress,P.O.Box 15399, Atlanta,GA 30333-0399(ph:404-727-2327;fax:404727-2348).Ads for the sale of antiquitieswill not be accepted. BiblicalArchaeologist (ISSN0006-0895)is published quarterly(March,June,September,December)by ScholarsPress,819 Houston Mill Road NE, Atlanta,GA 30329,for the AmericanSchools of OrientalResearch(ASOR);656 BeaconStreet; Boston,MA 02215-2010.Phone:617-353-6570. Printedby CadmusJournalServices,Baltimore, MD. a

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Archaeological Sources for the History of Palestine: The Iron Age II Period: Emerging Nations Author(s): Larry G. Herr Source: The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 114-183 Published by: The American Schools of Oriental Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3210608 Accessed: 02/04/2010 13:34 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=asor. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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(1838, 1852), who rode about the country on a horse, brilliantlyequatingmodem villageand sitenameswith linguistically COMPRISE similar names in the Bible and other ancient literarysources. THAT UP THE IRON II PERIOD HE CENTURIES MAKE A little later Heinrich Schliemann would do the same, using in perhaps the best known archaeological period Iliad to the the history of Palestine. The interest of Western help find Troy.But while they worked more-orsociety in the Bible and its lands has brought pilgrims, less responsibly, treasurehunters carried off looted works of treasurehunters, and their adventurous descendants, archae- art and history from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Turkey,Greece, ologists, to the Holy Land to see if the secrets buried beneath China, and Yucatan. It was colonial rape at its worst. The nadir of archaeology in the Holy Land was the expedition of the ground can enrich and, for some, prove the truths in Holy M. B. Parker who tunneled under Jerusalem in a ludicrous Writ (Silberman 1980). Although the Bible ascribes much of its action to the cen- attempt to find Solomon's rumored treasure(Silberman1980). turies before or during the early stages of the Iron II Fortunately,using the Bible to help guide one's research does not necessarily lead to treasurehunting. Yetpermitting period, most of the writing took place just before, during, and after the Babylonian conquest, that is, the seventh-fifth one's present understanding of the biblical text to dictate centuries. There is, therefore, a wealth of literary informa- how archaeologists understand what they dig up, and tion at our fingertips for the Iron II period, especially the later how they dig it, is intellectual looting (Dever has been the parts. When one adds the large corpus of alphabetic inscrip- most vocal critic of this abusive form of archaeology; see, for tions from the southern Levant, the Assyrian and Babylonian instance, 1982). Recent archaeology of the Iron II period cuneiform texts, and Egyptian hieroglyphic documents relat- has had to undo so much bad archaeology by earlier excavators, who came to their sites with positive certainties of ing to Palestine, the cornucopia of literary and historical biblical truths, that many sites have had to be reappraised sources becomes obvious (Pritchard 1969). Do we even need archaeology? What can it possibly radically (for instance, Pratico1993).But even when we know tell us that all those literary sources do not? It's worth recall- this sad truth, it remains difficult to interpret archaeological ing that every inscriptionsupplementing the Bible was found remains completely independent of literary sources. Must we then disavow use of the Bible to help us underby an archaeological endeavor of some sort, be it a late-night looting of an ancient tomb or a majorexcavation project.Both stand archaeological finds? Dever's critique of "biblical writersof inscriptionsand the biblicalauthorsmerely assumed archaeology" has been misunderstood as advocating just that (e.g., Shanks 1981). But he was simply verbalizing what many aspects of culture that their literary legacy does not address. Only archaeology can hope to resurrect ancient every good archaeologist knows: just as objective biblical scholarship attempts to work without imposing religious or lifestyles--especially those of the common person. theological preconceptions on the text, so archaeology must be practicedfree of any historicalor religious preconceptions, BiblicalArchaeology EversinceQueen Helena,the motherof the Romanemperor including those we have of the Bible. Only then can Constantine, began digging for the TrueCross in a Jerusalem archaeology be an accuratetool for biblical study. Otherwise, our understanding of both the Bible and archaeology is pit during the early fourth century CE,human curiosity and religious piety have combined to probe the dirt of the warped by our preconceptions. But neither should we go so far in separating Bible and Holy Land to find out if we can learn more than mere literarchaeology that we dismiss the biblical evidence for the preary evidence tells us. The practice of exploring and digging exilicperiod altogether(Dever [1995]describessome historians up Palestine with Bible in hand was thus nothing new when who have virtually done just that,especially Lemche,Thompmodern biblicists and linguists began to do it in the nineteenth century,some with more success and care than others. son, Davies, and Ahlstr6m 1993a).Despite its limitations, the One of the more successful explorers was Edward Robinson Bible still remains our best extra-archaeological artifact. It

By Larry G. Herr

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BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

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often helps us give names to things we find, from statues of gods to agricultural items.1 Without the Bible, our understanding of Iron II archaeology would be monochromatic;and without archaeology our understanding of the world of the Biblewould be just as lackluster. After working with them independently, we should try to relate the two, but in so doing, we must be careful not to confuse the one for the other.We must also rememberthat,like an archaeological site, the Bible has its own stratigraphyof oral traditions,written sources,editingprocesses,and scribal transmissionwhich we need to take into consideration when we use it. It is, indeed, as an artifactof the ancientworld that the Bible makes its most important contribution to archaeological understanding. In this article I will attempt to discuss the Iron II period by incorporating insights from both sources,but with a primary emphasis on the archaeological finds.

History of Iron II Syntheses

Periodizations of the Iron Age II IronIIA: IronIIB:

900-800 800-587

Aharoni (1978) IronIIA: 1000-925 IronIIB: 925-721 IronIIC: 721-586 Mazar (1990) IronIIA: 1000-925 IronIIB: 925-720 IronIIC: 720-586

Barkay(1992) IronIIA: IronIIB: IronIlA: IronIIIB:

10th-9thc. 8th c. 7th-early 6th c. 6th c.

IronIIA: IronIIB: IronIIC:

926-814 814-721 721-586

NEAEHL(1993) IronIIA: 1000-900 IronIIB: 90(0-700 IronIIC: 700-586 Babylon:

Herr (1997) IronIIA: IronIIB:

IronIIC:

586-539

10thc. 9th-late 8th c.

late8th-mid-6thc.

Archaeologistshave offered manyperiodizationsof IronIIoverthe years.WhileAlbrightdid not and IronIIBfrom subdividethe period,hisstudent,G.E.Wright,dated IronIIAfrom900 to 800 BCE Rast(1992)usedpoliticaleventsto subdividethe period:fromPharaoh 800 to 587 BCE(1961:117-23). Shishak'sinvasionin 926 to the end of the OmrideDynastyin 814 is IronIIA;IronIIBcontinues to Samaria'sfall in 721;and IronIIClastsuntilJerusalem'sfall in 586. IronIIAand Bthus centerprimarilyon the northernkingdom,while IronIICemphasizesJudah.Aharoni's(1978:xix)and Mazar's (1990:30)systemsare similarlyhistorical,in which IronIIAbegins with the UnitedMonarchyand lastsuntilShishak;IronIIBlastsuntilSamaria'sfall;and IronIICends with Jerusalem'sfall. Barkay's (1992)isthe mostcomprehensive,focusingIronIIon the periodsof the UnitedMonarchyand the northernkingdom of Israel(IronIIAand IronIIB)and adding IronIIIAand B for the time after and wideSamaria's destructionandthe Neo-Babylonian period.Becauseof itscomprehensiveness (Stern spreadusability,the most influentialperiodizationwill most likelybe that of the NEAEHL 1993:1529).Init, the Babylonianera is a separateperiod.

The first synthesis was Albright's TheArchaeologyof Palestineand theBible in 1932. It was adapted to his monumental 1940 volume FromtheStoneAge to Christianitywhich, although it is history and not archaeology, used archaeological finds to construct his grand historicalpanorama.He updated his construction and addressed specific archaeological questions in 1949 (The Archaeologyof Palestine;revised 1960 and reissued in 1971)in a volume that would become the paradigm for archaeological synthesis for many years. It was the first substantive attempt to look at archaeological results period by period. As such, it became the basis upon which a whole generation of international Palestinian archaeologists in the 1950s and 1960s would build. Albright's student, G. Earnest Wright, structured Albright's basic outline by ascribing specific sites to archaeological periods systematically in a major article published in 1961. But after that there was a dearth of syntheticstudies for over twenty yearsas Palestinianarchaeologists were inundated with so much new information that no one could command the whole field as Albright and Wright had done. In 1982 the first Israeli synthesis in English appeared by Y.Aharoni (the Hebrew version had appeared in 1978).It was intended to interpretin an Israelifashion the many new discoveries since 1961. Perhaps because Aharoni's book represented only one side of the Israeli approach (that of the 116

Rast (1992)

Wright(1961)

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University of Tel Aviv) and was seriously dated, A. Mazar from The Hebrew University in Jerusalemproduced his synthesis in 1990. The 1990s have seen a spate of them with the appearanceof W. Rast'ssmall book (1992)and the important article of G. Barkay(for Iron II)in a largervolume edited by A. Ben-Tor.The two most recent articlesappeared in a single book on the archaeology of society in antiquity (Dever 1994b and Holladay 1994).While not truly a synthesis of the period, the social study of Stager on the family in 1985 carried the same force.Virtuallyall of these studies have centered on the archaeology of Israel, recognizing that other national groups played a part in the southern Levant, but treating them as peripheral elements which contribute to our understanding of Israel,but not as individual entities in their own right or as independent factors in the archaeological history of Palestine. This synthesis attempts to correct that imbalance. Many other studies could be considered here, but they are limited to certainaspects of the period (e.g., Kenyon 1971)

or were inspired and controlled by the results from a single site. This article must express its synthesis in terms of archaeologicalconsensus. Unfortunately,a consensus is never easy to arrive at, and there are always those who differ from the mainstream (Finkelstein 1996). These studies are valuable because they call any glib syntheses into question, but in this presentation, space constraints limit the amount of specific discussion they receive.

Periodization The Iron IIperiod was formerly limited to the time of the divided monarchy in Israel's history (Wright 1961:117-23), dating from the late tenth century to the early sixth century BCE,and many archaeologists still retain those dates (Rast 1992:45). However, there is a rising consensus that we should now begin Iron II at ca. 1000 BCE.It is the time around which the Iron II assemblage of pottery, with its burnishing techniquesthat lasted throughoutthe period, replaced the styles of Iron I. It also appears to be the approximate beginning of the territorialmonarchies (or centralized chiefdoms) of the region.Wewill accede to these new developments and begin our survey with the arrivalof the firstmillennium. The end of Iron II is also debated. Earlier archaeologists uniformly stopped the period with the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCEafter which they posited a dark age before the Persian period. However, recent excavations have uncovered solid evidence that much of Palestine including Judah was inhabitedafterthat date during the "Neo-Babylonian"period. Moreover, because non-Israelite peoples also inhabited the ancient world of Palestine, such as Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and others, we can no longer practice the intellectual imperialism of supposing that the history of biblical Israel should dictate periodization for the entire region. We should therefore extend the Iron II period to the beginning of the Persian period in the last half of the sixth century BCE. Archaeologists have subdivided Iron II in various ways, causing considerable confusion. Ever since Albright, who did not subdivide the period (1971:112),scholars have added more and more subdivisions. These divisons are often made using political events such as Pharaoh Shishak's invasion, the fall of Samaria, and the destruction of Jerusalem. Unfortunately, much of periodization must be idealistic and artificial.Although several of the systems outlined in the chart to the left end a subdivision around 721 with the fall of Samaria, this makes sense only for the northern part of Cisjordan.One of the most significantarchaeologicalbreaks is the massive Assyrian invasion of 701 which destroyed Lachishand many of the other southerncities of Judah(except Jerusalem). This probably explains the loose designation of 700 by NEAEHLwhich intends to include both the Assyrian invasions of 721 (Samaria) and 701 (Judah).Another weakness of all of these systems is that they center too heavily on the history of Israelas recordedin the Bible.If we are to understand the Iron II period as objectively as possible, we must account for the cultural history of the southern Levant as a

whole and less on political and biblical history. Archaeologicalperiodization is an organizationof change in the material culture of a region and should not be related to specific years or momentary historical events. We should tie our periodization to changes in the material culture which we can ascertain archaeologically. These are often inspired by political and historical change, but there tends to be a cultural lag between historical events and the culturalchange they spark.Pottersdid not immediately begin making new forms, for instance, the moment Samaria was destroyed. They changed their potting techniques and habits slowly over time as new economic or technological forces took effect. For this reason I prefer subdivisions that are not related to historical events, but to wide-spread changes in materialculturewhich appear as the relativelyrapid development of new assemblages. This is what others have called a "punctuated equilibrium" (Eldridge and Gould 1972, cited by Holladay 1994:371)in which long periods of time pass by with relatively little change in material culture and then are "punctuated" with relatively sudden bursts of change. This is not to deny that steady change can take place as well. I will therefore begin Iron II with the onset of the new millennium, noting that it approximates the rise of the sociopolitical emergence of "monarchy"(or "chiefdom"according to LaBiancaand Younker 1994) throughout Palestine. Along with it came changes in the material culture, including pottery assemblages, architecture,and settlement pattern, to list just a few. I will end it with the beginning of the Persian empire in about 540 BCE, which radically altered the way of and the world around themselves peoples thought it an is of them, although something archaeologically arbiI with division. make no division the arrival of the trary of the Several Babylonians. Transjordanian national not were the groups destroyed by Babyloniansand, although demographic changes took place throughout Palestine and new aspects of material culture began to enter the picture, such as Greek pottery, there is not enough difference in the material culture during the 50 years of Babylonian control to merit an archaeological subdivision for that short period of time. The few changes that began during this time are much more significant in the Persian Period. We can group the corpora of finds into three basic cultural assemblages. (1) Iron IIA. The tenth century includes transitional Iron I/Iron II artifacts,including types of objects and pottery typical of Iron I as well as new ones presaging features characteristicof Iron II.There is a tendency for interregional similarity;that is, for instance,finds from Transjordan are very similar to those from Cisjordan. It was a time of a few largeurbancenters(especiallyin Israel)and many smaller towns and villages;wealth was distributedunevenly.Although Pharaoh Shishak's invasion of about 925 BCEis a handy historical date to end Iron IIA, changes in material culture cannot be limited to a single date; I therefore round off the date to the end of the tenth century. (2) Iron IIB. The ninth and eighth centuries made up a new corpus of material culturein which the trendtoward regionalassemblagesbegan. BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

117

Near the end of this period, Assyria destroyed Aram (Damascus) and Israel, cementing its control of virtually everything north of Jerusalem.(3) Iron IIC.The trend toward nationalism in Iron IIB culminated in the seventh to midsixth centuries with assemblages that strikingly correspond to regional or national polities. Most of the period included a pax assyriacawhen the Levant prospered under the stability of the Assyrian empire, whether its subjects liked it or not. Where deposits occur from the mid-sixth century (the Babylonian period), the material culture of each region is mostly similar to that of the early sixth century. Indeed, for some cultures, such as that of the Ammonite region of Transjordan, there is virtually no change whatsoever. My subdivision of Iron II is thus based more on archaeological assemblages than others which tend to be historically or biblically based: Iron IIA tenth century Iron IIB ninth to late eighth centuries Iron IIC late eighth to mid-sixth centuries

Goalsand Organization

In the following sections we will discuss each of the three periods of Iron IIhistorically and archaeologically,using both literary and archaeological sources. There will first be an historical and social overview which is primarily based upon biblical evidence, but is also helped by inscriptional and ethno-archaeological evidence from Egypt, Syro-Palestine, and Mesopotamia. It is not intended to be anything more than the most general look at the period so that the archaeological results may be put in an historical context. If it is argued that this is backwards, and we should start with archaeologyto get at history (a view with which I am inclined to agree),I would respond that the resultingdiscussion would be sterile and uninteresting. Moreover, archaeology cannot construct a history, but only a history of material culture. A synthesis for people interested in biblical archaeology, such as the readers of this journal, must include elements from the literary sources. The historicalcontext is followed by a look at how archaeological finds expand the historical overview in each of the polities or national entities of the southern Levant: Israel, Judah,Philistia,Phoenicia,Aram,Ammon, Moab, and Edom. The discussion of Phoenicia and Aram is limited to their contacts with the southern Levant and does not examine the archaeology of their central territoriesto the north. The organization of the discussion for each national group includes finds related to geographical extent (boundaries), settlement patterns (relationships of sites including demography), subsistence patterns (food production), urban plans (site organization), architecture,technology (including metal and pottery), trade, writing (scripts and inscriptions; languages are discussed in Iron IIC, except for Israel where it is Iron IIB),religion, art,burials, and water systems. These items are omitted when there is little or no information available or when they repeat information given in discussions of earlier periods. Some groups of finds can be discussed in more than 118

60:3(1997) BiblicalArchaeologist

one section. For instance, food production could be part of subsistence or trade. If it is discussed in one section, it will generally not appear in the other; only in remarkable situations will it be mentioned in both. Obviously, many aspects of Iron II culture and landscape were shared by the various "national" groups; these will be discussed with the first national group for each period (or the one in which the best remains are found), and not necessarily in the others. There is no attempt to discuss types of objects, such as textile implements or metal vessels, in separate groups. Instead, objects with important contributions to a synthesis understanding are discussed under the relevant general heading. Each "national"section includes a list of sites that seem to exhibitthe materialcultureof that people group. Site names follow the spellings found in NEAEHLfor ease of reference to the more detailed discussions and bibliographies there, even though some of the spellings are idiosyncratic (I include more common names in parentheses when the spellings are significantly different). To avoid proliferation of parenthetical referencesin the text and an incredibly long bibliography, we document material only for sites and features not found in NEAEHL. By dividing the discussion into "national"groups I have entered an area of great debate in recent literature. I do not wish to understand "national" (or "people-group") affinity by preconceived ideas of ethnicity or political control,but by the geographical distribution of distinctive aspects of assemblages of material culture.Artifacts and objectsrepresent the activity patterns of the people that used them; they therefore reflect that culture.If there is an isolatable assemblage of artifacts, it is a logical next step to call it a distinctive culture (Dever 1994b:420). Because assemblages of material culturechange over space as well as time,the growth or abatement of a people (or "national")group can be suggested by how these assemblages wax or wane in space. If there was a significant change of material culture or site history between two subsequent strata,its national or people orientation may have changed. For instance, the Iron IIA cities of Qasile IXVIII and Gerisa are markedly changed from the Philistine settlements immediately preceding them, suggesting the YarkonRiver area changed hands, probably to Israel.At the same time, however, the material culture of Ashdod to the south was virtually unchanged, indicating a general occupational continuum. Part of the border between Israel and Philistia thus seems to have been somewhere between the Yarkon and Ashdod. Mere political control of a region as stated in the literary sources, but without observable material culture connections in the archaeological record, is not a strong enough reason to attribute a site to any national or people group. When I ascribea site to a national group, it does not mean that I believe the site was politically controlled by the leaders of that nation, although this is indeed usually the case; nor does it mean that the "ethnic" group usually associated with the nationality is the majorityof inhabitants.Ethnic

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Spindlewhorls are a ubiquitousitem in the IronAge artifactual assemblage. Likethese unearthedat cUmayri,most were fashioned from potsherds.Stone was also used for whorls whose varyingsizes permittedthe spinningof different sizes and types of threads. Photo courtesyof the author.

affiliation could be very fluid (for that reason I try to avoid the term) and political control could be strong or weak. At the risk of overemphasizing the point (because some readers, in spite of how much I decry it, will still want to see "ethnicity"or politics behind my attributions), the deciding factor in placing a site with a particular nationality is the material culture of the site and/or the region it is in, including the material culture of surrounding and neighboring sites. Several of these attributions will be debated by my colleagues, but this debate will prove instructive. I do not wish to insist that my attributions of sites to national groups will remain correct, but the future of Iron II archaeology will perforce lead in this direction. My attempt to do so must be seen as simply a beginning to this process. There will be those who will challenge my attempt to describe "national" material cultures. I will be the first to insist that, especially for Iron IIA but less so for Iron IIB-C, national awareness was in its infancy. But I think we must trace the development of that awareness back to the emerging central governments of Iron IIA, if not even to the end of Iron I from which the national groups and monarchies/chiefdoms of Iron II arose. Disclaimer (yet again): For some border sites, insufficient aspects of material culture were found to make a national designation clear, and it is very likely that several sites have been misattributed.Shaded areas on the accompanying maps illustrate this uncertainty. These lists are not intended to reflect the precise borders of national groups, but are teitative attempts to suggest a modest level of probability.

Archaeologyof EverydayLife

There are many aspects of material culture that occur so frequently through both space and time with very little change that it is easy to skip over them in a survey such as this (which emphasizes change). Many synthetic discussions of archaeology and biblical studies ignore them, favoring

aspects of archaeology-predominantly "masculine"-such as monumental architecture,settlementpatterns,urbanplans, royal succession, and military conquests. Moreover,because these ubiquitous artifacts were usually used in everyday activities associated with the lives and work of women, we have neglected a very large and importantelement in archaeological synthesis. Interestingly,the objects that reflect these activities are the most frequent material culture finds made on almost every archaeological project, especially if one includes the pottery (Wood 1990). The logical place to discuss these featuresis in the section called "architecture"when we deal with domestic house forms, but, perhaps because women's work was so duplicated throughout the whole region, the descriptions would be so repetitive that it makes sense to discuss aspects of daily life briefly as categories here. They apply to every national group and time period included in this paper. Cultural features associated with food preparation,especially artifacts made of stone, tended to change little over long periods of time. Millstones for grinding grain consisted of a large, flat or gently curving lower millstone (or saddle quern) over which a loaf-shaped upper millstone could be pushed back and forth grinding the grain to flour.Both stones were usually made of basalt, a hard dense rock whose rough crystals helped the grinding process. The basalt often had to be imported from Galilee, southern and eastern Transjordan, and possibly the Negev. Because very few or no basalt chips are found on excavations outside basalt regions, the artifacts would seem to have been produced in the region of origin. They could have been supplied by itinerant producer/merchants or have been part of caravan shipments. Other types of mortars (many were limestone) and pestles (stone or wood) could be used for other types of food. Flint blades supplemented metal knives in butchering animals, chopping vegetables, harvesting grain, and many other activities from curing leather to sewing. Eating utensils (forks, knives, and spoons) are almost never found, and people probably reliedon theirhands and fingersmost of the time,perhaps using flat bread to scoop up stews or thick soups. Pottery cooking pots tended to have round bottoms because they could sit in the coals of a fire with stability and because they would distribute the heat evenly, keeping them from cracking. For the same reason potters added calcite inclusions which would allow the pottery to expand in the heat of the fire until technology became available during Iron II that allowed potters to use other tempering materials (Gloria London, personal communication, September, 1996). Hearths tended to be small indicating that fires were probably small. Flatbread could be produced in just a few minutes over a straw fire, so that women did not need to work long hours gathering wood for fuel. Textile finds, such as spindle whorls, loom weights, and other weaving objects like shuttle cocks and needles show that, for the most part, women used simple objects to produce clothing and tent material. By far the majority of spindle whorls were made of reused potsherds, rounded and 60:3(1997) BiblicalArchaeologist

119

with a hole drilled through them. A sherd provided enough weight for the shaft, with one end forced through the hole, to spin, creating thread as the woman held the wool above the spinning spindle. Based on ethno-archaeological observation of women today, whorls were spun while the women traveled, talked, or nursed babies, deftly making the threadwithout thought as they performedothertasks;women probably constantly carried a spindle and a ball of wool or hair.Whorls come in many sizes, suggesting the women produced varying sizes and types of thread. Spinners used large whorls to produce tent material with goat hair,medium-size for wool, and the smallest ones to produce fine linen threads. Different kinds of loom weights and weaving objects suggest at least two kinds of looms. One was a vertical type, usually attached to a wall or ceiling, while the other was horizontal,stakedon the ground.Clothingwas probablywrapped around the body and held in place by bone pins or, beginning in the eighth century, metal fibulae (sing. fibula), the ancestors of our safety pin. Buttons probably were used, but they were relatively rare. In fact, objects often called buttons (small round objects with two holes near the center) were probably used for other activities. Beauty enhancers included small mortars and pestles to grind kohl for black colors or ochre for yellow or red ones. Egyptian tomb paintings suggest that, if they could afford it, both sexes used a wide variety of cosmetics generously. Excavatorsfrequently find small metal cosmetic applicators. Jewelry is mentioned often in the Bible and is also found by almost every excavation of Iron II strata (Platt 1979).Most jewelry was made of metal, especially bronze, but also more rarelyof silver and gold. Adornments included, among other items, earrings, nose rings, bracelets, and anklets. Necklaces and some bracelets could be made of strings of beads, often boasting semiprecious stones such as carnelian, red limestone, or steatite, but more often strung of more common stone or even pottery as pendants. Metal and faience were used for beads and pendants as well. Items connected with sanitation are rarebecause they are often made of materials that are not preserved in the archaeological record. Brooms and brushes made out of twigs or bushes are almost never found, but they must have existed. Toilets (stones with holes in them placed over drains) are virtually nonexistent (one was discovered at Jerusalem in the City of David); instead, people must have used large ceramic bowls called kraters as chamber pots, probably in the inner, broad room of the four-room house (see 1 Kgs 22:1925 where a word play on "spirit"and "wind" indicates such a use); full kraters could be taken, along with baskets of animal manure, out to the fields as night soil (see Wilkinson 1982 for archaeological evidence of this practice). Although not connected with women's work perse, agricultural tools also changed little over time and space (O. Borowski [1987] gives the best catalogue and synthesis of this material). Because of the intrinsic value of the metals, stone plow heads are more frequentlyfound than metal ones, though bronze and a few iron tips have been discovered. 120

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Hoes could also be made of metal or stone. Grain harvesting may have used some flint tools along with metal sickles; flint and metal teeth for threshing sledges have been found, but wooden rakes or forks for winnowing are rare. Items for oil production and possibly dyeing are found at many sites, including weights, crushing vats, and settling basins.

Iron IIA(TenthCenturyBCE) HistoricalOverview The biblical books of Joshua,Judges, Ruth, and 1 Samuel describe a process of coalescence for the tribal groups in the central highlands of Cisjordan, what we now call Proto-Israel (Dever's term), albeit from the anachronistic viewpoint of the later Deuteronomistic authors in Judah. They also allude to other "proto-national" groups, such as Moabites, Ammonites, and Philistines. At the end of the premonarchicperiod of Israelitehistory,the Bible tells of a leader (chief-the biblical term is usually nagid,not "king")named Saul leading Israelite tribes and mentions what appears to be a similar ruler among Ammonite groups named Nahash (1 Sam 10:27). Other tribal entities were probably also coalescing into supra-tribal chiefdoms (LaBiancaand Younker 1994). At the same time, the Philistines and other disparate groups whom the later writers/editors of the Bible labeled "Canaanites",continued their urban-oriented regional polities, sometimes called city-states, ruled by petty monarchs or,in the case of the Philistines, a vaguely-understood group of leaders or tyrants. The biblical record of Israel's dominance during Iron IIA corresponds to archaeological realia (Dever 1995). According to the Deuteronomists and their sources, with David's vigorous military subjection of the "Proto-Israelite" tribal system at the beginning of the first millennium BCE(2 Sam 2-3) and the extension of his ambitions to groups in Israel's immediate environs (southernAram, Ammon, Moab, Edom, southern Phoenicia, and possibly Philistia-2 Kgs 4:21 [here inherited by Solomon]), the "House of David," which was

Iron IIAPrimaryExcavated Sites

Israel Abu Hawan III A? Fortifications,importedpottery

(Izbet SartahI

additionsto large4-roomhouse

Aphek X-8 Arad XII Aroer V (Moab) Batash IV Beersheba VIII?-V

4-roonmhouse; pits pre-fortress ocxcupation;sherds fortress fragments of domestic dwellings work camp and administrative city;

(Late 11th?) Jerusalem (City of David 14) Jokneam V-XIV

of Stratum II water system; stepped structure below Ophel? unfortified town replaced with casemate wall

Beit Mirsim B3

solid city wall houses, pits

Kadesh-Barnea Kedesh VI

Lower administrative buildings bit hilani (house/palace)? city wall, tripartite building, rnservoir, public building 11 m iwide city wall; house, wall fragments reuse of earlier walls houses; jar with insects brick city wall; street with buildings

(Jezreel Valley) Lachish V unfortified settlement; cult room Lehun fortress for agricultural storage Makmish square enclosure Malhata C rampart; city wall; public & private buildings 4-room houses, burnished pottery Masos II-I? Mazar courtyard building Megiddo VA/IVB 6-chamber gate; casemate wall; palaces; public buildings Mevorakh VII building with large courtyard around it Michal XIV dwellings and cultic building Mikhmoret pottery houses, casemate wall Nagbeh ? (pre-solid wall)

Beth-Shean V Bethsaida Beth-Shemesh II Chinnereth (Kinrot) V-IV Dan IV A Deir CAlla Dor Dothan 4 <EnGev 5-4 'En Sippori III Esdar Far'ah VIIB

large public building casemate wall; citadel public building; pillared building; houses 2 3-room house city gate with standing stone?; 4-mom

houses;shrine cemetery 20() (possibly Philistine)

(Yoqnecam)

pre-fortressstructures domesticbuildings

Negev Fortresses

casematewall enclosunrs;4-room

Qasile IX-VIII

houses temple rebuilt in IX (possibly

Fafrah (S)

Philistine);small town

Fll (Gibeah) II

fortress(?)

Gerisa

small domestic settlement

Qiri VII

olive press

Gezer VIII

6-chambergate; wall; poor cas•emate

Rabud

cisternand tombs agricultural settlement fortress

pottery tortress

Ramat Matred Rumeith VIII (possibly Aram) Sa'idiyeh X-IX Samaria Shechem X Shiqmona A?

HazorX Hebron Huun?

6-chambergate;casematewall reused MBrampart? survey potterx'

Taanach Yinlam Zafit(Safi)

culticbuildingwith Yahwisticcult stand 2 domesticbuildings 4-roomhouse

Irbid?

wall fragments

Gibeon Hammah 2 (Lahav) VII H.alif (latest phase) Hazeva, Mezad

houses water svstem?; listed on Shishak's inscription brick buildings with jars;destruction clay figurine, degenerated Philistine

(possibly Philistine)

Zeror

the ancient name for the Jerusalem monarchy (Biran and Naveh 1993; Lemaire 1994), became the strongest political force in the southern Levant early in the tenth century. The Bible recounts with a certain degree of realism, including negative information that is difficult to see as simple fiction written by the pro-Davidic Deuteronomists, how the House of David's control over the conquered territorieswas largely lost during Solomon's squanderous reign. The basic mastery of Jerusalemover the southern Levantnonetheless lasted through most of the tenth century.

large building with courtyard oil presses, pottery huts wall; 2 streets; 4 houses casem•ate

storehouses

Although parts of biblical tradition make Solomon the wisest man who ever lived, it also recountshis unwise oppression of his own people (1 Kgs 5:13)which led to the breakup of Israel into two small kingdoms more-or-less equal to the others around them. This apparently happened when one of Solomon's own work-gang leaders,named Jeroboam,revolted and, with the help of Egypt where he had been exiled for a while, set up the northern kingdom of Israel.This new weakness probablyopened the door to PharaohShishak'sinvasion of the southern Levant around 925 BCE.Because many of the BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

121

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The three royal cities of Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer projected the United I i Monarchy's royal power and prestige from its center in Jerusalem. The sites have often been grouped together as examples of Solomonic building activity. Hazor (right) and Gezer (top) had casemate walls. The contemporary wall at Megiddo (left) is said by some (Yadin 1972:153) to have been made of casemates as well, though others insist that it was a solid inset-offset wall (Barkay 1992:307-308). All three cities had six-chamber gates with two towers flanking the entrances. Against the claim of Solomonic construction, some point out the uncertainty as to the style of wall at Megiddo, the somewhat different dimensions and details of construction of the gates, and the presence of similar gates outside Israel (Ashdod in Philistia). This last point, however, simply suggests the gate design was not unique to Israel.

citieshe vanquishedarelisted on his own inscription(Pritchard 1969:263)and mentioned by the Bible as well (1 Kgs 14:2526), many archaeologists have, with good reason, taken this event at face value and attributed destruction layers dated to the late tenth century to this Egyptian campaign; these layers are often used to separate Iron IIAfrom Iron IIB. 122

BiblicalArchaeologist60:3 (1997)

Archaeological Contributions

Israel The archaeological evidence corroboratesthe broad lines of the biblical description that the United Monarchy of Israel produced the strongest polity in the southern Levant. By mentioning the "House of David," two non-Israelite, ninth century BCEinscriptions (an Aramaic one from Dan and

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Focusingon the royaland administrativesites of the United Monarchyobscuresthe fact that most of the population inhabited towns and villages scatteredover the countryside.ClzbetSartahI representsone type of hinterlandresidence.Illustrationcourtesyof I. Finkelstein.

the Moabite Mesha Stele from Dibon) support that name as the eponymous ruler of Israel (Judah). Moreover, during the tenthcenturythereis a homogeneityof finds throughout most of the southern Levant, from pottery to architecture, which more-or-lessequal the expanded borders of Israel (but not as large as those claimed in 1 Kgs 4:21!). That this was Israel is indicated by a continuity of material culture with later assemblages in territorythat is unequivocally Israeland Judah. Extent.It may have been Israelite expansion Geographical (under David?) that brought a small Philistine settlement, Tell Qasile X, to a close and, possibly following Stratum IX, incorporated it into the Israelite realm (Stratum VIII). This also most likely happened at Gerisa, Aphek X-8, Tel Batash IV,and perhaps Beth-ShemeshIIA.Justhow much of the rest of Philistia Israel captured is, however, debated. It seems the Israelites' primary aim was to gain a corridor to the sea in the YarkonRiver area. The presence of Israelite material culture (thatwhich matches the materialculturein the highlands) in the JezreelValley to the north suggests they also had access to the sea in the Haifa area. They thus most likely controlled the north coast from modem TelAviv to Haifa, although what happened to the Sikil, a people known earlier on the Sharon

coast, is a mystery. Fartherto the north, the border between Phoenicia and Israel is difficult to fix; probably it was north of Haifa. Although the Bible says David conquered Transjordan,the relationship of the groups east of the Jordan Valley to Israel seems to have been more one of vassal to suzerain than of actual conquest and settlement by Israel. According to the Iron IIBMesha Stele, a pocket of Israelites inhabited the areanorth of Moab and south of Ammon, which may have included the Aroer V and Lehun fortresses on the northern lip of the Wadi Mujib (biblical Amrnon). In Gilead, north of Ammon, Israel seems to have settled widely. Both regions may have been previously occupied by Proto-Israelite groups in Iron I. The complete Jordan Valley probably was incorporated into Israel at this time. SettlementPattern.The lavish orientalmonarchyof Solomon as described in the Bible, although ultimately abusive to its own people (1 Kgs 5:13), has produced a gold mine of finds for archaeology. Indeed 1 Kings 9:15-19 is frequently cited to help understand Solomon's building activities in royal cities, most of which were in the north where the House of David was least in control. Solomon carefully placed these royal cities on trade routes to dominate key agricultural regions (Holladay 1994:372).According to the biblical text, he built structuresin Jerusalem(1 Kgs 9:24;City of David 14) intended to show off the glory of his dynasty: the premier temple of the budding nation, his palace, something called mill6 in Hebrew, and the city wall. He did not seem to pay very much attention to the southern parts of the country, most likely because that is where the grass roots support of the Davidic dynasty was located. However, we should mention the administrative buildings at BeershebaV, the fortress at Hazeva (the fortress at Arad had probably not yet been built), the public buildings at Malhata C, and some of the small Negev fortresses. These probably reflect administrative reorganization of the old tribal system of Iron I into an aggressive, centralizing monarchy in its home territory (1 Kgs 4). Other explanations have been given for the Negev fortresses (Barkay 1992:324). But the northern territories and others outside Judah, which the Bible says were forcibly attached to the House of David by a violent war at the beginning of David's reign (2 Sam 2) and whose loyalties were questionable at best, needed more attention. Except for Jerusalem, the other three royal sites were probably all outside the tribal region of Judah: Hazor X, Megiddo VA/IVB, and GezerVIII.Withtheirpalaces and large public buildings, they may have been intended not only to express the glory of the House of David to a grudging populace, but also to house garrisons to ensure loyalty and to organize the inhabitants of their regions in large-scale royal projects (1 Kgs 9:15-19).Much has been written about the Solomonic city walls and six-chambergates at these sites. The similarity of these structures suggests a definitive confirmationof 1 Kings 9:15,perhapseven to the point of a master architectdesigning the fortificationsystems at the royal cities. However, interpreters have also observed dissimilaritiesin the style of the wall at Megiddo and in the gates' dimensions BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

123

and construction techniques. They have noted the existence of comparablegates outside Israel,e.g., at Ashdod. If Solomon was responsible for the urban construction, he probably did not conscripta largecorviefor his projectsas some have urged. Instead, Holladay has correctlyinsisted that a massive corv&e would have been counter-productive, damaging Israel's highly diversified subsistence base (1994:382). Other important, possibly administrative, Israelite sites in the north included Beth-SheanV Lower, Dor, and Dothan 4. All royal and administrativecities were on important communication and trade routes suggesting the strong control of a centralized government. But most of the people lived in towns and villages scatteredover the countryside, something like clzbet Sartah I and Samaria. Not yet a major settlement, probably because of the lack of a natural water source, the lattersite was probablynothing more than a village (Tappy 1992).2 The demographics of Israel most likely included a variety of peoples whose fluid loyalties carried them in or out of the "Israelite"sphere as their perceptions of personal or family advantage dictated. Uriah the Hittite, the husband of Bathshebaand, accordingto the Bible,a loyal subjectof David (2 Sam 11), might have been such a person. A detailed study of population numbers has not yet been done (but see below, Iron IIB).The emergence of a diversified class structurewith a growing elite class is suggested by the presence of palaces (see below) and large houses as well as localized patterns of fine and not-so-fine pottery concentrations as well as other status markers noted at many sites. Israelitepresence in Transjordanseems to have been concerned with security. The two sites in what would become Moabite in Iron IIBunder Mesha (Aroer V and Lehun) were multi-functional fortresses guarding the Kings' Highway where it emerged from the Wadi Mujib. The excavators of Lehun suggest that agriculturalstorage also took place there (Homes-Fredericq 1992:200).This fortress was surrounded by a casemate wall with towers at the angles; however, although most towers elsewhere extend outside the wall, those at Lehun were inside, possibly because of the topography of the site. The agricultural function is suggested by several silos and a high percentage of storage jars among the ceramic assemblage. SubsistencePatterns.The southern Levant is a land of great geographical and climatic variety.As a result, its agriculture can produce everything from tropicalfruits in the JordanValley to temperate crops in the Galilee and Golan highlands. Because of the United Monarchy's wide control over this diversity, as the Bible suggests, Israel had access to a wide variety of foods and goods. However, just how much the common person could take part as a consumer of this cornucopia cannot be known. Among emerging nations today that trade their goods for international currency,much like Solomon apparently did (1 Kgs 9), most of the people are able to purchase very little of the best and most varied goods. Indeed, outside the royal cities, which could effectively guard important agricultural areas, it seems that little 124

BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

A The long-roomtemple at Syria'sTellTainatoffers the best comparisonfor the architectureof the SolomonicTemple.The Tainat structurehas two roomsand a porchin similarproportionsand sizes to the descriptionof Solomon'sbuildingin 1 Kings.Along with the temple descriptionsin 1 Kgs6-7 and Ezekiel40-41, the temple at Tainatformsthe basisfor most reconstructionsof Solomon'sedifice. Illustrationby Leen Ritmeyer

V The mysteriousmill6 ("filling"),listed among Solomon's constructionprojectsby the historianin 1 Kgs9:15, may have referredto this stepped stone structure.Though it had been exposed in three excavations,the structurewas not well understood untilthe last one in the 1980sled by YigalShiloh(Cahilland Tarler1994). Thereis, however,still debate concerningits relationto a lower structuredfill and its date. Shiloh'sassistantsconvincinglydate both the substructureand the stepped feature to the period preceding the establishmentof the United Monarchy.

Reconstructionof a four-roomhouse. Archaeologyhas provideda vividglimpse into the way ancient householdersutilizedtheir space. Severalsites have producedfeatures that look like mangersin the side roomswhich were cobbled for stabling animalsmore effectively. Heavygoods, such as grains,fuels, oil, and water,would have been stored on the ground floor in piles or largejars.Lightermaterials, includingdried milkproducts(cheeses and yogurt),dried fruits,and straw could be placed on the roof or second story (see Josh 2:6), although the discoveryof heavy roof rollers(to flatten the mud roofs periodically)suggests the roofs were strongerthan we might think. Illustrationby George Taylorfrom The Worldof the Bibleby Roberta L.Harris? Thamesand Hudson,Ltd,London,reproducedby permissionof the publishers.

capital was invested. Relatively small towns and villages, such as Beit Mirsim B3, Chinnereth V-IV,Gibeon, Hammah, and Lachish V organized agricultural surpluses, such as those from the storage pits at cIzbet Sartah I, to support the grand building strategiesof Solomon. Indeed, the Israelite hills and valleys, when combined with newly conquered territories, easily produced agricultural surpluses that were traded inter-regionally.The broad valleys could, with enough water, produce bountiful harvests of wheat, barley, chick peas, and lentils; the terraced hillsides were excellent for vegetable plots (cucumbers, for instance) and orchards (grapes,apricots,peaches,olives, pomegranates,and almonds); and the rocky hills furnished sufficient grazing for family flocks of sheep and goats. Oil presses suggest olives were an important crop in the highlands (Stager 1990:94).Other agricultural infrastructure included small field towers and booths (or huts) to watch the fields during harvest time when they were most tempting to marauding bandits or tribes. Such small structures from the Iron Age have been found in

quantity by surveys in many regions of Palestine, east and west of the Jordan River.During the tenth century the agricultural potential of Israel (and probably also of at least some of its neighbors) must have produced surplus harvests which, when taxed, allowed Solomon to purchase technology (see below). Certainly,agricultural prosperity was needed to support the great governmental building projects that took place. UrbanPlans. Each one of the royal cities displayed an organized city plan, which included vital city walls and gates (mostly of the six-chamber variety), a palacecompoundand otherpublicbuildings from which to administer the surrounding region, and impressive water systems. The palaces existed with separately walled compounds within the city, isolating the royal family and its retainersfromthe lower classes.However, although Megiddo and Gezer were apparently about the same size as they had been during the Late Bronze Age, the size of the city at Hazor was very small compared to earlier settlements and Jerusalemwas, compared to "nonIsraelite" centers, a small provincial town. We may speak of the Iron IIA period as containing the seeds of urbanization in Israel.Urban centers housed official concerns and a complex organization of job specialization, while towns and villages served the peasantry among which everyone practiced the same type of subsistence behavior (agriculture and sheep-goat pastoralism). Jerusalem was, of course, the most important city, although not necessarily the largest.Here, too, the royal buildings were probablyrestricted to the northernhalf of the city,although none from this period has yet been found. Architecture. Nothing of Solomon's temple has been found, and it probably never will be, although it was undoubtedly located close to the site of the present Dome of the Rock (Ritmeyer 1996). Archaeologists refer to a very similar temple at Tell Tainat in Syria as the closest parallel (Hurowitz 1994; Meyers 1993). Apparently, the two shared a common plan and similar dimensions. The Tainattemple was built as an integral part of a palace compound as was Soloman's. While even less is known of Solomon's palace, if the analogy holds, then it stood between the city and the temple, making the latter a royal chapel and its worship a royal cult. Many suggestions have been made for the mill6, mentioned in 1 Kgs 9:15, as an architecturalfeature of Jerusalem. The word means "filling." Some identify it with the monumental stepped stone structure resting on a lower structure fill and leading up the eastern slope of the City of David. The most convincing analysis dates the stepped structure to the transition from the Late Bronze Age to Iron I, about 1200 BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

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BCE(Cahill and Tarler1994). Both structures seem to have widened the relatively narrow northern neck of the City of David, perhaps called Ophel (2 Kgs 5:24), as it approached the palace compound. If it were present during the time of Solomon, it could have supported the administrative buildings of his newly installed bureaucracy. We have already mentioned the casemate walls at Hazor, Gezer,and, possibly, Megiddo. Other casemate walls existed at Jokneam XV-XIV,Beth-Shemesh IIA, Beit Mirsim, Nasbeh?, and TEnGev 5-4. Solid walls have also been found, such as Chinnereth V-IVwhere the wall was about eleven meters thick. Just what the city wall was like at Jerusalem is still debated. Early excavations found a long solid wall eight meters thick with a gate on the western side of the City of David, the "WesternGate" or "Valley Gate" (Geva 1994:2). Kenyon found another wall on the eastern side of the City of David which she identified as a city wall (Cahill and Tarler1994:33).Strong fortifications were also found at the seaport sites of Abu Hawam IIIA and Dor. Megiddo has produced two palaces, one with its own wall and gate system (Palace 1723) and another at the northern edge of the site (Palace 6000). Both palaces were similar in plan to a type of large house or small palace in northern Mesopotamia and Syria called bithilaniwhich consisted of a pillared entryway, a centralcourtyard surrounded by rectangular rooms, and a stairwell leading to an upper floor. The bfthilaniat Bethsaida may also have been a palace. Hazor probably boasted one at the western edge of the site beneath the presently preserved palace from Iron IIB, and another one seems to have existed near the gate (Ben-Tor 1995:66).Multiple palaces at the same site suggest that royalty were not alone in building large, pretentious dwellings. The'typical Israelite house belonging to normal people continued the wide-spread four-room plan already encountered in Iron I, like that at Mevorakh. More modest families built similar structures, but with only three rooms, a broad room at the back with two long rooms abutting it. This type of house was used throughout the Iron II period and has been found in most of the national territories.Archaeological and ethnographic studies (Stager 1985;Daviau 1993; Holladay 1994:387-89)suggest the houses must have been at least partially two-storied. These dwellings stored many types of foods and fuels in jars or piles (straw, dung, and wood) and stabled small family flocks as well as sheltered human activities. ThroughoutIron II deposits there is virtually no evidence for small hovels for very poor people (Holladay 1994:392). It would seem that the family-based social system, although still a peasant economy on the local village level, helped support its members with reasonable personal security. The houses could have held a nuclear family or a small extended family that might include a widowed sister or orphaned children. True elite structures, such as the palaces at royal sites or the "West Tower" at Beit Mirsim, occurred primarily in the large cities and to a lesser extent in the walled towns. An importantcharacteristicof wall construction Technology. 126

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Although ashlarmasonry is documented in Syria,Lebanon,and Cyprusduringthe LateBronzeAge, there is no strong evidence that it came to the southern Levantuntil the tenth century.At that time it was apparentlythe Phoenicianswho brought it with them, as suggested in 1 Kgs5:18which recordswork on Solomon'sbuilding activitiesin Jerusalem(Shiloh1979a).Thisview of a wall from the platformat Dan shows both the elegant chiselingof the ashlarsand the header-stretchermethod of layingthe blocks.Courtesyof Hebrew Union College-TelDan Excavations;photo: Zev Radovan.

in royal sites and temples was ashlar masonry. The stones were well-chiseledand squaredso that they fit tightly together, often in a pattern known as "header-stretcher"(rectangular blocks alternating between the long [stretcher)] and short [header] sides facing out).This elegant and durable masonry moved into the southern Levant in the tenth century through Phoenician influence. Ashlar construction remained typical of royal architecture throughout the rest of Iron II. Associated with it was the "Proto-lonic" capital (also called "Proto-Aeolic"),probablyintended to support lintels of monumental gateways or doors (Shiloh 1979). Otherwise, in non-royal settlements,most of the buildings were constructed of roughly hewn stones. Because of the wealth of stones in the highlands, mudbrick was used much less frequently than in the lowlands where it was very frequent. Iron smelting was well known by this time, but most metal objects still tended to be bronze. Many iron artifacts have probably rusted away in the relatively wet climate of Palestine. Archaeologists may have uncovered a copper smelter at Dan (NEAEHL:327),but the mines at Timnacnear the Gulf of Aqaba were apparentlynot used. The much larger ore deposits on the island of Cyprus or those in the Wadi Feinan on the east side of the Arabah Valley may have

Findsfrom numeroussites and times illustrateparallelsto the Jerusalemtemple furnishings,such as lavers,wheeled stands, incense stands, lampstands(Meyers1976), lamps,cherubim(Borowski1995), altarsof sacrifice(Meyers1993),and the incense altarsfrom Miqne picturedhere. These objects provideus with a good pictureof what the temple furnishingsprobablylooked like;the biblicaldescription of the furnishingsby itself providesinsufficientvisualdetail. Photographby IlanSztulman,TelMiqne-EkronExcavationProject.

been the sources of copper used in the bronze objects of Solomon's temple (1 Kgs 7). Israelitepottery of the tenth century developed out of the late IronI period. Pottersnow began to hand- and then wheelburnish (polish) red slipped bowls, although exactly when this happened and how long it lasted is a matter of debate (Holladay 1990). Because of several factors spawned by the monarchy, including international commerce, job specialization, improving technology, and the urbanization of parts of Israelite society, potters began to make many new types of vessels. Ceramically,the tenth century included both the dying traditions of Iron I, as local village economies disappeared, and the emerging styles of Iron II intended for a more sophisticatedproto-urbaneconomy.It was thus a period of great ceramic variety and innovation. The new forms continued throughout the Iron II period with minor changes through time. Trade.The Deuteronomists speak of trade in horses, chariots, grain, and building supplies and technology (e.g., 1 Kgs 10:29).Archaeology has produced nothing of the horses and chariots,but ethnoarchaeologyand paleobotony have shown that the territory of Israel can produce significant agricultural surpluses (above). The location of the royal cities on trade routes suggests that commerce was indeed important to the monarchy of Israel. Hazor controlled the central north-south route to Phoenicia and Damascus; Megiddo policed the main pass through the Carmel range for trade heading from Egypt and Philistia to the north; and Gezer

oversaw the coastal route as well as one of the main routes ascending into the central highlands. The Phoenician connection was extremely important to Israelite trade. Building plans, ashlar masonry, and cedar construction-implied by long spans between walls (Holladay1994:382) as well as biblical texts-all exhibit Phoenician influence. Although most of the Phoeniciancedar apparentlyused in Solomon's building projects has rotted in the moist climate of Palestine (Liphschitz and Biger 1995), the ashlar masonry and Proto-Ioniccapitals at royal sites remain to witness the importation of Phoenician masonry technologies. Phoenician and Cypriot pottery has turned up at several northern sites (e.g., Mevorakh and Dor [NEAEHL:60,1033]).Zeror, on the coastal plain, contained storehouses, probably connected with trade. Israel's control of some port cities, as well as the Negev desert which caravans from Arabia traversed, allowed it to oversee the termination of most of the Arabian trade routes from the Hejaz to Mediterranean distribution points where the Phoenicianstook over. This trade included incense, spices, gems, gold, ivory, metal, and other precious goods. Some studies of the Arabian trade suggest as many as 5000 camels took part in the annual trade that comprised a value of up to $290,000,000in 1960 US dollars (Eph'al 1982). An incense altar from Beersheba VII (if tenth century) indicates the use of incense which arrived by this trade network. In the context of this lucrative trade, the biblical description of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Jerusalem does not sound far fetched. The Arabian trade came north into Transjordanvia the Kings' Highway and crossed to the sea through Beershebato Gaza or Beth-Sheanand the Esdraelon Valley to Acco or Dor. Othereast-west routes could have been used, as well, but all had to go through Israel. Writing.By the tenth century,the Northwest Semiticalphabet, especially in its Phoenician script type, was the standard mode of writing in the southern Levant. Different writing styles in the tenth century are difficult to distinguish from the parent Phoenician script, and we cannot as yet speak of clear national (or regional) scripts. However, literacy was definitely on the rise in official circles if not significantly among the lower classes who were understandably more concerned about dedicating time to basic subsistence than the leisures of literature. Oral recitation and the memorization that went along with it was probably more important to them. Note that the most significant inscription from the tenth century, the Gezer Agricultural Calendar, surfaced at one of the royal cities. Some scholars have suggested it was a schoolchild's exercise, because of irregularities in the script and the somewhat "ditty" nature of the contents, BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

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reminding one loosely of "Thirty Days Hath September" in English. But this need not indicate lower-class literacy. Rather, its royal site provenance suggests that scribes may have been trained on site to work in bureaucratic and royal archival projects, a new necessity with the arrival of a centralized government. Religion.The Bible is, of course, replete with references to Israelite religious practices, but most of this information comes from later sources, especially the Deuteronomists,and, like we do today, the ancients probably transposed much of their later theological expression, modes of worship, and religious ideology into the accounts of earlier periods. Because Solomon's temple seems to have been a royal cult attached to his palace, it may have been largely unavailable to the general populace. Moreover, because Jerusalem was several days journey from some tribal centers, people could not easily travel to the temple for many feast days let alone regular sacrificial rituals. Pilgrimage for those living far from Jerusalem would have been difficult. Local sacrificial precincts, called "high places" in the Bible, were therefore used for local religious purposes. The Deuteronomists talk of laterkings destroying many of these traditional sites. A cult room at the small unfortified site of LachishV with a stone altar, four incense stands, and pottery chalices (NEAEHL:905)may have been a "high place," although it was not situated at a high point. The same is true of a small cult room at Michal XIV.The biblical term "high place" was apparently a cipher for a holy place regardless of altitude. In any case, they were most likely easily available to the common people at this time, whereas the temple was intended to be more a symbol of Yahweh'schoice of the House of David than an expression of the national piety of Israel's inhabitants. But neither was royalty against using the high places. Even the Deuteronomists, normally staunch opponents of them, admitted that Solomon received his gift of wisdom at the high place of Gibeon. In the territoriesof ancient Israelarchaeologistsmake frequent finds of fertility figurines, mainly of nude goddesses (probably depicting the various types of mother goddess of whom Asherah and/or Astarte were the most important). Perhapsthese and the goddess they depictwere not as unorthodox during the early monarchy as the prophets make them appear in later periods. A figurine of a bull's head found during a surface survey at Shahaf in the Hulah Valley (Greenberg 1995) may anticipate the bull iconography attributedto the northernkingdom of Israel in Iron IIBby the Deuteronomists. Alternatively, it could represent the worship of El who is represented by a bull in the texts from Ugarit. But the Bible identifies of Yahwehwith El (Exod 6:3)and thus El's iconography,as well. Other frequent animal figurines may be attributed to cultic activities, although some suggest they could have been used for toys. A small shrine, most likely in a domestic dwelling, was found at Far'ah(Dever 1990:153-54).Residentialcultic comrners 128

60:3(1997) BiblicalArchaeologist

The Taanachcult stand offers a dramaticview of the symbolsof ancient Israelitereligion.Inthe lowest registerthe fertilitygoddess Asherahis depicted nude between two lions, her symbolsin literary texts. The second registershows a vacant spot (invisibleYahweh?) between two cherubim(compositebeasts made up of a human head, a lion or bull body,and eagle wings),the symbolsof Yahwehin Jerusalem.The third registerportraysAsherah'stwo lions, but this time, symbolizesthe goddess as the tree of life with goats eating from it. The fourth and uppermostregisterhas a solar disk-which many say was associatedwith Yahwehworship(Taylor1993:29; Dever 1994d:152)-above a horse,connected with solarthemes in the Bible(2 Kgs23:11).As an El-typedeity,Yahwehprobably possessed a consort.Thiscult stand indicatesthat Asherahplayed that role for some. Photograph? TheIsraelMuseum.

were probablymore common than this lone example suggests. Art. Artistic expression was concerned mostly with religion. By far the most famous artistic/religious item from the tenth century is the cult stand from a cultic room at Taanach. It includes four registers of religious symbolism, probably in alternating tiers of Yahweh and Asherah symbols (King 1988:107;Hestrin 1991). Asherah is represented by a nude figure and a tree of life nibbled by goats. Cherubim and a solar disk allude to Yahweh's presence. This stand most likely represents an Israelitetheology that saw Yahweh

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(an El deity) possessing, like El, a consort named Asherah. She is by far the most frequently mentioned goddess in the Bible, at times invading the sanctity of the Jerusalem temple (2 Kgs 21:7).Although the popularityof this Yahweh/Asherah worship has been suppressed by later "orthodox" biblical writers and editors, archaeology indicates it was the most prominent form of Israelite worship. The Bible itself makes clear that Israel was not afraid of iconographic representations. Depictions of cherubim, symbolizing guardianship,lined the walls of the Jerusalemtemple, even covering the most holy ark; and the great sea in the court of Solomon's temple was supported by twelve bovines, perhaps remembering the El connections of Yahweh, for El was representedby a bull. The Yahwisticscenes on the Taanach cult stand are thus not surprising. Burials.Veryfew burialsfrom this time in Israelareknown. Some suggest that the barrel-vaulted rock-cut chambers at the southern tip of the City of David were royal tombs dating to the united monarchy (Shanks 1995).But the chambers, if they were originally tombs, contained no tomb artifacts and were differentlyshaped than other Iron II tombs. Indeed, both the function and date of the structures are unknown. Part of Cemetery 200 at Farcah South produced tombs from the tenth century BCE.Most Israelite burials (as well as other national groups) in this period and laterwere interred in multi-chambered, rock-hewn tombs carved into the hillside. The tombs accomodated multiple burials. They appear to have functioned as family tombs to preserve, even in death,

the strength of family ties, the single most important economic and socialfactorin the IronIIperiod(notethe oft-repeated biblical phrase summing up the death of a king: "He slept with his fathers,"e.g., 1 Kgs 11:43).Bloch-Smith (1992)offers a detailed look at Iron Age burial practices. WaterSystems. No water systems can be clearly attributed to IronAge IIA in Israel,but part of the system at Gibeon (deep, circular pool and tunnels) may have existed (2 Sam 2:13),and one of the channels in the Jerusalemsystem, sometimes called the Siloam Channel, may have carried water from the Gihon spring to water fields in the Kidron Valley (NEAEHL:709-12).The large, four-branched underground reservoir recently discovered at Beth-Shemesh probably belongs to this period (Bunimovitz and Lederman 1997). Holding almost 300 cubic meters of water, the reservoir was dug out of the rock, covered with plaster, and fed by water channels originating from various places on the site. A series of steps provided access to one of the branches, while a cistern-like opening above the reservoir allowed more limited access to people using jars at the end of ropes. No other water systems can be clearly attributed to IronAge IIA in Israel, although some suggest Warren's Shaft, the first water system in Jerusalem, was made during this time (or later); it still seems most logical to me to view it as earlier (Kleven 1994). Philistia Although certainlyof less military and political clout than Israel's United Monarchy, the core cities of Philistia apparentlyretainedtheirbasicindependence.Theirpreciserelationship with Israel is difficult to know at present. GeographicalExtent.Although the coastal plain is one of the best known regions during the Iron I ascendancy of the Philistines, it is not as well known during Iron IIA, when united Israel eclipsed Philistine in influence and importance. The territory of Philistia seems to have diminished when Israel established its corridor to the sea in the region of the Yarkon River by taking over Aphek, Qasile, and Gerisa and establishing settlements of a very different nature than those of Iron I. These sites were at the northernedge of Philistia. The location of the southern border between Israel and Philistia remains elusive, but it apparently lay south of Gaza. Settlement Pattern. The Philistine pentapolis of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron,and Gath probablypersisted intact BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

129

100

300

250

150

Estimation of the geopolitics of Iron IIA Palestine based on archaeological material culture, historical and other texts, and historical projections inferred from the previous and subsequent geopolitical Borders were probably relatively fluid,picture. never fixed for longer than a few years, and we must illustrate them with degrees of uncertainty. The ambiguities represented here reflect two potential ancient processes-.Ha 1) the geopolitical ambitions of neighboring "national" groups as they claimed land as their own; and 2) the change of territorial

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BiblicalArchaeologist60:3 (1997)

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(certainly Ashkelon, Miqne (Ekron) IV, and Ashdod X-IX were still Philistine).Other sites in Philistiaprobablyincluded SeracVII and Jemmeh "GH,"but they probably lost Aphek and Batash at the same time as Qasile. Iron IIA thus saw the reduction of Philistine power to its core territory.The Iron I polity of confederated cities probably continued into Iron II: at the end of the period both the Assyrians and Babylonians speak of some of them as having individual rulers, especially Ekron (Miqne). From these urban polities, the city leaders controlled the hinterland towns and villages. Subsistence Patterns. Like Israel, Philistia's economy was agriculturally based, but without the variety which Israel's United Monarchy could access. The inland plain had very fertile soil for grain and orchard production. Sufficient rainfall allowed successful dry-farming, except in the south where inhabitantslikely experiencedfrequentdroughts. The concern with agricultureprobablywas behind the choice by these Aegean immigrants (at least those of Ashdod) of a Semitic deity named Dagon-meaning grain-mentioned in the Bible (1 Sam 5:2).The presence of Nile fish at Ashkelon in later centuries suggests that the Philistines did not produce much of their own seafood, even though located on the sea (Stager 1993:107). UrbanPlans. Because so little is known of Philistia in Iron IIA, we can say nothing about urban plans except at Serac VII where some of the walls stood almost two meters high and streets separated residential blocks. Architecture.A city gate from Ashdod X allows us a fleeting glimpse of tenth century Philistine architecture. Its plan and dimensions were similar to the Israelite gates at Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, but there was no added tower in the front, and its associated wall was solid brick rather than a casemate plan. Domestic architectureat SeracVII and Jemmeh "GH"comprised four-roomhouses with walls thick enough for a second story,suggesting Philistinesand Israelites lived in similar types of houses. Because most majorbuildings in Philistiawere Technology. made of mudbricks, there is no chance to know whether they used ashlar masonry or not. There is no brick equivalent to ashlar masonry, unless it be well-fired bricks,but not enough informationabout the bricksis given in archaeologicalreports to compare brick technology. Ceramic changes were significant as the Philistines abandoned their distinctive painted Iron I pottery and found themselves increasingly adopting the styles and functions of the prevailing regional repertoires. Excavatorsunearthed a furnace for smelting iron at Jemmeh. Religion.The Bible's attributionof a Semitic deity, Dagon, at Ashdod may reflectthe adoption of local Northwest Semitic religious expressions,although,again, this may be an anachronism of a late Iron II practice. Whether or not the Philistines had abandoned the worship of their own Aegean deities by this time is unknown, but the Iron I hearth sanctuary (an Aegean feature) at Miqne, which had been preserved or rebuilt through several strata, xanished by the tenth century. Alternatively, it is possible that the biblical Dagon was an identificationof an original Philistine grain deity with

IronIIAPrimaryExcavatedSites

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Ammon Heshbon pottery Rabbath-Ammon tomb;pottery (Amman) Sahab (Amman) tomb Moab houses;pottery Balu<

the Semitic one. It is certainly logical that a people conducting agricultureon the coastal plain would adopt the god of grain as at least one of their deities. Phoenicia The IronAge IIAwitnessed the emergence of the city polities of Phoenicia (especially Tyre) as important cultural and economic forces in the eastern Mediterranean. I intend to present here Phoenicia's changing involvement in the southern Levant only. We will discuss only those sites that are in the southern Levant, acknowledging that they are only minor sites and must not be construed to indicate anything really meaningful about larger Phoenicia. It was able to use the stability provided by the United Monarchy of Israel to its own advantage by making the latter one of its greatest trading partners. Becauseof the power of the House of David and its friendship with Hiram of Tyre, as mentioned in the Bible and confirmed by archaeology (above), it is difficult to establish a border between the two groups based on material culture. Phoenician control of the northern coastal regions south of Lebanon was most likely limited to the plain north of Haifa, including Acco, Keisan 8c-a,Achzib, and possibly Abu Hawam (which more likely was Israeliteto provide access to the sea for trade from their Jezreel Valley holdings) and Rosh Zayit (which could have been part of Israelite Galilee). The meager finds from these settlements suggest little investment in the region. At Acco, Phoenician and Cypriot pottery was frequent, confirming the northward and westward orientation of the culture on the Akko plain. A fortress at Rosh Zayit, possibly biblical Cabul, used Byblian cedar to span the large spaces between walls. It may representa structure built by Israel and then given to Tyreby Solomon along with nineteen other settlements (1 Kgs 9:11-13;Gal 1992a:53), a political capitulationJerusalemwriters and archivistswould most likely have ignored if it were not true. Based on the BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

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insignficance of the archaeological remains in the western Galilee hills, where these settlements were located, it is no wonder that Hiram was upset by the poverty of Solomon's gift. Close connections between Phoenicia and Israelare illustratedby the pottery found at Sareptain Phoeniciaand Hazor in Israel (Holladay 1994:380). Aram No sites south of Mt. Hermon can be identifiedas Aramean with any certainty in the tenth century. In fact, virtually no sites from the period have been excavated in the Golan. Ammon The early centuries of Iron II are presently very difficult to document in all of Transjordan.The Bible talks about Ammonite kings as contemporaries of David and Solomon, but the several small excavations that have uncovered significant Iron II remains on the Citadel at Amman (Rabbath-Ammon) have not clearly documented coherent tenth century deposits so far. The best preserved or excavated remains include a rock-cut chamber tomb at Rabbath-Ammon and another at Sahab. It is very likely that excavations at Jawa and cUmayri, on the southern fringes of Amman, will uncover Iron IIA remains. Pottery at Heshbon indicates the presence of occupation but all architecturaland living remains were destroyed by later inhabitants, unless the large (17 x 17 x 7 m) reservoir there dates to this period (as James A. Sauer suggests may be possible, personal communication). If so, the reservoir's remarkable location near the top of the mound may suggest why it was famous enough to be compared to the beloved's eyes in Song of Solomon 7:4.Rainfallwould have filled only about one fourth of its capacity;the rest of the water would have to be brought in most likely by donkey (see Iron IIB for more details on construction). Moab Israelmost likely controlled at least the northern sections of what laterbecame Moab (northof the WadiMujib)between Ammon and Moab. Archaeologists have recovered some eleventh-tenth century collared pithoi at Baluc (Worschech and Ninow 1994:202;dating is mine). Edom The founding of sedentary occupation in the region of Edom has been much debated. So far there is no clear published evidence that would alter the views of Bienkowski (1992:7-8)that no Iron Age settlements have been excavated in the region before the eighth century BCE.Glueck's early publications of Tell al-Kheleifeh at the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba (Eilat) misdated a type of handmade pottery called "Negev Ware"by restrictingit to the tenth century. A recent reappraisal has placed the earliest remains there in the eighth century (Pratico 1993).

Iron IIB (Ninthand EighthCenturiesBCE) Historical Overview Boundariesin Space and Tnne The breakup of the small empire controlled by the House 132

BiblicalArchaeologist60:3 (1997)

of David and the resulting centrifugal forces brought about rapid and profound political and social change, which in turn, abetted development in the material cultures of the region. Its demise offers a logical time to begin a new archaeological phase (Iron IIB) as well as a political one, though only after the material culture had had time to manifestthe change.Becausethis is not a subjectthe Deuteronomists spoke of with delight, there is little reason to suppose that the division of the monarchyis fictional.The end of the period is best placed within a range from the late eighth century to the arrivalof the seventh century when Assyria conquered most of Palestine, interjecting a significant new polity and other forces that propelled another period of rapid change in the material culture. The beginning of IronIIBsaw two Hebrew nations emerge. Northern Israel (hereafter Israel) was the largest and most prosperous of the small nations of the southern Levant at this time. It held the fruitfulhills and valleys around Samaria, Shechem, and Farcahas well as the hills of Galilee, apparently; especially important was the Jezreel Valley where the Bible says the Omride dynasty had a winter capital at Jezreel in the ninth century. Because it shared a long common border with Tyre,Israelcultivated special relations with that Phoenician territory,exemplified in the Bibleby the marriage of King Ahab of Israel with the Tyrianprincess Jezebel. In the southern hills and the Negev desert, the kingdom of Judah was still referred to as the "House of David" according to the Mesha Stele and the new inscription from Dan, both dating to the ninth century.3 We will, however, refer to it as "Judah," unless specifically referring to the royal dynasty. The Philistines on the southern coastal plain, no longer the military powerhouse they had been in Iron I, still hung on to their five main cities of Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gaza, Gath, and Ekron.The Phoenicians, however, took advantage of the demise of the Sikil on the Sharon coast during the tenth century and the special relationship with Israel to expand southward along the coast, ultimately to the bordersof Philistia just north of modem TelAviv. They planted majorcenters at Achzib and Dor,though Israelmust also have been strongly represented at the latter site. From these locations, but especially from the great ports of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos (and others), they began to colonize the Mediterraneanwith vigor, turning it into a Phoenician lake. They must be regarded as the doiiinant cultural and economic force of the period. Across the Great Rift Valley, the Aramean kingdom of Damascus held what is now the Golan, most likely as far as the eastern coast of the Sea of Galilee, as suggested by the finds from Hadar.Israelfought border skirmishes with Damascus in Gilead between the Yarmuk and Jabbok (Zarqa) Rivers. South of the Jabbok were the Ammonites, centered in their capital city at modern Amman (biblical RabbathAmmon). South of Ammonite territory and north of the Moabites, probably in the Madaba region, was an Israelite enclave, as recorded in the Mesha Stele. The Moabites inhabited the area from the region of Madaba to the Zered

100

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Estimation of the geopolitics of Iron 1IBPalestine based on archaeological material culture, historical and other texts, and historical projections inferred from the previous

and subsequent geopolitical picture.Borderswere probably relatively fluid, never fixed for longer

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Valley (Wadi Hasa); and the Edomites, at first primarily nomadic, began to eke out a settled way of life in a thin strip of land in the highlands south of the Hasa to the Gulf of Aqaba and quickly spread westward into the Negev in small numbers. InternationalRelations With this number of small polities living cheek by jowl in the limited region of Palestine, each with their own territorial ambitions, there were bound to be frequent violent confrontations or studied attempts to avoid them. Until the eighth century, no external power was strong enough to exert consistent control over the region for any length of time. When Assyria did not threaten the northern territoriesof the area, the nations were left to alternate between flexing their military muscles against their neighbors or giving in to perceived superior forces. The Battle of Qarqar (northern Syria) in 853 BCE,however, signaled a major interruption in the quarreling. Most of the small nations of Palestine and Syria allied together to thwart Assyria's Shalmaneser III as he advanced into the southern Levant (Pritchard 1969:27779). Butwhen his threatended, they resumed bickeringamong themselves almost immediately. Only toward the middle of the eighth century did Assyria consistently dominate the horizon. Philistia was primarily at peace with neighboring Judah, and the Phoenician cities along the northern coast generally maintained good relations with Israel, which helped their maritime trade flourish. Israel's antagonistic relations with Damascus (Aram)to the northeast,however, were a constant threat to regional security.Except for times of forced alliance (to resist the Assyrians at Qarqar, for example), Israel and Damascus were frequently at each other's throats according to the Deuteronomists. King Ahab lost his life in a battle at Rumeith (biblical Ramot Gilead, 1 Kgs 22). The large numbers of Syriangoods discovered in a marketor tradingentrep6t at Hadar along the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee supply a reason for Aram's interest:the Arameanswanted their trade with the Mediterranean to prosper, and Israel must allow them a route to the sea without having to pay exorbitant taxes. The Arameans celebrated one victory over Israel by erecting the Dan stele during the reign of Hazael (Biranand Naveh 1995; compare 2 Kgs 8). Undoubtedly, the Israelites celebrated a subsequent victory by breaking it into pieces and reusing the fragmentsin the other constructionsin which the fragments were found. Farthersouth, the Ammonites spread into the JordanValley at the expense of Israel whenever they were strong and retreatedinto the Transjordanianhighlands when they were weak. Israel controlled Moab in the ninth century while the strong "House of Omri" (the Assyrian name for Israel) held the throne. But in the weak years following Ahab, King Mesha of Moab rebelled and drove out the Israelites,piously giving his god Kemosh the glory on the famous Mesha Stele (also called the Moabite Stone). Mesha vigorously founded a thriving Moabite kingdom which expanded north as far as Heshbon at the edge of the Ammonite hills. Of Mesha's south134

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em neighbor, Edom, very little is heard during this period, most likely because the Edomites were not yet predominantly sedentary. Archaeological finds prior to the eighth century are very rarein Edom; indeed, according to most researchers, they have not yet been found. Society Very little social history is known for the nations other than Israel and Judah. The Bible remembers that the northern kingdom was more conservativereligiouslyand politically than the southern kingdom, although it never states it that way. Jeroboam's institution of temples with young golden bulls as the chief iconographic symbol probably points to a return to the old worship of El or, because most royal names still retain Yahweh as the theophoric element, tends to present Yahweh as an El divinity. Judah, on the other hand, with its iconography of cherubim, its newer emphasis on Yahweh as a Baal-like Divine Warrior (note his frequent Jerusalem title, "Yahweh of [military] Hosts"), and its royal cult (the Jerusalemtemple was part of the palace compound) was ideologically more progressive. The political conservatism of the north is reflected in their retention of the idea of charismatic rulers who must earn their throne rather than inherit it through secure dynastic succession. Whereas the House of David ruled in Judah with only minor threats to its stability (most notably the massacre inflicted on the royal family by Ahab and Jezebel's daughter,Athaliah) for over 400 years, the Bible records eight coupsd'etatduring Israel's history of about 210 years (Baasha,Zimri, Omri, Jehu, Shallum, Menahem, Pekah, and Hoshea). The most successful dynasties were those of Omri (Ahab) and Jehu (JeroboamII). Biblical historiography seems to suggest relative political instability in Aram (Damascus) as well as Israel;the Bible claims the coup of Hazael was instigated by the Israelite prophet Elisha (2 Kgs 8). Nothing significant is known about the political and social stability of the other nations.

ArchaeologicalContributions

Many sites were destroyed toward the end of the tenth century or the early ninth century BCE.Most likely several of these were caused by the invasion of the Egyptian Pharaoh Shishak. Shishak's incursion is mentioned in the Bible (1 Kgs 14:25),and he also left an inscription at Megiddo describing his conquests in Asia (Pritchard1969:263).Although we cannot be certain that any one destruction may be ascribed to Shishak, the relatively large number of destructions from roughly his time makes a logical point to establish the transitionfrom IronIlA to IronIIB.These destructionsoccurred at the same approximate time as the breakup of the united Israelite monarchy which brought about large socio-political and economic change, significantly affecting the material culture of the whole region as the small nations began to carve out their local spheres of interest. It is most convenient to end Iron IIB with the arrival of the Assyrians after the destruction of Damascus and Samaria toward the end of the eighth century. The fall of Samaria undoubtedly brought a stream of refugees into Judah,

IronIIBPrimaryExcavatedSites

Israel Aphek X7 Bet Arye? Bethel

6 pits four-roomhouse houses;oil and dye vats;SouthArabian clay seal Bethsaida (possibly 2 largeadministrative also Aram) buildings;bfthilani administrativecomplexwith Beth-SheanV Upper,IV gate;pillaredbuilding ChinnerethIII-II watchtower;city wall & gate; (Kinrot) tripartitebuilding Dan IVB-II high place;city wall & gate;inscription Dor 4 chambergate & offset-insetcity wall Dothan 3 2 publicbuilding with storerooms cEnGev 2-3 tripartitebuildings;citadel; (possiblyAram) offset-insetwall FaxrahVIIC-D gate with standingstone?;public buildings;houses wall fragments Gerasa(possibly also Aram) 2-chambergate;palace Gezer VII-VI Hammah houses casematewall II HItarashim Hazor IX-V palace,water system;tripartite building, houses Hefer A/5-4 house tombs;pottery (possibly I.Hun also Aram)

ultimately resulting in significant changes to that kingdom and its material culture. Though the other nations of Palestine were not destroyed by Assyria, its dominance in the region was a major source for change in their material culture as well. Israel GeographicalExtent. Israel controlled as far north as the Jezreel Valley, but just how far into Galilee cannot yet be determined. However, it is difficult to imagine Israelite control of the Hulah Valley,which the archaeologicalfinds affirm, without some control of eastern Galilee. To the east, so few excavations have occurred in Gilead that we cannot say whether Israel or Damascus controlled it. Even sites with remains, such as Irbid, Gerasa (Jerash),Rumeith, and Husn, have not been excavated or published enough to produce significant results. Although limited excavation partially explains this deficiency, it is also possible that the warfare in that area between Israel and Aram, known from the literary and inscriptional sources, made sedentary occupation difficult. Likewise, very few sites north of Moab, which both the Deuteronomistsand, most dearly,the MeshaStele,attribute to Israel during the ninth century, have been excavated. It may be that the on-going Jaluland Mudayna (WadiThamad) excavations will be instructive. A few sites near borders with other nations may have alternated between the control of Israel and its neighbors

Irbid (possibly also Aram) Jalul (possibly also Ammon) Jezreel

wall fragments

paved road;gate;tripartite building gate;casematewall; moat;towers; squatterhuts double JokneamXIII-XII city wall; street; houses (Yoqnecam) Kedesh V-VI houses (JezreelValley) Marjameh city wall & tower;houses Megiddo IVA-III city wall & gate;tripartite (Early) buildings;water system Michal XII pottery Mikhmoret pottery Mudayna pottery (WadiThamad) Qarnei Hittin pottery houses;pit with pottery Qashish HI houses Qiri VI Rumeith (possibly wall fragments also Aram) SamariaI-VI palacecompound;ostraca;ivories; shrine Shechem IX-VII 2-storyhouses tower Taanach Tel CAmalII courtyard Zeror houses

during this period. It is sometimes difficult, for instance, to tell whether a city along the northern coast, such as Dor, should be classified as Israelite or Phoenician. These sites probably contained inhabitants from both groups, and it is best to see them as a gray area with both groups having a significant interest. Perhaps the easiest suggestion is that major sites directly on the coast were Phoenician, while the sites somewhat inland were Israelite.Another vantage point would attribute the Sharon coast to Israel during the ninth century,but probably to Phoenicia during the eighth century. Other fluid attributions could include Phoenician sites like Harashim in Upper Galilee, Abu Hawam IIIB-C,and Shiqmona B-D in modern Haifa; Aramean sites such as cEn Gev III-IIand Hadar I; and Ammonite Sacidiyeh VIII-V in the Jordan Valley (though Hammah in the western part of the valley probably was always Israelite). SettlementPatterns.Remains from the royal cities mentioned in the Bible (Samaria VI-I, Jezreel, Dan IVB-II)and others inherited from the United Monarchy (Hazor IX-IV, Megiddo IVA-III,and Gezer VII-VI) produced the kind of monumental architecture we usually associate with a royal infrastructure. Only Bethel, where there was supposed to have been a royal sanctuary (Amos 7:13), has not produced monumental royal structures, though only a small part of the site was excavated. Surrounding the royal cities, of which Samaria and Jezreel were the central sites, BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

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and feeding them with agricultural and human resources, were walled towns, such as Shechem IX-VII,Dothan, Farcah North 2 (which, as biblical Tirzah,may have been a royal city for a short time; see 1 Kgs 15:21) in the highlands; Aphek X, Dor, Michal, and Zeror on the coastal plain; Beth-SheanV Upper in the JordanValley;and JokneamXIII-XIIand Taanach in the Jezreel Valley.The presence of significantly more fortified settlementsthan in the past indicatesnot only a growing population but, as Williamson suggests (1996), propaganda for the house of Omri and the presence of neighbors who were often hostile to the northeast (Aram) and south (Judah). Small, unfortified towns and villages, such as Bet Arye (Riklin 1994), supported these cities and towns. The most comprehensive study of this economic system, using the anthropological model called "central-place theory," was done by the Jokneam Regional Project in the Jezreel Valley (Ben-Tor and Portugali 1987). Around the central site of Jokneam were towns like Qashish III and villages like Qiri VI. Another central site with easily accessible smaller sites surrounding it, but not yet seriously examined as a regional economy, is Beth-Shean with sites like Tel CAmal and Rehob nearby (some argue that Rehob may have been the major site-excavations will begin there in the summer of 1997). Circular towers sat long three of the east-west roads crossing the Jordan Valley. They were probably part of an attempt to control routes of access into the central highlands of Israel: Khirbet esh-Shaqq was located near the mouth of the northern road to Far'ah; el-Makhruq was at the lower entranceto the WadiFarcahthat went to Farcahand Shechem; and Rujm Abu Mukheir guarded a route into the highlands in the Bethel region (Zertal 1995). These towers may have been early warning stations for attack from the east by the Arameans or, less likely, Ammonites. Zertal (1995:265) suggests they belonged to the tenth and ninth centuries, but they make most sense geopolitically during the ninth century when Israel most likely heightened security along its eastern approaches. In terms of geopolitics, Israel's control of the Hulah Valley was odd, giving this part of the nation a shape like a finger poking up between Phoenicia on the west and Aram on the east. Israelite interest here must be related to trade (see 1 Kgs 20:34). The presence of two major royal cities in the region (Hazor and Dan) confirms its importance to the Israelite monarchy. One major route for overland trade to both Phoenicia and Aram traveled up the Great Rift Valley and branched to the east (Aram) or the north and west via a very important site not yet excavated (Abel Beit Ma'akah) and the BeqacValley (Phoenicia). The large public buildings at Bethsaida may have been involved with this trade (Arav and Freund 1995). Bethsaida was most likely located on the crossroad between a north-south road in the Great Rift Valley and a branch that went northeast to Damascus and west to Acco and Abu Hawam. An Israelite seal was found there (Brandl 1995).

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A Omriand Ahab probablyboth contributedto the constructionof the palace at Samaria.The compound was huge by Palestinian standards:nearly1.6 ha (4 acres).The acropolisof Israel'scapital boasted its own defensive perimeter,a royalresidency, and other free-standingbuildingswhich were the source of the famous assemblageof ivorycarvings.Plancourtesyof the IsraelExploration Society. V Reconstructionof the platformand associatedstructuresat Dan, apparentlydating to the end of the tenth century.The size of the platformsuggests that it be interpreted,as its excavatorBiranhas insisted,as a platformfor a temple ratherthan a palace.Drawing courtesyof Hebrew UnionCollege-TelDan Excavations.

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One study of population numbers in Israel for the eighth century calculated there were about 350,000 people in the area (Broshi and Finkelstein 1992). But this number is based on a similar population density for eastern Israel in Gilead as there was west of the Jordan. Surveys have shown there were far fewer sites in Transjordanthan in Cisjordan, indicating that we should probably lower the total population numbers to between 250,000 and 300,000. SubsistencePatterns. The procurement of food was not normally a major problem for Israel. Generally, the farther north one goes in the southern Levant, the more rain falls. Israel thus had more agricultural potential than Judah. A three-yearfamine, such as that recorded in 1 Kings 17, would have been the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, the broad valleys of Jezreel and Dothan could easily support agriculturalsurpluses which were then exchanged for traded goods, either within Israel or without. Thus, the alliances with the Phoenician ports of Tyreand, in the eighth century, Dor were vital to the prosperityof Israel,especially its monarchy. The marriage of Ahab with Jezebel, daughter of the king of Tyre, likely reflects the importance of this economic relationship. Israel was the most convenient breadbasket for Phoenicia, while the Phoenicians were Israel's marine merchantsand probablesourceof technology.If tripartitebuildings were markets or trading centers (or even storehouses-see below), there is ample evidence for the bulking and redistributionof goods in a complex economic system. Along with increased surpluses came job specialization and a concomitant rise in the cultural arts. UrbanPlans. Although not enough of any site has been excavated to give us a complete town plan, this period saw the greatestbuilding activity in Palestinebefore Roman times,

Palacesfrom Hazorand Megiddo:the structuresevidence both the huge surge of buildinginitiated in Israelby the Omridynastyand the royalcharacterof these two strategicallylocated cities.The palaces are of comparablesize:the dimensionsof Megiddo Building1723 (21 x 23 m) nearlyachievethose of the citadel of Hazor(21 x 25 m). But their plansare different.The Megiddo palace is nearlysquareand may have been designed as a bit hilaniwith a porticoedentrance (top) leading to two rectangularrooms. Hazor'spalacewas laid out as two long roomsencompassedby smallerroomson three sides, perhapsa variationof the common four-roomhouse plan. Megiddo photo courtesythe OrientalInstituteof the Universityof Chicago. Hazorplan adapted from HazorII,pl. ccv.

especiallyin the royalcities.Becauseof biblicalpassagesdescribing King Ahab's building activities and his prosperous reign (1 Kgs 22:39, for instance), the generally accepted date for his reign in the ninth century BCE,and his connections with the royal family of Tyre(traditionalarchitectsand builders for IsraelfromDavid'sday,accordingto the Bible),most researchers reasonably identify these new structureswith his reign, making him the greatest builder in ancient Israel'shistory. At Hazor, renewed excavations have made clearer the plan of the area near the city gate. On the southern side of an open space just inside the gate stood a tripartitebuilding and two storehouses (Ben-Tor1994:10).Farther south, residential buildings led the way westward to the water shaft. The westernmost end of the site hosted a palace. Although Ahab's father, Omri, had apparently already begun to build on the site of Samariawhich he had purchased (1 Kgs 16:24),Ahab finished the large palace compound. Contrary to a previous consensus that Samaria was unoccupied until this time, new analysis of the pottery has clearly shown that occupation existed at Samariabefore the Omride dynasty began its building activities (Tappy 1992). The large palace compound, measuring 178 x 89 meters, is the best evidence for the presence of the divided monarchy as described by the later biblical texts. The palace was surrounded by its own fortification wall (a combination casemate and solid wall) made of impressive ashlar masonry. It also included 60:3(1997) BiblicalArchaeologist

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open spaces, storehouses(in which 102 ostracafrom the eighth century, perhaps the reign of Jeroboam II, were found), residence buildings (for servants?), a large residence (palace), and a separate building in which excavators discovered approximately 500 ivory fragments, by far the most significant collection ever found in Palestine (see 1 Kgs 22:39 and Amos 3:12-15). Similar ivories were found at the Assyrian palace at Nimrud in Mesopotamia;they may have come from Samaria or similar locations in the Levant when the Assyrians conquered the area. Seven Proto-lonic capitals were found at Samaria. The overall plan of Jezreel seems to have been similar to that at Samaria with a surrounding casemate wall, towers at the comers, a sloping earthen rampart, and a massive moat outside the fortifications (Ussishkin and Woodhead 1994:4).At Jezreel,ashlar masonry in a tower may be related to the palace. It could have been part of Ahab's winter palace (Ussishkin and Woodhead 1994;1 Kgs 21:1).Gezer may have also boasted a palace near the gate. Other royal cities saw significant public constructions most likely sponsored by the central government. At Dan a platform was built with ashlar masonry, apparently near the end of the tenth century.It was a raised podium within which foundation walls were laid to support a building, perhaps a temple associated with the Dan cult (1 Kgs 12:28-29).Others have suggested that the platform was for a palace (Barkay 1992:312),but at about eighteen square meters it seems too small for that. Two palaces were found at Megiddo IVAwhere they succeeded those of Iron IIA. There was also a palace compound at Hazor at the western edge of the site which seems to have been built in a plan similar to, but much larger than, the well-known residences in the four-roomhouse plan. The city wall at Hazor was strengthened by filling in the earlier casemate wall, turning it into an inset-offset wall like Megiddo. While the most spectacularfinds are from the royal cities, we should not forget the common people. Surprisingly, at the major sites, very few of their dwellings have been found, suggesting that the royal cities were dedicated primarily to governmental or public functions, while the people lived outside walled sites in camps or small villages or in more modest settlements, such as Bethel, Farcah, Hefer, H.ammah, Shechem, and Jokneam, Kedesh, Marjameh, Qashish, Qiri, Zeror. Architecture.With all this royal construction we can easily study architectural styles of public buildings. Near the gate at Hazor was an important structure that had two rows of pillars running the length of the building dividing it into three parts. This type of building appears at several other major sites and, following archaeology's tendency for ponderous terms, is called a "tripartitepillaredbuilding."Various interpretations for them include stables (Holladay 1986), storehouses (Pritchard1970),barracks(Fritz1977),and markets/trade emporia or entrep6ts (Herr 1988;Kochavi, public lecture, April 1995; a related theory had been proposed by Bliss in 1894).Whatever they were, they were certainly pub138

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lic structures. They occured both singly or in a series of attached structures (Megiddo had seventeen in all). Often, they were situated close to city gates, were almost always near open areas, and were located in urban centers which seem to be central to regional trade economies. Most likely, the buildings were multi-functional public centers that dealt with trade as well as the exchange and purchase of food and

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<] Tripartitepillaredbuildingsfrom variousIronAge IIsites. The rows of pillarscreated two side aislesthat were paved with cobbles. The center room was unpavedor coated with a thin layerof lime. The entrance usuallyled into the center room. Most interpretthe structuresas storehousesor stables. Although these characterizations are well founded, the pillaredbuildingat HadarI (in Aramat this time) was attached to a storehouse that contained large quantities of grain,while the buildingitself contained many potteryvessels. The excavatorsthere have adapted Herr'ssuggestion that these buildingswere marketsconstructedto promote the role of bulk shipment in the economy (Kochavi,publiclecture,April1995). Adapted from Kempinskiand Reich 1992:313

A The elaborate chambergateway at Dan. Itsmajorelement was a four- ratherthan the six-chambervarietycharacteristicof IronIIA.An outer gate (1) led into a large court (2) which, after a left turn and a jog by a series of standing stones and a ceremonialseat (3; for judgment sessions?),one entered the four-chamberedgate (4). This led to an ascendingstreet (5) that curvedup the slope and passed through another gatehouse at the top (6). Courtesyof Hebrew Union College-TelDan Excavations.

goods and also included storage functions. Whereas the royal gates of Iron IIA had six chambers, those from Iron IIB were made smaller, most with only four chambers, such as the gates at Megiddo IVAand Hazor IX, each built over the earlier gates. Jezreel apparently possessed a similar gate. At Dan, a complex series of entrance facilities,all paved with cobbles,included three gates. Another four-chamber gate complex was discovered at Dor complete with ashlar wall and tower making up an outer bastion, as well as a beaten-earthrampart(Stem 1995).The gate at Gezer was two-chamber as was the gate at Far'ah North. But the latterincluded a standing stone and basin just inside the gate. From Dan and FarcahNorth, it would seem that city gates could contain cultic features, perhaps a reflection of local deities or local expressions of a national deity. The rampartand moat at Jezreelare rareexamples of such features at this time. The moat went along three sides of the site for a total of about 670 meters and reached a width of twelve meters and a depth of six meters. Along with the earthen rampart crowned with the casemate wall, this fortification system must have been an impressive sight. The towers at the corners of the site were constructed of ashlar stones. Several have suggested the site housed the strong military forces of Ahab. According to the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, who fought a coalition of armies at Qarqar in Syria, Ahab's chariot force dwarfed those of the surrounding nations,totallingmore than all the othernations combined. Another suggestion would add the element of emotional propaganda to explain Jezreel's large fortifications which, situated along an importanteast-west road throughthe Jezreel Valley from Beth-Shean to Megiddo, were in plain sight of thousands of travelers (Williamson 1996). Domestic residences continued to be the typical IronAge "four-room house" and its varieties (see above). Technology.Ashlar masonry was still used in royal constructionsas were Proto-loniccapitals.The ashlarsat Samaria were especially fine, reflectingthe culturednature of the royal capitalwhile those at Jezreelwere not as fine, probablybecause of the more functional nature of the site. Out of the variety of IronIIApottery,the assemblage crystalized into two main groups fosteredby the exchange of ideas and material culture associated with the rise of inter-regional and internationaltrade, as well as the new urbanism brought about by the strong centralized government. This government alsoencouragedthe growthof a middleclassof bureaucrats and merchants who desired more sophisticated goods than their peasant fellows could afford. Although it began somewhat earlier,the fine pottery known as SamariaWare,because it was first found at that site, flourished during Iron IIB.It is now known, however,thatthis bowl type originatedin Phoenicia and is found in Cyprus as well. It is marked by a polished thick red slip over a very fine and thin ware. As the period progressed other Phoenician pottery types appeared; some, called Cypro-Phoenician Ware, are nicely decorated with paint. The majority of the pottery, however, was coarser and used by the common people. BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

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Trade.The most outstanding indication of international trade,beside the pottery,was a South Arabianclay seal found at Bethel (VanBeck and Jamme 1958).Although it may have been illicitly planted at the site (Yadin 1969), and certainly does not confirm any specific visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon in Iron IIA, the seal could indicate the existence of trade with far-flung regions. The incense trade had started in previous centuries, and this seal may manifest its continuation. Another South Arabian inscription was found in Jerusalem, but from Iron IIC (Shiloh 1987; some think this inscription may be Greek [Sass 1990]). The ivories found at Samaria support the strong links with Phoenicia attested in the Bible, because many of the artistic motifs on them are similar to those found at Phoenician sites. Writing. Scribal activity began to proliferate during Iron IIB, culminating in Iron IIC. The most famous inscription from an Israelite site (Dan) is not in Hebrew, however, but Aramaic and was most likely a victory stele set up in the ninth century to commemorate a triumph of Damascus over Israel (Biran and Naveh 1993) during the reign of Hazael (Biran and Naveh 1995). We mention it here because it is of primary importance to the study of Israel since refers to "the King of Israel" and the "House of David." The Samaria ostraca from the mid-eighth century illustrate another aspect of writing as well as the structure of Israelite society. As more people learned to write, a cursive script developed to allow quicker writing. This was used for everyday documents, often written on broken pieces of pottery, called ostraca (singular, ostracon). Most ostraca were receipts of sale, IOUs, or lists of names or objectsin an inventory or shipment. They represent the everyday economy of the people and could be written by anyone (most were probably done by scribes, however), whereas scribes certainly wrote monumental inscriptions, such as the one from Dan. The SamariaOstracawere cursive economic inscriptions,not very interesting as direct witnesses to political history, but they do contain inferences of social changes. They witness foremost to the growth of the large landowner in the region of Samaria-one who supplied goods to the palace, becoming even more wealthy in the process and joining a growing class of well-to-do merchants. Such an ample estate is suggested in the Bible when the king of Israelbuys the site of Samariafrom a single landowner (1 Kgs 16:23-24).Archaeology has produced an analogous estate from an earlierperiod at CIzbetSartah. As expected, the language of the inscriptions of Israel is Hebrew, a member of the Canaanite family of the Northwest Semiticlanguages (of which Aramaicis the other).These Northwest Semiticlanguages were located mostly in the Levant, roughly from southern Turkeyto the borderof Arabia(for a detailed treatment of the Northwest Semitic languages, see Garr 1985). There are some slight differences between Israeliteand other forms of Hebrew,such as the spelling (and probably pronunciation) of the divine name which appears in names as yw (y6 or yaw), but probably not enough to characterizeit as a separatedialect.The inscriptionslackmany 140

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A The Aramaicinscriptionunearthedat Dan. No one knows how large the inscriptionwas, for so far only these three pieces have been found scattered nearthe lower gate of the city.The writing is typical of monumentalroyalinscriptionsfrom the ninth century:strong, formal letters are inscribedinto hardbasalt stone. The inscription mentions "the king of Israel"and "the Houseof David"and may name a king of Israel(Jehoram;Biranand Naveh 1995:18),though only partof the name is present.The inscriptionwas undoubtedly broken in pieces as soon as the Israelitesregained control of the city, and the pieces were used for other purposes.CourtesyHebrew Union College-TelDan Excavations;photo: Zev Radovan. > Thecursivescript of the Samaria Ostraca.Some sixtysix of these inscribedpotsherds turned up in the destructiondebris of the gate of the royalcity.The brief notations associate quantitiesof wine and oil with specific,named suppliersof goods to the palace.The ostracawere, thus, economic inscriptions,not very interestingas a directwitness to politicalhistory,but they contain inferencesof socialchanges. The names of only a few individualsoccuron the ostracarelativeto large amounts of goods being exchanged (Dever1994b:526).These individualswere probablylarge landownerswho increasingly constituteda prosperousand influentialclassof merchants.The prophets often complainedbitterlyabout these people who, in their view, "add house to house and join field to field untilthere is no room left" (Isa5:8, and, e.g., Mic2:2;see King1988).Photo courtesy of FrankMoore Cross.

Iron IIA, usually associated with El, but possibly also with Baal (Hadad, the storm god). Although it is still not clear,the Baal of Tyre,from whence the Bible says the worship of Baal came with Jezebel, may have been, at least partially, an El divinity named Melqart. This is an extremely complex issue and cannot be fully presented here. A shrine outside Samaria has been suggested to be a tophet(precinct of human sacrifice; Barkay1992:320).At Dan, an oil press was installed near the platform upon which a temple or shrine probably stood. The presence of such a production facility reminds one of biblical references to anointing that took place at or near shrines (1 Kgs 1:39;Exod 29:4-9) and for ritual use of oil in lamps (Exod 27:20). The presence of an oil press in a holy area could also insure the finest oil for libation and cake offerings (Num 28:4-5;Stager and Wolff 1981). Art. The artof Israelis best exhibitedin the Samariaivories, now seen to be distinctively Israelite even though Phoenicia probably served as the muse of origin (Keel and Uehlinger 1992). Beautifully carved in a Phoenician style, they depict scenes of cherubim (sphinxes), attacking lions, women at windows (some contain small Proto-lonic capitals as decorative elements in the windows), and Isis and Nephthys (protective goddesses in an Egyptian style). The most comwhich in of Masoretic Hebrew mon decorative element was the palmette. The ivories was, (i.e., biblical) aspects the with affiniHebrew of the close any case, earlyMiddleAges apparently were used as inlay for furniturein palaces (Amos ties to RabbinicHebrewfromthe Romanand Byzantineperiods. 6:4) and were so prominent that the Deuteronomists rememFor instance, Iron Age segolate nouns were one syllable ber them by crediting Ahab with building an "ivory the word for which became Masoretic melek); house" (1 Kgs 22:39). (e.g.,*milk, "king" there were fewer occurrences of relative pronouns and Burials.Excavated tombs from Iron IIB in Israel are not as direct and such object markers, prose particles syntactical frequent. A few have been found at Samaria,but very little forms such as waw-conversives (consecutives); although the is known of them. At Baqa el-Gharbiya in the western hills spelling (orthography)of words included vowel lettersto help of Samaria, a rock-cut burial cave with three chambers was in pronunciation, they were not nearly as universal as they recently excavated (Badihiand Lotan1995).Two of the rooms became during the Hellenistic and Roman period. contained central pits surrounded by ledges where bodies could be laid out. Israelitebeliefs about the realm of the dead Although both cylinder and stamp seals had been used in various forms from the Early Bronze Age on, they began will be explored below. WaterSystems.Monumental water systems seem to have to be inscribed with owners' names toward the end of the ninth century, becoming very frequent by the seventh cen- been associated most prominently with royal cities. In order tury.The earlyHebrew seals often depicticonographicelements to ensure a stable water supply inside a city during times along with the names. The most famous one is a seal of Shemac, of siege and to allow regular access to water without having an official of King Jeroboam II, with its depiction of a roar- to exit the city, the more wealthy sites dug complex water shafts and tunnels to make water available inside the ing lion. Others depict animals, scarabbeetles, and varieties of people or divinities. Seals were carved in mirrorimage so cities. Occupants of Megiddo descended a stairway to the could be into and the name of the owner impressed they clay top of a shaft through which they dropped their water jars would turn out legibly. Recently, a seal has been found that to scoop up water flowing through a human-made tunnel contains the name of the last Israelite king, Hoshea (Lemaire from a spring at the foot of the site. Inhabitants at Gezer and Hazor descended stairs all the way to the water table;no tun1995). nel was needed. There is some debate about the date when Religion.The Bible is replete with references to the worship of Baalin the northernkingdom duringthis time,especially these systems were built, but the data favor a ninth centhe reign of Ahab. One only has to think of Jezebel and Eli- tury date, though anything dug out of rock,like water systems, is notoriously difficult to date securely.No similar water sysjah to evoke some of the most colorful images of religious confrontation in biblical lore. Archaeology does not reject tem has yet been found at Jezreel,but over a hundred cisterns this biblical view, but neither does it roundly support it. dot the landscape in and around the site (Williamson1996:42) Although most of the names on Israelite seals reflect Yah- Judah wism, rather than Baal worship, figurines of Asherah or GeographicalExtent. The core territory of the southern Astarte illustrate the continuation of the fertility cult of kingdom of Judah, called "House of David" at this time in The name of the last Israeliteking, Hoshea, identifies the bearerof this seal as a royal functionary.The inscriptionreads: "Belongingto Abdi ministerof Hoshea."The Egyptianinfluence on the iconography of the 1.7 cm wide and 2.5 cm high scaraboidof orange quartz is striking.It is most obvious in the pose, wig, dress, and accoutrements of the figure and the use of the winged sun disk.Photographcourtesyof the Shlomo MoussaieffCollection-London.

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Iron IIBPrimaryExcavated Sites

Judah Arad XI-VIII BatashIII BeershebaIV-III Beit Mirsim A2

fortresswith temple gate & attachedbuildings;public buildings gate & solid wall followed by casematewall gate;city wall; houses;palatial building casematewall;oil & wine industry

Beth-Shemesh IIB-C Eshtemoa silver hoard cemetery200 Fairah(S) (possiblyPhilistia) Gibeon water system?;winery casematewall with rampart& tower; Ijalif VIB houses foundationplatformfor houses; Ijesi VIID-C double city wall; rampart (IraVIII pottery houses on east slope;Silwan Jerusalem13 tombs;gate (City of David) Kadesh-Barnea fortresswith interior middle fortress buildings LachishIV-III palace;city wall & gate;tripartite buildings;water MalhataC city wall with tower;tripartite Intermediate building Masos post-Str.I houses wall fragments;pits Nagila IV Naybeh 3 city wall & gate;many houses Negev fortresses oval & rectangularfortresses Rabud B-III-II city wall & attachedrooms Sera, VII-VI houses;streets;publicbuilding Teman fortress;inscriptions (KuntilletAjrud)

the Dan and Mesha inscriptions, was the southern hill country of western Palestine. It probably also involved most of the Shephelah and, at times, the interior coastal plain bordering on Philistia. It also included the northern Negev desert, as well as part of the Negev Highlands and the southern Arabah(GreatRiftValleysouth of the Dead Sea),although the rising Edomites seem to have fought Judah for this land toward the end of the period. Except when it controlled the Arabah to the Gulf of Aqaba, Judah had no outlet on the sea. Interiorcoastal plain sites such as Hesi VIID-C,SeracVIIVI, Nagila IV,and FarcahSouth could have been Philistine, but several aspects of the sites reflect Judean occupation as well. SettlementPatterns.The organization of population centers in Judah was similar to that of Israel, but at a reduced density and with less prosperity due to the drier and harsher 142

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00I

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The plans of Nasbeh (above)and LachishIII(right).The royalcity of Lachishis distinguishedmost conspicuouslyby the segregated palatialplatformapproachedvia a specialgate through its own fortified enclosure.Nasbeh representsa common town: a agglomeration of buildings,mostlydomestic, enclosed within a solid wall. The varyingscales of the two top plans hide the fact that Lachishwas twice the size of Nasbeh.Lachishadapted fromABD MI116.

climatic conditions. Royal cities included Jerusalem (City of David 13-12) as the summer capital in the highlands and Lachish IV-IIIas the winter capital in the lowlands. Governmental or military administration may have occurred at fortresses in the Negev regions, such as Arad XI-VIII, Kadesh Barnea middle fortress, Teman (Kuntillet CAjrud), and perhapsother Negev fortresses.As in Israel,walled towns reflected the need for security following the demise of the united monarchy.These were at Nasbeh, Marjameh,BeitMirsim, and Rabud. Some of these sites that included large buildings, such as the one at Beit Mirsim, could also have housed regional administrative functions. Otherwise, most sites in the hill country tended to be small villages and towns, such as Gibeon and Eshtemoa. Even Jerusalem apparently did not outgrow its originalIronIIAconfines.The most important cities excavated are in the Shephelah: Batash III, Beth Shemesh IIB, VIB, and Lachish IV-III.But this period saw new life in the northern Negev with significant settle.Halif ments at Arad XI-VIII,BeershebaIV-III,IraVIII,and Malhata C Intermediate.

Broshiand Finkelstein (1992) reasonably estimate the population of eighth century Judah at about 110,000, with the Shephelah supporting roughly half. SubsistencePatterns. II Rainfallin Judah,and the AL lifestyle patterns based upon it, was considerably more marginalthan \ ~i--K::j---:,= in Israelto the north. For this reason, the population of Judahcould never be as great as that of its northern neighbor. It is m 0 100 interestingthat the greatest population seems to have been located in the Shephelah where the water was available. The highlands with their greatest supply narrow valleys were good for fruits, vegetables, and small crops of grain, while the Shephelah with its wider valleys could produce considerably more food. Sites such as Beth Shemesh, Beit Mirsim, and Gibeon (this last site in the highlands) illustrate the agricultural potential of the area with their oil and wine installations.In the rainshadow of the eastern highlands, the primarylifestyle of the JudeanDesert must have been pastoralism, much as it was in most periods. But the real point of interest for the subsistence patterns of Judah is why the northern Negev prospered as never before. Though settlement had already begun in Iron IIA as isolated fortresses, moderately sized walled towns now sprouted up (but see Holladay 1994 for observations about how many of them could have been IronIIA).Defensive strategiesor demographic pressures may have compelled settlement here, but the fact that it was done successfully indicates the adaptation of subsistence strategies-including both agriculture as well as pastoralism-to marginal desert zones. This must mean the Negev residents constructed dams and embankments in the wadis to catch runoff and retain it for fields, dug wells to tap the water table,and hewed cisternsto store runoff. UrbanPlans. Although very little is known of Jerusalem at this time, thanks to Lachish III and the Assyrian destruction which preserved it, we can describe the urban plan of a Judean royal city in some detail. Visitors entering ancient Lachish ascended a roadway slanting up the slope of the site to an outer gateway through a lower solid wall. Passing through it and turning right, the visitors crossed a courtyard, a bastion, and entered the main gate, a six-chamber structure that pierced the upper solid wall. Inside they met a broad street flanked by market and trading areas (including tripartite pillared buildings) behind which, to the left, towered the walled royal palace on its large platform which could be entered through its own gate. Domestic areas most likely sur-

rounded the palace on the north and east, and a water shaft was situated in the eastern area. The best-known plan of an ordinary town is that of Beersheba, but, because it is best represented in Stratum II from Iron IIC, we will discuss it there. However, the plan of the site in Iron IIB was probably similar. It is unfortunate that Nasbeh I cannot be dated better, but it may have been a significant site during this time. If we can date it to Iron IIB,it is an excellent example of a residential town plan with a solid wall surrounding a thick maze of houses with narrow passages scattered throughout. Beit Mirsim presents a similar picture, but it was less extensively exposed. Houses were packed into settlements, suggesting a growing population and the need for security behind walls. Architecture.Excavated monumental buildings include the palace podium at Lachish IV-III.Two palace buildings next to each other occupied the western side of the podium. To the north were storeroomsand to the east was a large open area or courtyard,much like the southern palace at Megiddo. To enter the palace one had to pass through a gate, possibly with eight chambers, before emerging into the large courtyard.Then one could enter the palace buildings through their own gates. Although the location of the palace in the center of the city reflects access of royalty to the people, restricted entry to the palace compound underscores security risks. Indeed, the Bible records that one of the Judean kings (Amaziah) was assassinated here (2 Kgs 14:19).Unfortunately,the walls of the palacesthemselvesaretoo fragmentary to suggest a coherent plan and function for the rooms. Although they were not dwellings of the kings, fortresses were part of the crown's infrastructure. Of these, Arad XIVIIIis the best preserved. The stratigraphyof Arad is difficult to sort out, but there is a rising consensus that the pottery dictates a lower date for Strata XI-VIIIthan the excavators suggested (see Zimhoni 1985; Mazar and Netzer 1986 for more details). Moreover, there is no development in the pottery forms presented from all four of those strata, indicating that they actually representonly one building phase. We have thus placed Arad and its shrine-templein IronIIB.Surrounded by a strong wall and including wall fragments which may have been part of a barracks,the fortress not only garrisoned military functions, but also supported a religious institution. Perhaps the occupation in the Negev flourished because the central government had a distinct policy of settlement which it supported through this and other fortresses, including the middle fortress at Kadesh Bamea with its strong wall and buildings inside (also with a water shaft).Several of the small fortresses in the Negev highlands were probably part of this process, too. The most astounding of the fortresseswas at Teman(Kunnot because of size or formidability,but because tillet CAjrud), of its location, built atop a hill in the middle of a bleak desert south of Kadesh Barnea.The hill rises from the pebbled desert floor like a breaching whale. Obviously on a caravan route between the Gulf of Aqaba and Gaza, the site contained pottery typical of Judah and was probably a way station for BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

143

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sits on an isolated plateau < The fortress of Teman(KuntilletCAjrud) in the southern Negev.The richtrove of inscriptionsfound at the desert site added greatlyto the corpusof Hebrewinscriptionsand forced a reexaminationof the religiousaspects of ancient Israelite and Judeancultures.Photographcourtesyof Ze'evMeshel.

travelersratherthan a site for militaryactivity.Modest in size, the walls and pottery in the entryway contained numerous inscriptions-primarily religious in naturedating to the early eighth century.Apparently the site had a pilgrimage aspect to it. Some of the inscriptions included the word for "sacrifice,"qorban,while others contained a blessing in the name of Yahweh (see below for more details). City walls could be solid (Lachish), casemate (BethShemeshIIB,HalifVIID-C,BeershebaIII),inset-offset(Nasbeh), or zigzag (Rabud B-III-II).The same variety is reflected in the gates: two-chamber (Nasbeh), four-chamber (Beersheba III),six-chamber (BatashIII,Lachish III),and possibly eightchamber,or six-chamber with two flanking towers (Lachish IIIpalace). Arad boasts the only temple yet discovered in Iron Age Judah, and it is the only temple so far found that can conceivably be connected to the worship of Yahweh. Although it is best known from the Iron IIC strata (where we will discuss it in more detail), earlier phases seem to have been similar. It contained a courtyard with a small altar built of rough field stones, a broad room as a Holy Place, and a small niche with steps approaching it as the Most Holy Place. The plan of this temple is not at all like that in Jerusalem based on the description in 1 Kings 6. Houses were similarto those in Israelwith four-roomand three-room plans predominating. Smaller houses of one and two rooms existed, but a coherent typology for them is not possible. They were especially frequent at Nasbeh and Beit Mirsim, but were probably ubiquitous elsewhere, as well. The stone masonry of Judah was not as monTechnology. umental as that in Israel,though Jerusalemundoubtedly had impressive building techniques to go along with the ashlar, 144

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A

The two figures in the foregroundof this inked scene from a jar found at Temanhave attracted muchattention. They possess human bodies but have tails and bizarreheads. One partialnude is a female. Some have suggested the faces look bovine and, given the presence of tails, this is indeed as good a suggestion as any. Ifso, the portrait may depict "Yahwehand his Asherah,"because as an Eldivinity (Exod6:3),Yahwehwould have been thought to be representedby a bull (as indeed the Biblesays he was at Bethel and Dan in Israel)and Asherahas a cow (Amos4:1 may allude to this identification). Drawingcourtesyof Zeev Meshel.

header-stretchermasonry found south of the temple platform in a gate that led into the royal quarter (E. Mazar 1989).Ashlar masonry was present at Lachish, but it is generally rare elsewhere,probablybecause royalbuildings outside Jerusalem and Lachish were infrequent. Pottery was also not nearly as splendidas thatfromnorthernsites,most likelybecausePhoenician trade with Judah was much less significant than with Israel,and therewere not largenumbersof merchants.Whereas imported pottery was frequent in the north, it is only rarely found at southern sites. Indeed, in the Negev, a very crude hand-made style of pottery known as Negev Ware,begun already in Iron IIA, occurs along with the typical Judean pottery. This seems to confirm the more restricted prosperity of the southern kingdom implied by our observations on subsistence patterns. Trade.Although international trade was not as well represented in Judah as it was in the north, inter-regional trade is suggested by the winery at Gibeon. Goods were not simply bartered, however, but could be purchased, as a silver hoard from Eshtemoa suggests. The silver was not yet turned into coins, but bits of silver could be weighed and used in

Tombswere essentially houses for the dead carvedout of the limestone cliffs.The beautifullypreparedtombs at St. Etienne, Jerusalemdepicted here are elaborate versionsof the plan that shaped the majorityof Judeantombs. A smalldoor led into a room which could have other roomsattached. Along the sides of the room(s)were benches that sometimes contained omega-shaped head rests.The dead were interredon these benches. When the tomb was full, the bones of earlierburialswere collected and placed in a repositorywithin the tomb. Inthis way,the tomb could be used for many generations. Thisdescriptionof the tombs and the biblical referenceto being gathered to one's ancestorssuggest the familial use of tombs (1 Kgs22:50).Drawingcourtesyof the IsraelExploration Societyand EphraimStern.

place of exchange in kind. Writing.Inscriptionsfrom Judah are extremely important. The many inscriptionsfromTemanalmostdoubled the Hebrew corpus then known. Moreover, the number and variety of them suggest that common travelers or pilgrims could write; the hands that wrote the inscriptions, actually more properly termed "graffiti,"were obviously different, and it is unlikely that a scribe was kept at such an out-of-the-way site for this purpose. The individual travelers likely wrote them themselves. Several of the inscriptions were in Phoenician script and others seem to suggest people from Israel, showing that not only Judeans used the site (see the next section for more details). During this period the practice of using seals for identification and important documents became more frequent in Judah, but not to the same extent that it did in Israel. Likewise, ostraca have not been found in Judah with the same

frequency as in Israel. The less vibrant economic system in the south was also reflected in a slower development of cultural aspects. Religion.The inscriptions at Teman illustrate the continued influence of the fertility religion on Judah. Two of the inscriptions invoke blessings for individuals in the name of "Yahwehand his Asherah."Some have disputed the identity of the last word with the goddess, suggesting that the word indicates wooden poles dedicated to Asherah, because the possessive pronoun "his" is strange to use with a proper noun in Hebrew. However, because Asherah was El'swife in many Northwest Semitic religions, and Yahweh was an El deity, Asherah as the consort of Yahweh remains the most meaningful translation (Dever 1984).Indeed, the Bibleitself says that the Judean King Manasseh carved an image of Asherah and set it in the temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem (2 Kgs 21:7). Much of the popular worin as well as Israel, probably saw Asherah as Judah ship Yahweh's consort, undoubtedly giving women a more active role in formal religion than did the more adamantly masculine monotheism of later Yahwism from whose point of view the Deuteronomists and the prophets wrote. Another inscription with the same blessing formula was found in a tomb at Q6m, but it may be later. The un-Masoretic grammar represented on these inscriptions could be the result of a lack of education on the part of those who wrote the graffiti or, more likely-because there are three inscriptions with the same problem-our post-Masoretic Hebrew grammar does not correspond with considerably more ancient forms of speech (Dever 1994b:426). Much has been written about the shrine-temple at Arad XI-VIIland its similaritiesand dissimilaritieswith the Jerusalem temple as described in 1 Kgs 6-7. That the altar in the courtyard was made of unhewn stones, recalling Ex 20:25, has indicated to many that it was a temple in the Yahweh tradition. But most biblicallaws tend to have a common social and religious background with other Northwest Semitic groups. Because religious expressions often replicate the social conditions of the people, the unhewn stones may simply reflect a background in a peasant social system common to the area. The presence of a broad room for the first room of the building (instead of a long room as in the Jerusalem temple) suggests that the Jerusalem structure was certainly not taken as the paradigm of construction for this building. Its architecturaland ritual roots lie elsewhere. The same is true of the small cultic focal point or niche often called "Holy of Holies." Instead of a separate square room, as in Jerusalem, there was simply a small niche approached by stairs. FlankBiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

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ing the niche were two free-standing incense altars, typical features of almost any kind of cult in the Northwest Semitic areas.Nor do the standing stones at the rearof the niche, usually thought to indicate divinities, suggest any specific deity, except that, as Dever notes (1995:41), one is smaller than the other, indicating perhaps a mixed-sex couple. Certainly, the Arad temple was not consciously constructed to follow any specific Hebrew plan that we know as yet. The question of which divinity was worshipped in the Arad temple thus cannot find a definitive answer. Later inscriptions (Iron IIC) at the site make it clear that some of the people in control had Yahwisticnames, but no single factor in the architectureor accouterments of this temple allows a firm conclusion. Most scholars suggest it was a temple to Yahweh primarily because it lay within a Judean site. Excavators found an altar made of ashlar stones dismantled at Beersheba II, meaning it was most likely used in Beersheba III. It differed from the altar at Arad which was made of unhewn stones. On one side of the Beersheba altar was engraved the sinuous lines of a serpent, a symbol of life for at least some of the people of Judah; one is reminded of the serpentine symbol destroyed by Hezekiah (2 Kgs 18:4).A pillar figurine and an incense burner found together in a house at Halif VIB (Jacobsand Borowski 1995) suggest individuals could still set up domestic shrines (see Jud 17). Art. Artistic expression may have been more limited in Judah than Israel. The only significant representations come from Teman where crude sketches adorned some of the pottery. One scene on a jar shows a lineup of people dressed in a variety of clothing giving homage, apparently to a deity, perhaps Yahweh and/or Asherah. But the most intriguing depiction shows three figures. One is seated playing a lyre, while the othertwo, largerthan the first,stand nearby.Because the faces on the two prominent figures arebovine, some interpretershave identified the pair as Yahweh (often represented by a bull) and Asherah. Burials.The tombs of the Jerusalem area have been well documented (Ussishkin 1993; Barkay and Kloner 1986). Ussishkin's detailed study (1993) suggests their gabled ceilings and other architectural features relate to Phoenician tombs of the eighth century. The tombs were essentially designed as houses for the dead. Although most of the tombs in the Jerusalem area were robbed of any contents long ago, other less pretentious tombs outside Jerusalem have produced lamps and jugs, objects which were most likely left as ritual goods to aid the deceased in the realm of the dead which the Biblecalls Sheol. Seeing theirtombs as houses, perhaps Jerusalemites wanted to outfit them as such. Others have suggested the grave goods were left as funerary offerings (see Bloch-Smith for more details). WaterSystems.Although Judean sites have not produced as many water systems as Israelitesites, majorsystems await excavation at Lachish and Beersheba. Whether they date to this period or not is impossible to tell. The water pool and tunnelat Gibeonprobablywere in use at this time.InJerusalem, 146

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Iron IIBPrimaryExcavated Sites

Philistia Ashdod VIII small temple Ashkelon house with silo & fish bones Azor burials CEraniIX-VIII courtyard& fills (possiblyJudah) stone wall JaffaIIIA (possiblyIsrael) houses JemmehGH tower Miqne IIA Mor 2 casematewall fortifiedsettlement Ruqeish IV

Phoenicia Abu Hawam IIIB-C complex 13-21;rampart Acco domesticbuildings inside MB rampartcrater Achzib tombs Dor city wall and gate Bira tombs Kabri pits, farmstead Keisan 7-6 houses Rosh Zayit fortress houses;oil presses Shiqmona B-D

Aram Bethsaida (En Gev 3-2 (poss. Israelite) HadarIII-I (I in NEAEHL) Rumeith VII-V Soreg (possibly Israelite)

temple?,inscription tripartitebuildings; citadel;offset-insetwall privatehouses (phasingrevised in Kochavi1995) fortress;casematewall;houses casematefortress

Deir CAllaIX-VI Heshbon Jawa Jalul (possiblyalso Israel,Moab) Rabbath-Ammon (Amman) Safit Sahab Sacidiyeh VII-V
houses;Balaaminscription waterreservoir houses;casematewall;gate paved road;gate

Ammon

walls;pottery pottery pottery block of houses wall fragments

Warren'sshaft probably continued in use as did the Siloam Channel. Philistia Very little can be said about the Philistines during this period. Although their sense of identity may not have

< Houses at Jawa in Ammon do not appear to have adhered to the ao four- or three0 room house type or any discernable plan. The ground o a, floor of Building 800 contained eleven rooms 0 m 5 constellated around a centralhall demarcatedwith pillars.Twostaircasesled to an upper story.Ourcurrentpictureof Ammon'sarchitectureis quite incomplete. IllustrationcourtesyM. Daviau.

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diminished significantly, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify them archaeologically as they gradually took on more and more of the indigenous Northwest Semitic lifestyle and culture. Indeed, there is very little formal evidence for them at this time. For this reason, we cannot consider them in all the archaeologicalaspects available for Israeland Judah. Philistiaseems best limited to its core territorysurrounding the Philistine pentapolis. We have included Jaffahere, but it could belong as easily to the Phoenicians or Israel. Likewise CEranicould be Judean. Broshi and Finkelstein (1992) estimated the population of Philistia to be about 47,000 in the eighth century. The only documented fortificationswere a casemate wall at Tel Mor 2 near Ashdod and a wall and towers at Ruqeish IV south of Gaza. Wall fragments at Ashkelon, CEraniIX-VIII, Jaffa IIIA, and Jemmeh GH most likely reflect domestic dwellings. The house at Ashkelon contained a silo with fish bones, some of which were from fish imported from Egypt. Apparently the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean did not produce all the seafood the Philistines consumed. Ashdod VIII offered a small temple with a possible small brick altar and a deposit of cultic objects. The cult objects included many male and female figurines, possibly votive gifts. Family tombs found at Azor contained Cypro-Phoenician pottery. Diggers have unearthed a tower at Miqne and, as present excavations there report more of their finds, we will be able to say more about the Philistines in this obscure period. Philistine trade with Arabia is suggested by Eph'al (1982) who associates Samsi, queen of the Arabs mentioned by the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III, with King Mitinti of Ashkelon who rebelled against Assyria very close to the end of the period. The booty from Ashkelon included spices that must have come to Ashkelon via the Arabian trade.

< Planof the fortress at RoshZayit.The large numberof storejars recoveredfrom the ca. 25 x 25 m buildingimpliesthe involvementof this Phoenicianoutpost with trade. The finds also included Phoenicianpottery.PlancourtesyZ.Gal.

Phoenicia Again we cannot say very much about the Phoenicians from excavated sites in Palestine, because of the limited and sporadic nature of the finds. The Phoenicians capitalized most on the breakup of the Israelite United Monarchy. They gradually took over cities down the coast probably as far as modern Tel Aviv. But the homeland sites of Tyre,Sidon, and Byblos remained the primary centers.Although Israelprobably controlled the Sharon coast during the ninth century, it is possible that the Phoenicians gradually took over in the eighth century. This would include the major port of Dor. Because of Phoenician concentration on its major cities and on its western trade, its activity along the Acco coast was not their most significant activity.At Acco itself, excavations have found only domestic buildings inside the Middle Bronze Age rampart crater.Similar structures were found at Keisan 7-6 and Shiqmona B-D, the latter with oil presses. At Abu Hawam IIIB-C,where there was a mixture of Israelite and Phoenician pottery, reflecting trade connections, a rampart cut off part of the upper portions of the site. A series of tombs was found at Bira and Achzib where they included Phoenician pottery and objects.The fortress at Rosh Zayit probably was connected with trade, based on the exceptionally large number of store jars in one of the rooms (Gal 1992b:173). No significant Phoenician inscription has been found in the southern Levant as yet, but already Phoenician inscriptions were being produced outside the homeland as far away as the island of Sardinia where the Nora inscription was found (Pekham 1972).Although it probably occurred earlier, certainly by this time the Greeks had adapted the Phoenician alphabet to their language. Through Greek and Latin, this script has developed into our own. The sites here classified with the Aramean kingdom of Damascus probably vacillated back and forth between BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

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Damascus and Israel, depending on which nation held the upper hand at the time. Damascus apparently wanted trade centersalong the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee so it could ship goods across the lake to meet caravans carrying goods to Acco or Abu Hawam along the coast. The large fortress at (En Gev 3-2, with two tripartitebuildings and surrounded by an offset-inset wall, may have performed such a function in the eighth century.On the slopes above (En Gev stood a casemate fortress at Soreg. On the plateau of Gilead, Rumeith VII-V contained a casemate fortress with houses surrounding it. Hadar, which may have been a satellite site of cEnGev, contained pillared four-roomhouses interspersed with streets and paved squares (Kochavi 1995:31).This plan was altered significantly in the eighth century in Strata II-I by densely packedbroadroomhouses without pillars.Kochavi suggests this change reflects the takeover of the region by Aram, because eighth century Aramaic inscriptions were found at both Hadar and cEnGev,as well as Bethsaidanearby A large public building at this last site may have been a temple, based on the presence of a row of standing stones and a figurine of a probable divinity wearing an Egyptian-style atefcrown like Ammonite deities (Arav 1995:26) Although we discussed it in detail above in connection with Israel, the Dan inscription should be mentioned here, because it was written in Aramaic, most likely as a victory stele set up by King Hazael of Damascus. It is one of only three monumental royal inscriptions found in the southern Levant so far (joining the Mesha Inscriptionand the Amman Citadel Inscription). Ammnon Extent.With the retreatof the IronIIAIsraelite Geographical Ammon undoubtedly expanded its borders beyond empire, its minimum area on the Transjordanianplateau from the Wadi Zarqa to the edge of the Madaba Plain and to the eastern slopes of the Jordan Valley, especially to those sites that controlled access to the plateau. There is some debate about just how far south the region of Ammon went (Hiibner 1992), but many of the Iron IIC diagnostic objects from Jalul east of Madaba appear to be Ammonite, not Moabite (see below). However, during Iron IIB the border may have stopped short of Heshbon (Isa 16:8-9). SettlementPatterns.We can characterize ancient Ammon as an extended city state, with the central site at RabbathAmmon (the Citadel hill in downtown Amman) and outlying towns and villages protecting and supporting the capital. Unfortunately, very little is known about Rabbath-Ammon itself. Several small-scale excavations have uncovered a few ill-defined phases of activity on the mound, including what appears to be a series of fortificationwalls and portions of public buildings. The finds reflect the sophistication associated with a capital city.Outlying small towns on the plateau included the excavated sites of Jawa and Sahab to the south; 'Umayri, Heshbon, and Jalul to the southwest; and Safit to the north. In the JordanValley were Sa'idiyeh VII-Vand Deir cAlla IX-VI. The small rural agricultural sites, so frequent in Iron IIC, were not yet in evidence. 148

60:3(1997) BiblicalArchaeologist

> The AmmanCitadel Inscriptionwas probablya royal building inscriptioneither for a temple or the citywalls. Because the instructionsfor building come from Milkomand because gods were usuallythought to be involvedwith the plansfor temples, the buildingwas probablya temple for Milkom. Perhapsit was built in the area of the Romantemple to Hercules.

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Subsistence.Food production is a major researchfactor of the Madaba Plains Project in its excavations at Heshbon, CUmayri,Jalul, and their hinterlands. Although most of the information comes from Iron IIC,it is clear that there are two major ecological zones on the Ammonite plateau. (1) In the first zone, the hills and valleys immediately surrounding Rabbath-Ammonwere excellent for fruits and vegetables on terracedhill slopes, grain in the valleys, and flocks on untilled hills. (2) The Madaba plain to the south was ideal for large tracts of grain. Because of the sophistication of the material culture found in the Ammonite region, it is a logical inference that subsistence was not a grievous problem for its Iron Age inhabitants. Urban Plans. Jawa presents us with the best city plan,

back. Some of the houses had rows of pillars. Ashlarmasonry has been Technology. found at Rabbath-Ammon, along with a Proto-loniccapitalstill visible in a later wall along the southern lip of the site. Ashlar stones laid in a header-stretcher style made up part of the remarkable reservoir at Heshbon (see below). It looks as if the royal expressions of architecture and technology typical of Israel and Judah were also true for Ammon. Ammonitepotterywas oftenred-slipped, but the finer Samaria ware is rare. Writing.The Ammonite script was borrowed from the Aramaicscript type. Indeed, the earliest Ammonite inscriptions are written in the Aramaic script, but the language, or dialect, seems to be Ammonite. The most monumental inscriptionis the Amman CitadelInscription dating to the ninth century. Like the Dan Inscriptionand the Mesha Stele, it was most likely a royal inscription carved on a basalt stele, but only a portion of it is preserved. Excavatorsuncovered a most interStatues from the AmmanCitadel.On the left, the limestone likenessof YerahCAzar, according esting and perplexing inscription on to the inscriptionon the pedestal. Hisstatue stands 48 cm tall. The "son of Zakir,son of plaster fragments fallen from a wall in a residence at Deir CAlla.It is called Sanipu"adopts a common royalpose, clutchinga lilyto his chest with his left hand. On the the "Balaam Inscription" because it right,the unlabeled figure adopts the same pose in his statue that stands nearlytwice as high recounts a vision and prophecy of the (83 cm).These statues representa unique aspect of Ammonite art within the Palestinian milieu.Photographscourtesyof the AmmanArchaeologicalMuseum. prophet Balaam, son of Beor, known from the Bible (Num 22-24). The exact nature of the language and script of the inscription are hotly although it has not yet been fully published, and no single field of excavation was uncovered with enough horizontal debated, but it is clear it was not Hebrew and should probexposure to get a clear picture of a site-wide plan. With a ably be seen as a variant of Ammonite or Aramaic script. It casemate wall skirting the rim of the hill and a two- or reflects a common tradition of Balaam as a great prophet four-chamber gate allowing access through it, the interior of known in more than one religious tradition. If the inscripthe site was made up of houses. But few streets or alleys have tion is seen as Aramaic in language, it could indicate that, at been found (Daviau 1994). At the small site of cUmayri, the times, Damascus controlled the Jordan Valley, perhaps at a inhabitants reused an Iron I rampart, but did not fortify time when it was ascendant over Israel. the site themselves. Like Jawa, houses seem to have been Religion.The national religion of the Ammonites was centered around a god named Milkom who is known in the Bible sporadically placed. Sacidiyeh possessed neatly organized blocks of brick houses with streets separating them. (1 Kgs 11) as well as in the Amman Citadel Inscription and Architecture.Very little monumental architecture has so later seals. He seems to have been, like Yahweh, an El far been found in this period. A series of two broad roads, deity, because Ammonite names most frequently include one on top of the other and each paved with flagstones, El as the theophoric element. There is some evidence for a has been found at Jalul approaching a gateway. But it is as goddess, as well (see below). Because the Amman Citadel yet incompletely excavated. Certainfeaturesremind one pre- Inscription seems to mention the Ammonite god, Milkom, liminarily of the Dan entrance complex. Houses do not seem many interpreters see it as a text associated with the dedito sport the four- or three-roomplan as frequently as in Israel cation of a temple, while others see it as a different kind of and Judah. Indeed, at Jawa, they are made up of many inter- religious text (Aufrecht 1989). connected rooms with no immediately obvious type of plan. Art. The most astounding aspect of Ammonite art comAt Sacidiyeh, houses were composed of two rooms, a prises stone statues and busts of divinities (Bienkowski 1991:40-41).Often decoratedwith an Egyptian-styleatefcrown larger one in the front and a smaller broadroom in the BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

149

(two feathers flanking the head), they represent a bearded, sober, and stern deity. Some have suggested they are depictions of Ammonite kings wearing what is called the crown of Milkom in 2 Sam 12:30.One of the busts represents a female deity, depicted much like the fertility goddesses known elsewhere, but clothed (Bienkowski 1991:42). WaterSystems.The massive reservoirat Heshbon was certainly in use by this time, but may have begun already in Iron IIA. It is the best example of water systems in the region. Its location near the top of the site suggests that the water supply in time of security risk was of great importance to the inhabitants. At approximately seventeen meters square and seven meters deep, it had the capacity to hold five times the amount of water that could possibly have run into it during any normal rainy season. It demanded that inhabitants import water from elsewhere to fill it, possibly by donkey. The date for the construction of the structure seems to be somewhere in the tenth to ninth centuries. Its situation high on the hill may have been one reason for its fame, if we may identify it with one of the pools mentioned in the Song of Solomon (7:4).Moreover,where its edges encountered caves or other breaks in the bedrock, the sides of the reservoirwere built of ashlar stones laid in header-stretcher fashion, even though they would be plastered and not seen. Such a construction reflects royal involvement. Moab For the northern border of Moab, see the discussion on the southern border of Ammon above and, especially, in the section on Iron IICbelow. The other borders for Moab cannot be established by archaeological remains. There have been too few projects working in the region to give an accurate characterization of much of Moabite material culture. The most logical geographical borders are, however, quite clear:The Dead Sea on the west, the desert on the east, the Wadi Hasa (biblicalZered) on the south, and perhaps the Wadi Wala (a tributary of the Mujib) on the north, though in times of political strength this last border probably shifted farthernorth and west to include Madaba and Nebo. In terms of subsistence, the gently rolling plateau encompassed by these borders is ideal for grain production. After extensive archaeologicalsurveys in the region (e.g., Miller 1991),more projectsare entering the field in what will turn out to be a very excitingregion for IronII (e.g.,Worschech and Ninow 1994). The present discussion can do no more than whet our appetites for the remarkable finds which are sure to follow in the upcoming years. Until now, the largest excavation was the American project at Dibon,but it was conducted so long ago, led by different directors each season, and so disturbed by later (Roman and Byzantine) building activity that its results and reports have been uneven and difficult to use for the Iron Age. Although some suggest otherwise, Dibon was apparently the capital city of Mesha, the Moabiteking whose rebellionagainst Israel is recounted on the Mesha Stele as well as in the Bible (2 Kgs 3). Apparently, Dibon included a large platform, possibly for a royal palace. Farthersouth, and possibly also a royal con150

BiblicalArchaeologist60:3 (1997)

Iron II8 PrimaryExcavated Sites

Moab AroerIV Baluc Dibon Lehun

fortress;reservoir houses;publicbuilding podium for palace?;tower fortress

Edom Bozrah (Buseirah) palace;city wall Kheleifeh casematefortress earliest phase Foundcompletely intact in the late nineteenth century in the hands of local bedouin at Dibon, the MeshaStele is a monumental royal inscription.Inthe negotiations for its purchase,the stele was broken into many pieces. Fortunately,a French diplomat/scholar named Charles Clermont-Ganneau had been able to make a squeeze (wet, soft material pushed onto the inscribedface and then allowed to dry)of the inscriptionbefore this happened, and now we can read virtuallythe whole inscription with only minordifficulties.Meshapraiseshis god Kemoshfor victory over his enemy Israelin a style that indicatesthat Kemoshalso seems to have been an Eldeity like Yahweh.A recent rereadingof the inscriptionhas found, as on the Dan Inscription,the words "Houseof David"(Lemaire1994).Photo courtesyof the Louvre.

struction, was a fortress at Aroer IV on the northern lip of the Wadi Mujib, the "Grand Canyon" of the Middle East. Aroer also included a reservoir. Another fortress, probably used for military, trade, and storage functions, was situated at nearby Lehun. Domestic houses were found at the large, sprawling site of Baluc,but the excavations are very recent and have not yet exposed a large area. The most important discovery from this period in Moab is the monumental royal inscription known as the Mesha Stele. It is the longest inscription in a Northwest Semitic language yet found and recounts the rebellion of Mesha against

the House of Omri (Israel) and how he killed thousands of Israelites in towns immediately to the north of Moab.Unlike the biblical version of this rebellion in 2 Kings 3, Mesha does not mention the Israelite invasion of Moab nor his own sacrifice of his crown prince which brought panic on Israel and gave Mesha the victory in the biblicalbattle account;and the Bible does not mention the killing of so many Israelites in Transjordan.A comparison of the two texts is an excellent exercise in showing how two literary accounts of the same event can be very different. Both renditions offer comparable credit to their respective deities. Edom Virtually nothing is known of Edom during this period, possibly because most of its population was still primarily pastoral and did not build cities or towns that could be preserved in the archaeological record. It would appear that the capital city of Bozrah began during the eighth century (or possibly the ninth) with a palace and a city wall, but the best known parts of the town come from the time of Assyrian domination in the next period. The casemate fortress-the earliest one-at Kheleifeh on the Gulf of Aqaba was also probably built during the eighth century. It consisted of a large, non-domestic four-room structure surrounded by an open courtyard. The complex probably was associated with shipping activities on the Red Sea.

Iron IC (Late Eighthto Mid-SixthCenturiesBCE) HistoricalOverview In the late eighth century Assyria finally broke through the combined defenses of the Syro-Palestiniannations when Tiglath-PileserIIIdestroyed Damascus in 733 while also taking over the northern portions of Israel. Inevitably, Samaria fell in 721, and the population was deported and partially replacedby anothergroup who ultimatelybecame the Samaritans we know from later sources in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.They still exist today,especially in Nablus near ancient Shechem. Much of the former territoriesof Israel and Aram were annexed to Assyria, or taken over by Phoenicia, Ammon, and Judah. Even Judah was invaded in 701 BCE,but was not completely taken over; only Jerusalem managed to hold out. Assyria dominated the northern regions of Palestine, but only indirectly (with some exceptions) influenced the development of southern areas through the local rulers (Philistia, Judah, Ammon, Moab, and Edom). However, as Assyrian power grew and as it set its sights on the riches of Egypt, especially under Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal, Philistia and Judah either had to join the Assyrians or suffer the consequences. The seventh century thus saw several Assyrian invasions of the southern Levant intended to open and maintain a route to Egypt along the coast. The Assyrians also sponsored largescale projectstailored to theirwide-spread trade system. They preferred to work with local kings loyal to them, and their

strong military presence ensured very few defectors. As a result of a broadened tradebase for every nation in the region, the southern Levant saw one of its most prosperous periods. Whereas the eighth century seems to have been the most prosperous for Israel before it was destroyed, certain parts of Philistia, Judah, Ammon, Moab, and Edom thrived as never before under what many have called a pax assyriaca. This new age of peace allowed Edom to sedentarize rapidly. Indeed, the presence of Assyrian pottery and architectureat several sites in Transjordansuggests the eastern flank was important to the Assyrian strategic planners. Contrary to some biblical points of view, the Assyrians were not bent on simply destroying everything in their path. They wanted wealth, and a prosperous southern Levant would help them, especially as it facilitated their approach to Egypt. The inhabitantsat Miqne (biblicalEkron)were able to convert large quantities of olives produced in the highlands of Judah and Samaria into the largest center for the production of olive oil known from the ancient world. The economy developed beyond simple subsistence with small surpluses, for, at least at Miqne and probably elsewhere too, central planners organized efficient production systems that allowed exports of large surpluses. Likewise, the Assyrians apparently respected the social and political systems of the nations they influenced. They preferred to work with local rulers and did not or could not object to a rapid growth in nationalism which was also occurring during this period. Although the small nations of the southern Levant may have expressed national loyalties (rather than clan or tribal loyalties) before this time, the growth of national cultural institutions and practicesburgeoned in the seventh and sixth centuries along several cultural lines that are reflectedin the materialculture:(1) Linguistic differencesbetween the various dialects of Northwest Semitic spoken by the population groups in the area became firmly entrenched so that we can speak of "languages" or of "distinct dialects" for most of the groups. (2) Inscriptions in the Northwest Semitic alphabet display varieties of scripts that scholars can consistently relate to national territories and thus call "nationalscripts."(3) Varietiesof artisticexpression, includingstatuary,figurines,and glyptic(seal)iconography can be defined by national regions even though some features transcendboundaries as well. (4) Distinct heterotheistic religious expressions which had begun much earlierreached a climax in this period, especially with regard to divinities related to El and Asherah/Astarte. Yahweh was worshipped primarily by Judah; Milkom in Ammon; Kemosh in Moab; and Qaus (or Qbs) in Edom. (5) Pottery forms and decorative features were also distinctive to regions that generally correspond to national boundaries. Although an alternate suggestion that the pottery represents regionalassemblages only and not national ones is difficult to disprove, generally speaking a pottery assemblage that is characteristic of the core area of a national territorytends to disappear very soon afterone entersanothernationalterritory.Forinstance,Judean pottery is not found in dominant quantitiessouth of the AradBiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

151

Beersheba line. It doesoccur at Edomite sites there, but so do quantities of Edomite pottery.These latter pots, however, do not usually occur at Judean sites. The best solution is to speak of regional assemblages which are nuanced by national preferences in their core territories.However, we still cannot tell what nationality an ancient person was by the pottery they kept in their house. At the same time as national expressions in the material culture arose, there were also many internationalsimilaritiesbetween these groups thattied them together as regional or national variants on similar themes. The weakening of Assyria toward the end of the seventh century allowed a renaissance of nationalistic hopes and ambitions among the already prosperous small nations. It was the time of Josiah in Jerusalem,who broadened the borders of Judah and whose righteous rule was the catalyst for self-conscious reflectionson the history of the nation interpretedthroughthe pens of the Deuteronomistichistoriographers. Hebrew writers purposely looked at the past history of their peoples and reinterpreted them in the light of new nationalistic and religious ideologies and propagandas. For many, Josiahwas the new Joshua(theirnames mean the same thing), leading the nation to the culmination of Joshua's original plan for the occupation of the Promised Land. Although we don't have their texts, Ammon, Moab, and Edom probably also went through a similar phase of introspection and propaganda to foster nationalism. It is certainly exhibited in other aspects of their material culture as outlined above. But about eighty years before Josiah, another dormant giant began to stir. Toward the end of the eighth century Babylon rebelled against Assyria under a governor named Merodach Baladan. The rebellion had been well planned, and ambassadors had come to King Hezekiah of Judah to enlist his support, most likely along with other kings of the small nations of the southern Levant (2 Kgs 20:12). They apparently hoped that, by occupying the Assyrians on at least two fronts (Urartu [biblicalArarat]may have formed a third front),Babylonianrebels would have a chance. But Sennacherib invaded Judah in 701 BCE,destroying the winter capital Lachish, and, on the eastern front,he completely decimated Babylon.Although that rebellion failed, a descendant of Merodach Baladan,Nabopolassar, began a renaissance of Babylonian power in the late eighth century by forcing out the Assyrians with the help of the Medes and initiateda rapid rise toward making Babylon the next superpower in the Levant. Egypt was also developing ambitions for renewed activin ity Asia and, after defeating and killing Josiah of Judah at Megiddo in 609 BCE,marched on to fight Babylon in Syria. The nations of the southern Levant thus found themselves caught between the rivalries of two ambitious superpowers. The Hebrew Bible records several flip-flops in superpower loyalties for Judah, and the situation was apparently similar among its neighbors, because the Bible also speaks of pressures on Judah from them. There is both archaeological and literary evidence of a successful Babylonian invasion of the Philistine cities of Ashkelon and Ekron (Miqne) in 604/3 154

BiblicalArchaeologist60:3 (1997)

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Archaeological Contributions

It is from the seventh century finds that we have the best evidence for the separation of nationalities based on material culture.As national awareness of the political, social, and

Iron IICPrimaryExcavated Sites

Samaria FarcahVIIE SamariaVIII

farmingvillage pottery

Shechem VI

wall fragments

Abu Tuwein Arad VII-VI Aroer (Negev) IV

fortress fortress; temple inset-offset wall; houses

(also Edom) Azekah BatashII

towers?;fortress? houses;citywall withstreet;publicbldg's

Beersheba II-I Beit Mirsim Al Bethel Beth Loya Beth-Shemesh

city wall; gate; tripartitebldg's; altarstones city wall; houses; olive industry ? tomb with sixth c BCEinscription tombs

Beth-ZurIII Buqei'a En-GediV

scatteredwall fragments small agriculturalsites streetwith houses;perfumeindustry?

En Gedi Cave CEraniVII-IV (also Philistia) III (Gibeah) Ffll Gezer V Gibeon Halif (Lahav) VIA

inscription houses

Judah

HIashavyahu

fortress with tower and casemate wall two-entry gate; houses winery casemate wall; houses fortress; ostracon

ideological/religious levels rose, so did its expression in the archaeological record. Bronze arrowheads with a triangular section are found at many Iron IIC sites in the southern Levant. Apparently first used by the warlike Scythians (Ashkenaz in the Bible-Jer51:27,for example) far to the northeast, they represent the late Assyrian and especially the Babylonian military presence in the region. Samaria We have attributed three sites in the central core of the Samaritan region to the combined group of Israelites left in the land and new immigrants brought in by Assyria, who together made up the Proto-Samaritans. The poor remains of these sites confirm the weak nature of the new group as reflected in the Bible and Assyrian sources (2 Kgs 17). A majorchange occurredat FatcahVIIEwhen the city gate was blocked and no longer used, although the earlier cultic area with the standing stone may have continued. The report is not clear on this and may claim too long a time period for this installation(however,note the Samaritaninterestin retaining Yahweh worship according to the Deuteronomists [2 Kgs 17:25-27]).At the other two sites, SamariaVIIIand Shechem VI, both of which would become major Samaritan centers in later centuries, only pottery or small wall fragments

Hebron

unpublished

houses (also Philistia?) city wall & gate;publicbldg's;houses (IraVII-VI Hesi VIIB-A, VI

Jericho

tripartite building, tombs

Jerusalem 12-10 (City of David) Judeideh Kadesh Barnea?

west city with massive wall; water tunnel; houses royal seal impressions; buildings upper fortress

city wall; gate;palace; LachishIII (destruction)-II water shaft;siege ramp Malhata tripartitebuilding;houses Mareshah Murabafat, Wadi Nagila III

pottery caves with papyri wall fragments; pits

(also Philistia?) Naybeh 3-2

city wall; gate; many houses; tombs

Qasile VII? pottery (also Philistia?) tombs;inscription Qom small fortress Qumran wide city wall Rabud B-1 palace; casemate wall Ramat Rahel V Sera V-IV city wall; citadel; pits (Assyrian?) agricultural site? Shilha Uza fortress; houses; ostraca (temporarily Edomite?) Zafit ($afi) city wall?

have been found. The presence of Assyrian imported pottery shows that very close attention was given to this group by the suzerains as implied by the historian in 2 Kgs. Judah GeographicalExtent.For short periods of time in the late eighth and seventh centuries, during the reigns of Hezekiah and Josiah, Judah was the most successful of the nations in the southernLevant.It took over sites in what had been southern Israel to the north and made attempts on Philistine cities as well. This was the greatest period of prosperity for Judah. Thousands of refugees from Israel streamed into Judah in the late eighth century, apparently quadrupling the size of Jerusalem and bringing economic resources to spend and invest in the country. The biblical story of Hezekiah boasting of his wealth to ambassadorsfrom Babylon(2 Kgs 20:12-13) probably reflects this high-spirited time of prosperity. We shall also see below how Hezekiah was able to help solve inevitable problems of under-employment by at least two significant building campaigns in Jerusalem,lending further force to the boom. Planners mounted these and other such activities elsewhere in Judah to prepare for an inevitable Assyrian invasion. During the reign of Josiah in the late seventh century, there is evidence that Judah,in the absence of a strongAssyria BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

155

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A The innercitadelof RamatRahel,just a few kilometerssouth of the Cityof David,was surroundedby a solid wall encompassingca. 2 ha. A casemate wall and gate (ca. 75 x 50 m) further protectedthe constellationof elegantly constructedbuildingsshown here. Judah's royalestablishmentmay have erected RamatRahelas a retreatfrom the hurly-burlyof sprawlingJerusalem.Plancourtesyof the Israel ExplorationSociety.

> The site plan of Beersheba.Smallenough to be almost completelyexcavated, Beershebaaffordsa detailed look at an ancient city.The plan includeda well just outside the town's four-chambergate and casemate fortificationwall. The gate was probablythe place where Beersheba'sleading men (elders)kept an eye on comings and goings, gave advice,witnessed contracts(covenants),and helped decide cases of litigation.So, too, the well was a publicplace where women would come to draw water, converse,and make household arrangementswith each other. Insidethe gate, a plaza offered an open area where tradersand peddlerscould hawk their goods. Immediatelyto the rightof the gate, three tripartitebuildingsalso providedmarket opportunitiesfor localfamilies.A water shaft occupiedthe northeastcorner,accessiblefrom the ringstreet that helped structurethe internal arrangementof Beersheba'shouses. Plancourtesyof Ze'evHerzog.

and while Babylon and Egypt had not yet fully emerged as superpowers, controlled parts of the coastal plain and perhaps the northern highlands as far as the Jezreel Valley. But at other times Judah's relative weakness allowed the expansion of neighbors, perhaps piquing the prophets to condemn the nations in some of their oracles (see for instance Isa 11:14).There has been much discussion recently about how much of the Negev Edom controlled (Cohen and Yisrael 1995).Based on the ceramic, epigraphic, and cultic finds, it is my view that Judah was, in the long run, shrinking in the south during Iron IIC while Edom gradually pushed north to a line south of Arad. The site list represents Judah at its greatest extent under Josiah in its southern, more centralterritoriesonly. Some of the sites belonged to other groups at various times. Several of the sites were also occupied for only a short period of time. Some early settlements which I have ascribed to Iron IIC may be late Iron IIB, such as Beersheba II and the tombs at Jericho. SettlementPatterns.Judah outside the Jerusalemarea centered around important, but mostly quite small, market and 156

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production centers, such as Azekah, Beersheba II-I,Gezer V, Halif VIA, Hebron, Jericho, Lachish II, Rabud B-1, and possibly Zafit. While much of the southern Negev was lost to Edom, the Shephelah apparently continued in importance from Iron IIB.Other, smaller sites fed these cities with agriculturalproductsin exchangeforprocessedgoods manufactured in the towns or imported from elsewhere. But more than ever, Jerusalemwas the center of Judean self-consciousness. Governmental centralization under Josiah may have forced the closure of the Arad temple during this period, and the resultant rise of the bureaucracy brought much of the wealth of the nation to the capital. This only further spurred a demographic move to Jerusalem,where money, jobs, and influence were available. Small rural sites used for agriculture proliferated, even invading desert areas in the arid Buqeicaregion of the eastern rainshadow where sophisticated water and irrigationsystems allowed the people to eke out an existence. This was the only time this region was occupied before the Roman period. SubsistencePatterns.Terraceson the hillsides are notoriously difficult to date because people did not live there.

< Drawingof Aradostracon.The archive contains a welter of miscellaneous information.One inscription(no. 18) seems to mention the temple in Jerusalemand another ten referto a group of people called kittiyim,possiblyGreekor Cypriot mercenariesservingin the Judean army. Theyfrequently mention the Edomites, suggesting there may have been confrontationsbetween Judahand Edomin the area of Arad.FromAharoni 1981.

of Rahabat Jericho(Josh2:15)in a story written or edited by the Deuteronomists %1 Af to an audience living in IronIIC.A "ring street"separatedthese houses along the wall from blocks of houses in the center of the town. In one comer of the town WW-d~~ was a water shaft similar to those at Hazor, Gezer,and Lachish,easily accessible from the ring street. According to the Bible,Beershebashould have had a temple or holy place (Amos 8:14),but no clear site for such a building was found.One suggestionput it in the buildA of collection < militarycorrespondence, ing immediately to the left of the city the twenty-two Lachishletters emerged gate and anothersuggested it was where from beneath the ashes of a guard room a Roman building destroyed what was burnt in Nebuchnezzar'sfinal campaign there before. Judah in 586 are the Architecture.Ramat Rahel V is the against BCE.They easily most dramaticostracayet discovered.The best site for the study of royal archiletters speak of absent signal fires at Azekah tecture, but later structures have and of a prophet who is delivering unfortunately limited the coherence of orations. the Photographcourtesy demoralizing buildings. The site was apparently of the IsraelAntiquitiesAuthority. enclosed by a solid wall, though there is some confusion about phasing. The smallpalacecompoundwithin the enclosure consisted of at least two buildings But some recent work has been able to attribute a few ter- surrounded by a casemate wall and storerooms. The races in the Jerusalem area to this period (Edelstein and palace at Lachish from Iron IIB was apparently not rebuilt Gibson 1982). The terraces supported the agricultural after the Assyrians destroyed it in 701 BCE. activities mentioned in the previous section. Fortresses, probably with at least some governmental Plans. The influx of north from the Urban huge refugees support, were built in many locations including Abu Tuwein as well as southern fortune seekers coming to Jerusalemmust and Fill III in the highlands, Azekah? in the Shephelah, have caused very rapid growth, forcing a radically altered Hashavyahu on the coastal plain, Qumran in the Dead Sea desert, and Arad VII-VI and cUza in the Negev. The most concept of the city. Whereas it had not grown significantly since the beginnings of the monarchy, the hill to the west completely excavated one is Arad with its temple, which of Jerusalemnow apparently housed thousands of people in seems to have gone out of existence toward the end of the a new quartercalled mishneh,or "second quarter"in the Bible period, perhaps in Josiah's reforms (2 Kgs 23:8),as the excavators suggest. Arad functioned not only to house troops, (e.g., 2 Kgs 22:14).This put the palace of the king downwind from a sprawling refugee camp and in the center of a great but also as a provincial center for the government, as evibabble of public demands. It may have been a result of this denced by the 100 plus ostraca which imply bureaucratic impossible situation that a major country palace was built activity. The fortress at cUza has also been mostly excavated. It just south of Jerusalem at Ramat Rahel V along the road to Bethlehem. Thus Jerusalem, as a royal city, had outgrown was well fortified with a wall and towers and included itself and become a huge domestic and bureaucratic center, residences, storerooms, and possibly barracks inside. Judah's first real urban site. Many ostraca were also found here. Other houses were outBeersheba II is one of the best sites to understand what side the fortified area. Apparently, fortresses such as these a typical Judean town was like. A visitor approaching the were drawing cards for families who made a living from the town would have passed a well just outside the gate. fortress residents. These fortresses in the northern Negev Inside the gate was a plaza. The most significantpublic build- were probably intended to present a strong border to the ings in the town were the complex of threetripartitebuildings Edomites who were gradually pushing westward and northto the right of the plaza. As the earlierbuilding at Hadar has ward into the Negev at the expense of Judah.Other fortresses in the highlands, such as Abu Tuwein and Ffil IIImay have shown, these were most likely used for trade and bulking of in allowed the government to secure the main north-southtrade goods; they were therefore located near the gate and one of the most public locations in the city. route through the country as it approached Jerusalem. The Surrounding the city was a casemate wall into which the existence of one at Azekah is only a surmise based on one of houses lining the wall were incorporated,much like the house the Lachish ostraca which speaks of signal fires at Azekah.

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The writing styles of IronAge peoples. Epigraphicartifactsabound in the IronII,witnessingto the proliferationof writing. Formalwriting on monumental inscriptionsand diminutiveseals is joined by a cursivescriptused for papyrusdocumentsand potsherdnotes. Writingstyles diverged among the emerging nations, one aspect of the growth of a differentiatedmaterialcultureand self-awareness.Chartby the author.

The fortressat Hashavyahu may have been necessarybecause it was in territory along the coast not traditionally occupiedby Judah.It may have been, for a shortwhile, Judah's only point of access to the sea. The only reason to attribute it to Judah is the presence of Judean pottery and a Hebrew ostracon. City walls were constructed in several ways: casemate VIA), solid inset-offset (Aroer [Negev] (Beersheba II, and solid plain (CIraVII, Jerusalem Mish.Halif IV, Nasbeh 3-2), neh). The most remarkable city wall was the one built in Jerusalem around the Mishneh Quarter before the AssyrAt the point where it was found the wall ian attackof 701 BCE. was almost ten meters thick. The walls at other sites in Judah were also buttressed in preparation for the Assyrian onset. Just how realistic these preparations were is illustrated at Lachish, which the Assyrian king Sennacheribconquered in 701 BCE and bragged about on his palacewalls back in Assyria, illustrating the siege in bas relieffor every visitor to see. It now appears that the scene uses stock artistic conventions with details that do not represent Lachish itself (Franklin 1994). But its presence on the Assyrian palace wall is nevertheless a graphic representation of the importance of this royal site to Sennacherib's battle plan. The Bible also mentions this siege (2 Kgs 18:14),but in the context of showing how Jerusalem was delivered. Both sides claimed victory, but in different ways, much like we do today. This invasion, which utterly destroyed Lachish(ratifyingSennacherib'sversion) so that it was not reoccupied for several decades afterwards,devastatedJudah.ButJerusalemwas not destroyed (ratifying 2 Kings version). Because of the centrality of 158

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Jerusalem to the Deuteronomists, they ignored all the suffering and destruction in the rest of Judah. But it took most of the following century for Judah to rebuild to its high point at the end of the seventh century under King Josiah. The variety in city gates during Iron IIB continued into Iron IIC:two-chamber (Gezer V), four-chamber (Beersheba II), and six-chamber with towers (CIraVII-VI,unless Holladay is correctin his tenth centuryattribution).The only temple known was still that at Arad (see above). Residential buildings at many sites continued the four-room and three-room traditions. Technology.Ashlar masonry and Proto-Ionic capitals remained in use for royal structures at Jerusalemand Ramat Rahel V.Many private houses showed signs of cottage industries, such as olive oil production perhaps alternating with textile dying when olives were not in season. Small-scale work places of this nature have been found at Beit Mirsim 1A, Gezer V, and many other sites. En Gedi V may have had a perfume industry, utilizing the presence of exotic plants in the Dead Sea climate. Pottery in all the small nations of the southern Levant developed into more-or-lessdistinctive regional assemblages at this time. The pottery of Judah is best exemplified by sites in the highlands, although it was generally homogeneous for most of the excavated Judean sites. Judean pottery did not develop significant fine wares; it is best characterized as utilitarian. Bowls were often wheel burnished and lamps sported a high stump base. The decanter,a jug with a squared off body, is also typical in Judah. Trade.East-westtrade is evident from an Ammonite black-

< The Imikseal impressionand the rosette, both from jar handles.The Imlk ("belongingto the king")impressionslikelyguaranteed or claimed royal ownershipof the contents of a particularkindof jar duringthe reign of Hezekiah.Towardthe end of IronIIC,the same function appearsto have been carriedout by the rosette impression.Thissubstitutionmay have been the result of an aniconicimpulse.Drawingof Imikfrom D. Ussishkin1976. Rosettephoto by Z. Radovan,courtesyof the Cityof DavidSociety.

7 The seal impressionof Berekyahu,son of Neriyahu,the scribe.Two bullae stamped with the identicalseal are now known. The seal likelybelonged to the biblicalBaruch,scribeof Jeremiah.Courtesy of R.Deutsch.

burnished bowl found at Batash II. The inscribed jar hanindicate dles at the winery of Gibeon, dating to about 600 BCE, that ancient wine drinkers were just as aware of the origin of a vintage as theirmodem counterparts.But the most important indicators of trade with Judah are the hundreds of jar handles with the word Imlk("belongingto the king")impressed on them by seals. They have been found throughout Judah, probablyfrom the reign of Hezekiah. The stamps were placed on one type of jar and were probably intended to guarantee the contents or their ownership in the process of official or royaltradeand taxationwithin Judah.Theirsignificantabsence from areas beyond Judah suggests these jars were not used frequently to carry goods outside the borders. Although coins were used in Asia Minor by this time, they were not yet in use in the southern Levant. Hoards of small silver ingots from En Gedi in Judahand Miqne in Philistia suggest that cash payments for goods were weighed out in this metal. Several of the jewelry objects found in the Ketef Hinnom tombs (see below) were imported from as far afield as Assyria, Babylon, and Urartu. Writing.The greatest monument of writing to come out of the southern Levant at this time was a significant portion of the Hebrew Bible, including the basic portions of the Pentateuch, the Deuteronomistic history (Joshua,Judges, Samuel, and Kings), many of the prophets, and some of the Psalms. Even though the Bible is still extant today, edited and reedited by countless scribes in a living literary process that has now lasted over two millennia, and a large portion of the world holds it to be sacred, it is still possible to view it as an archaeological artifact,keeping in mind the later elements need to be peeled away, much like strata on a tell. Indeed, for those of us working in this area, it is the single most important artifact from the Iron Age. Although no manuscripts of this literary artifact date to Iron IIC, the

historical, social, and religious issues to which many of its writers speak date best to this period (Friedman1987).Two texts written on silver foil and rolled tightly into small amulets found in a tomb just south of and overlooking Jerusalemat Ketef Hinnom (see below) contained the earliest biblical passage so far discovered, the priestly blessing in Numbers 6:24-26. This is the era in which alphabetic writing proliferated, and it is now a simple matter to separate the writing style of Judah from that of most of its neighbors. Hebrew scribes liked to add curving ligatures onto the legs of letters extending below the line, such as kaph,mem,nun,and pe.Two general types of writing had already begun to emerge in the eighth century but diverged even more during the seventh century: the formal script, seen on monumental inscriptions from the ninth century,was reserved for formal inscriptions and seals, while a cursive script, that allowed fasterwriting on papyrus and potsherds, proliferatedso that hundreds of such inscriptions are known from Iron IIC. This latter style represents the democratization of writing. Arad alone produced more than 100 ostraca-mostly economic texts-dated toward the end of the seventh century BCE.Their frequent mention of the Edomites points to confrontations between Judah and Edom in Arad'svicinity. The fortress at cUza also produced over a score of ostraca. The famous Lachish ostraca, found near the city gate, contain dramatic witnesses to the frantic last-minute activities of Judeans during the Babylonian invasion which ultimately saw the destruction of Jerusalem. Another ostracon from Mesad Hashavyahu reflects the biblical law of pledge. A worker complains that he has given his garment in pledge for a loan, but has not received it back at night as he should have according to law (Deut 24:12-13). The Siloam Inscription from Jerusalemwas found inside the tunnel that carried water from the Gihon spring to the Pool of Siloam. It was located just a few meters from the end of the tunnel and celebrates its completion. The tunnel was meant to bring water from outside the city to the inside of the new city walls around the Mishneh Quarter. Probably written just prior to the Assyrian invasion of 701 BCE,it 60:3(1997) BiblicalArchaeologist

159

tells how the excavators of the tunnel worked from both ends and how they met in the middle, hearing each others' pick strokes before they actually broke through. Found in one of the Silwan tombs acrossthe valley to the east of Jerusalem, the Royal Steward Inscription is difficult to decipherbut also belongs to about 700 BCE.There is a chance it was written for the steward Shebna mentioned in Isaiah 22:15-16who dug a rich tomb, but we will never know, for the steward is not named in the inscription.Other inscriptions are known from tombs in Beth Loya and Q8m. Because of the generally wet climate of Palestine, papyrus documents, probably the most frequently-used writing material, do not last long after they are buried.In a cave in the dry Judeandesert in the Wadi Murabacat, however, a papyrus fragment containing a portion An arrayof pillarfigurinescommon throughout Judahand especiallyin Jerusalem.The terracotta statues portrayAsherahwith a "pillar"lower body but a detailed upper body, usually of a letter from this period was preserved. Very little is known except that with handscupping breasts.Sometimesthe head is mold-made,sometimessimplypinched into a schematicrepresentation.Archaeologicaldiscoveriessuch as these help to visualizethe the writer is trying to prepare the contoursof religiouslife apartfrom the "orthodox"renderingoffered in biblicalsources. addressee for bad news. The largest number of inscriptions Photograph? TheIsraelMuseum. from Judahwere seals and seal impressions. This genre of material culture flowered during Iron where) was at this time. Many of the inscriptions are difficult to read and seem to reflect a grammar that is somewhat IIC; over 1000 have been found and will be published in a different than classical or Masoretic Hebrew. This may be with national monseals from other soon, along groups, umental catalogue produced by N. Avigad and B. Sass. Most because the Hebrew Bible as we know it was the product Judean seal impressions (bullae) were inscribed with the of centuries of editing and change primarily by intellectual name of their owners along with their patronym (father's circles for a millennium and a half after the end of the Iron name) and sometimes their position or occupation. The most Age (Dever 1994b:426). Toward the middle of the sixth century BCE,the paleoimportant seals from this period include the seals of several biblical persons mentioned in Jeremiah:Berechyahu the Hebrew script derived from Phoenician prototypes was son of Neryahu the scribe (Jeremiah's scribe better known replaced by Aramaic. Although there were brief attempts to his brother his the short form of name, Baruch,Jer36:26), bring back the national script as late as the Roman period, by a and named Yerahmecel they were only stutters of nationalist ideologues. Today's prince Seriyahu (Seriah,Jer51:59), an in bullae These (Jerahmeel Jer36:26). represent important Hebrew script is a derivative of Aramaic writing as practiced the bureaucratic into proceduresof Jerusalemtoward by Jews during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. glimpse The language of Judah can be determined by comparing the end of the Judean kingdom (Avigad 1986:120-30). Otherimportantseals were owned by royal officialsand men- the Hebrew of the inscriptions with the Hebrew of the bibtion the kings they served by name: Ahaz, Hezekiah, and lical text. However, we must remember two things. First, different genres demand different use of language (e.g., Uzziah. In the section on trade, we have already menthe difference between a poem and an editorial). And sectioned the Imlk seals that were stamped on jar handles; they depicted a flying scarabbeetle with an inscription read- ond, the Hebrew of the Bible is actually a product of a long ing Imlk"belonging to the king" along with one of four place period of scribal activity, culminating in the Rabbinic activnames. Regardless of the place names on the seals, chemical ities of the Roman and Byzantineperiods and including slight studies of the wares show that most of the pots were made changes even as late as the early Middle Ages, making it what in the Jerusalemarea (Mommsen, Perlman, and Yellin 1984). Dever accurately calls a "curated"book (Dever 1990:8-11). Most of these inscriptions could have been and probably This means that, in some ways, comparison of inscriptional and biblicalHebrew is a comparisonof differentthings. were written by trained scribes. There is some debate about just how literatethe average person in Judah (and elseNevertheless, there are enough similarities to enable us to 160

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determine that the Bible (though not the Masoretic text) originated in Judah. For example, most Hebrew names in the inscriptions of Judah contain the name of God and spell it as yhw (pronounced yahi4).This is the same in the Bible, though the names come down to us in English as the "Jeho-"at the beginning of names or the "-iah" at the end. Furthermore, the language of Judahwas probablysomewhat understandable by most of the nationalgroups around it, because,like Hebrew, the languages of these groups all belong to the "Canaanite" branch of Northwest Semitic as opposed to the Aramaic branch which was, by this time, significantly different. This is clear from the biblical story of the Assyrian Rabshakeh (2 Kings 18;ca. 700 BCE). Apparently, most Judeans could not understand Aramaic very well. Because the Rabshakeh was speaking to Jerusalemin Hebrew and the Judean leaders did not want his message to be understood by the common people, they requested him to speak in Aramaic,the international language of the Assyrian (and later the Babylonian and Persian) empire. Indeed, because of the subsequent domination by these groups over Judah, Aramaic became better known, and ultimately, by the Hellenistic period, became the language of the Jews. Religion.The religion of Judah during the Iron IICperiod is best expressed by the Bible, much of which was written during this time (the Hebrew Bible was written in its present basic form primarily during the seventh to fifth centuries BCE, though some parts are still later). Archaeological finds cannot confirm or disconfirm the emotional or supernatural aspects of religious expression, but they can illustrate some of the material culture connected with religious behavior. Fertility figurines were still prevalent in Judah at this time, especially those made in the form of pillars with moldmade faces.Although these probablyrepresentthe old religion of Asherah superimposed onto the tree-of-life idea (Hestrin 1987), her cult may have been reduced during Josiah's day (2 Kgs 23), at least among the religious literary elite in Jerusalem. The Arad temple may have also been destroyed during the centralizing reign of Josiah,in spite of the fact that worshipers piously gave offerings in bowls inscribed with the word qodesh"holy." Cultic items were found at Bethel, and the excavators posited a shrine, but that interpretation may be based more on what they read in the Bible about the temple there than what they actually found; unfortunately the information provided by the publication cannot answer our questions satisfactorily. Artifacts include a hoard of cultic items Kenyon found in a small hidden cave on the eastern slope of Jerusalem. She suggested that these reflected "unorthodox"religious expressions. The objectsin the cave included many domestic vessels such as bowls, jugs, lamps, and cooking pots, but also an incense stand, scores of human figurines (mostly fertility pillar figurines of Asherah), zoomorphic figurines (primarily horses, a solar/Yahweh symbol), and miniaturepieces of furniture(chairsand tables)usually associatedwith culticactivities (Kenyon 1974:140-42).Do these cultic finds actually represent an unorthodox form of worship in Judah? The archaeologi-

cal finds here and in other places of Judah suggest that such objects were much more frequent than the literary texts in the Bible seem to suggest. Indeed, they must represent the religious views of the majorityof people living in Judah.There apparently was good reason why the prophets railed against idolatry and the worship of other gods than Yahweh. A small ivory scepter head in the shape of a pomegranate with a dedication mentioning the word "priest"on it was perhaps associated with ceremonial activity in the Jerusalem temple. Art. Some have characterizedthe art of Judah during this period as aniconic, if not iconoclastic. Although pockets of artistic representation occurred, the frequent depictions of animals and people on eighth century seals were replaced by full names or the inclusion of patronyms and simple lines separating two registers of inscription. The most significant aspect of art was the scarab beetle on the hundreds of Imlkjar handles that have been found throughout Judah. Suffice it to say here that the flying scarab must have been a symbol of the Judean monarchy (Younker 1985). Note also that the Imlkseals were not used after the early seventh century.Another symbol of the monarchy was the rosette,which was used as seal impressionson jarstoward the end of the period much like the Imlkseals were used at the beginning. Indeed, the jarsthat carriedthe rosette impressions were immediate derivatives of the Imlkjars (Cahill1995). It is possible that the rosette represented an aniconic trend replacing the scarab as a royal symbol. Burials.Tombs were found at Beth Loya, Beth-Shemesh, Nasbeh, Qom, and, most importantly, Jerusalem, where the Silwan tombs probably continued to be used, as were other tombs in the region. Recent excavations of tombs just southwest of Jerusalem at Ketef Hinnom have produced a wealth of remains, including two amulets made of thin silver sheets rolled up tightly. Both contained inscriptions of parts of the priestly benediction from Numbers 6:24-26.The amulets were perhaps an "early intimation of the concept of phylacteries" (Barkay 1992b:186).Their presence in Judean tombs suggests the need for blessing in death. Other objects, such as silver jewelry and semiprecious beads, indicate the wealthy class. Although they may have begun in the eighth century,the two finest examples of tombs were also used in Iron IIC. North of the city, large tombs were finely hewn out of the rock. One tomb has an entry court outside the door, which leads into a large central room flanked by eight small chambers,each,exceptone, having threebenches,a centralwalkway, and, in five of them, repositoriesfor secondary bone deposits when the benches were full (Barkay,Kloner,and Mazar 1994). There is a debate about whether mounds of stone, called "tumuli," west of Jerusalem really were tombs as suggested by their excavator (Amiran 1958).Associated with the stone mounds were hearths for burning, perhaps in funerary rituals. Debate about them centers around the relationship of the hearths to burials (Aharoni 1982:239). Jeremiah 34:4-5 speaks of burning spices for the dead. Undoubtedly a part BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

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IronIICPrimaryExcavatedSites

Philistia Ashdod VII-VI Ashdod Yam Ashkelon Haror (poss.Assyria) Miqne I Ruqeish III-II (Phoenicia?)

potters'quarter glacis rampart non-specifiedremains city wall, tower,& rampart; publicbuildings houses;olive oil industry storehouses,burials

of this funerary ritual was a feast called marzeah in the Bible (Jer16:5;Amos 6:4-6).Archaeologicalevidence for it is slowly mounting, with most of the items described in the Amos passage found archaeologically (King 1988:137-61).A Moabite papyrus inscription,if it is authentic (most believe it is), mentions the feast (see below). Pillar figurines are frequent finds in Judean tombs; that they are rare outside Judah suggests they are particularly characteristic. WaterSystems. The water system of Jerusalem was not sufficient for the swollen population of the city during Iron IIC.Bringing the Mishneh Quarterwall slightly south of the originalridge upon which the City of David was built allowed the engineers to bring water from the Gihon Spring to the depression southwest of the ridge. But to keep the water from potential besiegers meant they had to dig a tunnel beneath the ridge. This tunnel, often called Hezekiah's Tunnel, and its inscription have been mentioned above, and it is probably also mentioned in the Bible (2 Kgs 20:20). The Siloam Inscription speaks of two teams of workmen digging from either end of the tunnel. The tool marks still visible on the walls of the tunnel show where the two teams came together, the feat that is celebratedby the inscription.The tunnel snakes its way through the rock,probably following natural fissures or joints, and emerges into a pool 533 meters after leaving the Gihon Spring. Many more people could now gather around the new reservoir, called the Pool of Siloam in the New Testament(John9:7),than could effectively use the previous system through Warren'sshaft with its narrow tunnel, limiting access to just a few drawers at a time. Philistia GeographicalExtent. Although an Assyrian text of Sennacherib records that Ekronwas controlled by Hezekiah for a short time (Pritchard1969:287),the Philistines seem to have otherwise controlled their own destiny, although Assyria was in charge nominally. The Assyrians were not interested in any one of the small nations becoming too powerful, and Sennacherib, probably to protect the Assyrian investments in olive oil productionat Ekron,says he drove Hezekiah out almost as soon as the Judean monarch took it. Under Assyrian dominance, at least parts of Philistia prospered, although Ashkelon was destroyed by Sennacherib(Pritchard 1969:287).Philistia was very important to Assyria because it was on the military and trade route to Egypt. Because the 162

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Miqne'stown plan is the best known of the Philistinecities. Inside the fortificationsystem,a belt of olive oil productionfacilities constituted an industrialzone. Acrossa street, the center of the city consisted of common and elite residences.Illustrationcourtesyof Tel Miqne-EkronExcavationProject.

Shephelah solidly belonged to Judah and the northern coast was largelyPhoenician(probablyunder the controlof Assyria), Philistia was limited to the coastal plain south of Tel Aviv. SettlementPatterns. Sennacherib describes the polities of Philistia (Ashkelon and Ekron,at least) as city-states, each with their own "king" and surrounding towns and villages ruled by the king (Pritchard1969:287).While excavations at the thriving trade city of Miqne (Ekron) and the coastal sites of Ashdod and Ashkelon do not belie this characterization,they have also not yielded solid evidenceforindependent status. The material culture of the southern coastal region is very similar from site to site, suggesting close connections. Urbanplan.The best city plan so faruncovered is at Miqne, although still only a small proportion of the town has been excavated. Ringing the city was a solid wall pierced by a gate in the south. Between the gate and a ring street olive oil

Reconstructionof an olive oil manufacturingfacilitybased upon the remainsexcavated at Miqne.The crushingbasinwas carvedout of one large stone; in it, workerspulverizedolives into a puree so the oil could be more easily extracted.On either side of the basinwere large, hollow stones with an opening at the top and a shallow channel leading aroundthe hole and draininginto the hollow chamber.Workersplaced basketsof olives on top of the stones, balanceda log-which was anchored into the wall behind the presses-over the baskets,and weighted it down with stones with massesof 25-50 kg each. The weighted beams presseddown on the basketsof olives and slowly extrudedthe oil which dripped into the hollow stones. The oil was then decanted into nearbyjars.Illustration by ErezCohen, TelMiqne-EkronExcavationProject

production facilities were located in what appear to be individual houses (see below). In the middle of the town was an elite zone where large buildings, at least one temple and residences, suggest the wealthy lived in blocks of houses. The largeststructurehas turned out to be the most extensive palace ever excavated in Palestine from this period. Best exposed during the 1995 season, the palace was a multi-storied building in a Neo-Assyrian style with a throne room approached by steps and an Egyptian-stylecolonnaded entrancehall. Diggers made several rich finds in its destruction layer,including Egyptian style objects. The presence of these objects may the Babyexplain why the Babylonians attacked in 603 BCE: lonians did not want the southern Levant to fall under the influence of Egypt. Because of the special function of Miqne as an oil production center,the city may have had a bulking and shipping section slightly to the east of the city gate. Here, rows of pillars poking above the surface suggest a series of tripartite buildings that may have housed the oil in bulk and prepared it for shipment in caravansto Assyria or to coastalports,where Phoenician shipping would take over. More excavations need

to be done in this unique and potentially enlightening area of the site where an elaboratesecurityinfrastructurewas probably in place. Because these buildings seem to pierce the wall, oil shipments possibly did not need to pass through the city gate. Architecture.Fortification systems show a variety of city wall types. Ruqeish had a massive solid wall over 6 meters thick with huge towers 7.7 x 11.6 meters. This could have been part of an Assyrian fortress along the road to Egypt. The site of Ashdod Yam included a rampart with no wall at the top. Harorhad a solid brickwall with a tower and rampart against the wall. Storehouses made up of a series of long rooms with plaster preserved on the walls were present at Haror. Miqne I sported a six-chamber gate with two solid towers in front. House architectureat Miqne I included pillars separating the rooms in which olives were processed. In many of the pressing rooms, or located nearby,were small cultic comers with incense altarsof all sizes and several shapes (Gitin1990). Technology.It was apparently under the sponsorship of Assyria that the largest olive oil production facility so far found in the Middle East was put into operation at Miqne I. Using olives from the highlands to the east, the inhabitants produced oil in over 100 industrial buildings. Other sites with significant oil production finds include Batash II and Beit Mirsim Al in Judah. The technology of oil production for an average building consisted of one or two crushing basins, two to four presses, heavy stone weights, and storage areas (Borowski 1987:117-26).When finished, the oil was transferred to jars and shipped. Because literary texts speak of different qualities of oil depending on the stage of pressing, the process probably involved several pressings, perhaps at different locations. The first oil was the finest, while the last was somewhat bitter. Fine oil may have been used in religious ceremonies and played an important role in the rites of sacrifice.Although probably belonging to Iron IIB,the oil press in the sacred precinct at Dan may reflectthis practice (Biran 1994a:174).If in some way the extraction of oil had religious overtones, then this helps account for the incense altars in the buildings at Miqne I. The exact nature of the production at Miqne I still needs more formulation. Were they family operations consigned to individual family groups or more formal "factory" production centers located in many small buildings for convenience? Was it big business or family oriented? Although they do not seem to be "cottage industries" in the sense of small independent family businesses, but rather part of a largerproduction facility sponsored and organized from outside, most likely by the Assyriansthroughlocal intermediaries, ethno-archaeological observations suggest that the family may still have been at the heart of the organization. That is, while the production was administered from outside, individual families may have contracted for a share of the production. Ashdod VII-VI illustrates another aspect of large-scale technology. Here archaeologists unearthed a whole series of BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

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potters' kilns suggesting a potters' quarter. It comprised a street, houses, and courtyards where the potters produced theirwares. The kilns were of the horizontal type which operated on a down-draft air movement pulling the oxygen down through a pit kiln. Pottery of the southern coastal plain (Philistia) can be separated from that of the southern highlands (Judah). For example, decanters were more bag-shaped here and took their place among a considerably larger repertoire of vessel forms,even when one discounts the many importedpieces. Ashlar masonry was found at Miqne in the gate area. Trade.The large oil production center at Miqne I and the potters' quarter at Ashdod VII-VI indicate the integration of large-scale production and surplus trade. Certainly the oil trade was international, while the potters probably produced pottery for towns and cities other than Ashdod. Excavatorsat Ashkelon have recently found Phoenician artifacts in the 604 Babylonian destruction, which, they suggest, may indicate more than simple trade, but a formal alliance against Babylon (King 1993:xxv). Writing.Philistine inscriptions are still rare. In fact, it is difficult to describe what Philistinewriting looked like. When inscriptionsfrom Philistiaare found, such as the short ostraca from Miqne and a few more from Ashkelon, they often consist of a single name. Most remainunpublished. The script looks very similar to Hebrew, though specialists can detect a few minor differences. The Philistine language, because the inscriptions are limited to names, is not yet diagnostic, but it was also probably close to Hebrew. In the summer of 1996, a large inscription was found at Miqne. Made up of five lines, the inscription appears to be complete, written on a large stone apparently associated with a temple in the center of the site. It mentions the name of the site as Ekron and also gives the names of two kings, Padi and Achish, the former of whom is also mentioned on an Assyrian inscription. When the inscription is published, it should give us our first good look at Philistine writing and language. Until then, it is impossible to say anything certain about the Philistine language. By Iron IIC, they probably spoke a Northwest Semitic dialect close to Phoenician or Hebrew (Naveh 1985). Religion.The religion of Philistia is difficult to describe without extensive inscriptions. More than one ostracon from Miqne mentions Astarte. The Deuteronomist also mentions a Baal Zebub as a divinity at Ekron (2 Kgs 1:2-18), but, meaning "LordFly" or "Baalof Flies" (so the Septuagint and Josephus),a coherentunderstanding of the name is problematic unless it is a pejorative distortion of, for instance, zebul, "lord" (giving us a meaning "lord of 'Lords'"). Both Miqne and Ashkelon have produced incense altars. They were especially frequent at Miqne in relation to the oil production centers. Their prominence suggests the existence of specific cultic activities associated with the production of oil. At Ashkelon, an incense altarseems to have come from the roof of a building, reminding one of Jeremiah's diatribe (19:13) against Judeans who offered incense to the "whole host of heaven" on their roofs. Although incense altars were 164

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Iron IICPrimaryExcavated Sites

Phoenicia Abu Hawam Acco Achzib Dor Kabri Keisan 5-4 Michal XII Shiqmona E

pottery wall fragments cemetery gate;wall fragments;pottery town, casematewall, Greekpottery internationalpottery pottery pottery

common in Judah in Iron IIB,by this time, when they had become very common in Philistia, they seem to have gone out of frequent use in Judah (Gitin 1992). Phoenicia GeographicalExtent. In the seventh century, the Phoenician colonies throughout the Mediterranean were rising in importance. Excavations at Carthage in Tunisia show that that city was alreadywell on the road to the glories that would make it the greatest rival of early Rome. The prosperity of the colonies meant prosperity for the homeland as well. Indeed, no other group in the eastern Mediterranean knew how to conduct maritime trade as well as the Phoenicians. Their skills were significant enough to be of value to the Assyrians, who thus patronized their prosperity, allowing Phoenician ports to expand down the Levantine coast well into Palestine, probably as far as the TelAviv area. The most important excavated Phoenician site so far is Dor (Stern 1994:131-48). It may be debated as to just how much control the Phoenicianshad over this territoryduring the Assyrian domination of the area.Although we must conclude that the Assyrians ultimately controlled the region, it was probably the Phoenicians (and other groups) who lived there, and it was their genius that is represented by most of the finds. SettlementPatterns.The majorPhoenician ports had small villages around them that produced some agriculture, but the close proximity of the mountains largely limited crop production. Phoenicia was thus a mercantile society focused on maritime trade. One of the most significant inland sites could be Shefacnear Kabri,with its casemate wall and East Greekpottery (Kempinskiand Niemeier 1995).Cypro-Phoenician potterywas found in pits at Kabri.The excavatorssuggest that all the Greek pottery may reflect the presence of Greek mercenaries in the service of Tyre against the Babylonians; the site's destruction is attributed to one of the campaigns of Nebuchadnezzar (Kempinski and Niemeier 1995:19). SubsistencePatternsand Trade.The Phoenicians were the most prosperous group in the southern Levant due to the riches of their trade. Indeed, the word "subsistence"is hardly appropriate, even though they must have produced very little of their own food. While sufficient food was imported from the colonies and other trading partners,the Phoenician cities along the coast probably also bought goods from the inland peoples and consumed them or resold them abroad.

150

100

300

Estimation of the geopolitics of Iron IICPalestine based on archaeological material culture, historical and other texts, and historical projections inferred from the previous

and subsequent geopolitical picture.Borderswere probably relatively fluid, never fixed for longer

250

than a few years,and we must illustratethem with degrees of uncertainty.The ambiguities representedhere reflect two potential ancient processes-................. 1) the geopolitical ambitionsof neighboring "national"groups as they claimed land as their own; and 2) the change of territorialholdings Shiqmona duringthe period,that is, two or more groups may have held part of the territoryat limitedtimes-as well as our uncertaintybased on materialculture and/ortexts.

330

200

Mediterranean

Michal

320

150 Asdod Yam

SSeaElat 35

6

050

0 50

mi3les 0

kilometers

50

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Thus, the archaeological finds at their sites are replete with objects from many localities in the eastern Mediterranean. Although coinage was invented in Asia Minor during this time, it probably was not widely used until the following Persian period. Small silver ingots have been found at several sites outside Phoenicia, reflecting a growing method of exchange for which coinage was a logical, but later,extension. Most trade was conducted in kind. UrbanPlans. Unfortunately, not enough is known from Phoenician sites to gain an understanding of a typical urban plan. We have only wall fragments and pottery from the coastal sites south of Lebanon and not much more coherent remains from sites in Phoenicia proper. Later colonial sites, such as Kerkowan and Carthage Bursa in Tunisiafrom the fifth and fourth centuries BCE,exhibit the hippodamic plan (a grid pattern of streets and blocks of houses). Because of similar fortifications, Stem suggests that the urban plan of Dor was probably similar to that at the Assyrian site of Megiddo, comprising residential and administrative quarters (1994:138). Architecture.Because of their prosperity,Phoenicians had the leisure and wealth to pursue the arts of culture. Dor provides the best remains to examine Phoenician architecture (Stem 1994:132-38).An inset-offset wall with ashlar masonry at some of the offset corners surrounded the city. One stone has a mason's mark identicalto an example at Megiddo. Some sections of the wall's foundation were made with bricks around a stone core, and a sloping rampartran up to the wall. The eastern gate comprised two chambers facing each other on opposite sides of the passageway which led into the gate from an outer bastion surrounded by a casemate wall (Stem 1995). A well-preserved flagstone passage approached the gate. Although it is not clearly represented in the southern Levant, the Phoenicians constructed some walls in a distinctive fashion with ashlar or well-hewn stones in vertical "columns" while the rest of the wall was made of less fine masonry. Called "pier and quoin" or "orthostat" construction, this technique actually began much earlier in the north and continued in the Phoenician colonies for several centuries after the Iron Age (Shiloh 1979a:78-81). Technology.Although some of the ashlar masonry at Dor may have been reusedfromearlierperiods (Stem1994:132), it was apparently associated with other than royal constructions. This fits with the prosperity of the time and the long tradition of this masonry type in Phoenicia. Pottery production received a shot in the arm with the arrivalof Assyrian styles, especially bowls. At times they combined with local painted forms to produce interestinghybrids (Stem 1994:143). Greek styles may have been influential as well. Writing. Phoenician writing style is characterized by a basic conservatism, eschewing the cursive developments of Aramaic and Hebrew inscriptions. While other nations, like Ammon and Edom, were opening the closed heads of several letters under Aramaic influence or, in Moab and Edom, ligaturing the legs of letters under Hebrew influence, Phoenician inscriptions maintained the closed forms and 166

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Iron IICPrimaryExcavated Sites Abu Salima G ChinnerethI (Kinrot) Dan Dothan I? Hammah? Hazor III Jemmeh EF,CD JokneamXI (Yoqnecam) Megiddo III (Late)-I Pella? Qashish IIB Qiri V Tel CAmalI TaanachIII Yincam

Assyria/Babylon

Assyrianfortresson roadto Egypt Assyrianopen-courtbuilding

storeroom;multi-roombuildings pottery,ostracon;coffin houses citadelwith enclosed courtyard Assyrianvaulted building wall fragments Assyrianadministrativebuildings; city wall; gate pottery wall fragments houses tombs destruction courtyardwith pottery

(more-or-less)straightlegs (Herr1980).Moreover,the Phoenicians did not adopt Aramaic writing as so many of the other nations of the southern Levant did in the middle of the sixth century BCE.Most Phoenician inscriptions come from the colonies, where we now call them "Punic," and a few short ones come from Palestinian sites outside Phoenicia (Vance 1994a;1994b).Even inscribed seals, so frequent in Judah and Ammon at this time, are much less frequent in Phoenician areas; there is no shortage of seals, but they present primarily iconographic depictions. It is interesting that a seal mentioning a person with a Yahwistic name as "priest of Dor" was written in Hebrew script, not Phoenician. Perhaps this suggests that there was a Judean population at Dor as well. The Phoenicianlanguage is very well known from inscriptions, especially in its colonial (Punic)guise from laterperiods (Peckham 1968), but also from the northern Levant. Since "Phoenicia" is a name given by the Greeks to what they thought was the territory of the Canaanites of ca. 1200 BCE, the term "Phoenician"has subsequently been applied to the people and their language. Nevertheless, they called themselves (andpresumablytheirlanguage)"Canaanite."Whatever its name, this language continued to exist and evolve (e.g., Punic) alongside of the other Canaanite Northwest Semitic languages of the southern Levant, such as Hebrew. The most easily recognizable difference between Phoenician (along with its relatives in the southern Levant) and Aramaic is the use of a prefixed he as the definite article,where Aramaic has a suffixed )alep. Art. Scores of seals from Phoenicia depict scenes with animals as well as people and symbolic figures. Although the Phoenician style of art, with its strong Egyptian spirit, continued, there were now also influences from Assyria early in

Jemmeh'svaulted mudbrickbuildingclearlyrepresentsthe importationof Assyrianarchitecturalmodels and brickconstruction techniques. ElegantAssyriancarinatedpalace bowls emerged from beneath the building'scollapsedceilings.The Assyriansestablished themselves as far south as Jemmehbecause of their intense interest in relationswith Egypt.Drawingcourtesyof G. VanBeek.

the period and Babylon later. However, little Phoenician art has been found in the southern Levant, except for a few small finds from Dor (Stem 1994:142-43). Religion.Little is known about Phoenician religion from sites in the southern Levant. From elsewhere, we know that the old Northwest Semitic pantheon of gods continued, often with individual sites emphasizing certain members of the pantheon or specific characteristics of individual gods. These divinities, in fact, were remembered well into Hellenistic and Roman times in the writings of classical authors. The fact that a person with a Yahwistic name served as a priest in Dor probably illustrates religious tolerance rather than syncretism or ecumenism. Burials. Tombs at Achzib illustrate two types carved out of bedrock. There were pit graves, probably for people of limited means, and more monumental shaft tombs for the more pretentious. The latter had a vertical entrance shaft, at the bottom of which was a square entrance into the burial chamber..Royal tombs at Byblos in Lebanon were similar but more monumental. Assyria/Babylon Extent.Although Assyria controlledthe region Geographical for only part of Iron IIC, some sites have produced remains which primarilyreflectthe Assyrian presence. If, afterAssyria was removed from the scene by Babylon at the end of the seventh century BCE,the sites continued into the early sixth century and were not destroyed or abandoned, some of them

may have gone to Judah under King Josiah or to Samaria (Dothan I, Hammah, JokneamXI, Megiddo II-I,Qashish IIB, Qiri V, Tel CAmal,and Yin'am), Philistia (Jemmeh? EF,CD; two probable Philistine ostraca were found here), Ammon (Pella),and Egypt (Abu Salima).The geopolitics of the Hulah Valley are uncertain, but an Aramean state may have controlled them (ChinneretI, Dan, and Hazor III).However, the remains at the sites listed here were primarilyconnected with Assyrian control of the region, either as administrative centers, garrisons, or trade centers. Assyrian presence is implied primarily by the imported Assyrian pottery and architecture. SettlementPatternsand Trade.Most of the Assyrian sites were located on importantroads, especially the route between Assyria and Egypt towards which its primaryambitionswere directed.The route came down the Hulah Valley (Dan, Hazor, Chinneret), through the Carmel passes from the Esdraelon Valley (Jokneam[with Qashish and Qiri] and Megiddo [with YinCam?and Tel cAral?]), near some of the hills in the northwest highlands (Dothan),and down the coastalplain (Jemmeh and Abu Salima) to Sinai. A branch of this route probably passed south through the JordanValley (Pella and Hammah) from which a connecting route crossed to Megiddo through TelcAmal and YinCam.Access to the sea was important to the Assyrians as well, but they probably simply allowed the Phoenicians who were in Acco, Achzib, Dor, and the northern Phoenician cities to do their shipping for them. Direct Assyrian habitation probably occurred at military garrisonsin fortressessuch as Hazor Ill, ChinneretI, Megiddo III-II,and Abu Salima G, and at trading centers like Jemmeh. Other, smaller sites in their neighborhood most likely comprised supporters of the Assyrian administration or groups controlled by it (Qiri, Qashish, and Yincam). Subsistence. Based on the large quantities of imported Assyrian pottery, the Assyrians living in Palestine probably brought large quantities of goods from the homeland. In spite of this, most of their supplies were undoubtedly produced in the region and given to them as taxes and tribute by the local, non-Assyrian inhabitants.They were essentially a consuming element in the economy, taking and reorganizing local economies to suit their own imperial needs. At the same time, they must have plowed back considerable amounts earned from the trade into the local economies, otherwise they would not have been able to continue. UrbanPlans. The Assyrians built no cities from scratch; instead, they constructed administrative buildings within other cities, such as Megiddo and Hazor, which may also have contained residential quarters of local inhabitants. Architecture.These buildings and those erected as separate fortresseshave plans similar to administrativebuildings and palaces in Assyria. The buildings at Chinneret I, Hazor III, and Megiddo III consisted of square or rectangular courtyards surrounded by rooms, a plan known in Assyria as the "open-court" building type (NEAEHL:300). The fortress at Abu Salima may have contained a temple. The city wall at Megiddo III continued the inset-offset wall BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

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of Iron IIB, but the city gate was a two-chamber structure as was the gate at Dor in Phoenicia. The most interesting architecturalinnovation introduced by the Assyrians was the vaulted building at Jemmeh EF Built entirely of mudbricks, it consisted of at least six rooms, most of which have been preserved with ceilings intact. The vaults were erectedwith keystone-shapedbrickscalled "voussoirs" which its excavator, Van Beek, claims are the earliest ever found. This technique was imported from Mesopotamia where it was a natural outgrowth of local brick technologies. The vaulted rooms, probably used as basement storerooms, supported a superstructure. Technology.Assyrian pottery was found below some of the fallen ceilings at Jemmeh. Assyrian palace bowls with their thin wares and elegant, carinated shapes, influenced the development of pottery in Palestine as local potters began copying them in large numbers, though not with the same finesse. However, most pottery continued the indigenous forms, except perhaps in Ammon where there was a burst of growth in carinated bowls during the later seventh and early sixth centuries. Other types of Assyrian pottery forms that appeared frequently in Palestine were small, thin bottles with pointed bases and small mouths. Some sported horizontal painted lines. The main influence of Assyrian pottery may have been to suggest to Palestinian potters ways in which to make the texture of their wares finer. At about this time, afterthe elegance of Samariaware had disappeared, there was a resurgence of fine wares; we can now speak of fine and common wares, especially in areas most strongly associated with Assyrian administration, such as Ammon (Oded 1970). Writing.Normal Assyrian writing was in the cuneiform script, but very few of these inscriptions have been found in Palestine. Small fragments appeared at Samariaand Ashdod (Hestrin 1972:57-58).Most were short inscriptions on ostraca in Aramaic, like the one from Dothan I. Aramaic was the script used by the Assyrians to communicate with the western regions of their empire. It became so strongly entrenched that it lasted throughout the Babylonianand Persianempires, to be gradually replaced by Greek only in the Hellenistic the small nations period. In the middle of the sixth centuryBCE, of the southern Levant which had developed their own idiosyncrasies of writing styles, almost universally changed to Aramaic writing. It has lasted with minor changes in modem Hebrew and, with more changes, in modem Arabic. The use of the varieties of Aramaicby the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persianempires began one of the most important long-term processes in the southern Levant:the gradual shift away from the "Canaanite"family to a more extensive use of the Aramaic family. In the Persian period especially, the use of Aramaic-sometimes called Imperial, Classical, or ChancelleryAramaic--by the imperialadministrationsencouraged local bureaucrats to learn and use it (Folmer 1995). Meanwhile, those groups became more and more influential in the elite levels of their local societies. Over several centuries, Aramaic gradually replaced the local languages 168

60:3(1997) BiblicalArchaeologist

Iron IICPrimaryExcavated Sites

Ammon Deir cAlla VI Hajjar,Kh Heshbon 'Iraq al-Emir Jalul Jawa Mazar Nimrin Mount Nebo Rabbath-Ammon (Amman) Rujm al-Malfuf (N) Rujm al-Malfuf (S) Saftit Sahab Sacidiyeh IV "TowerSites" cUmayri

houses circulartower 16 wall fragments?;reservoir unpublishedpottery houses casematewall; houses tombs pottery;wall fragments tomb palace?;wall fragments; tombs circulartower circulartower houses wall fragments pits fortresses;agriculturalsites administrativebuildings;houses; monumentalentry Umm ad-Dananir cobbledcourtyard

and dialects of the several regions. In the process, Aramaic itself became transformed into several varieties scattered throughout what is today Syria and northern Mesopotamia, as reflected in the many inscriptions (Moscati 1969;Fitzmyer and Kaufman 1992).It is difficultto classify all these branches of the Aramaicfamily.The Aramaicof Ezraand Daniel belong to one (perhaps two) of them. Later branches of Aramaic include a western group: Nabatean, Palmyrene,Jewish Palestinian, Samaritan,Christian Palestinian; and an eastern one: Syriac, Babylonian, Mandean, and a modem version, sometimes called "Assyrian,"found in small pockets in Syria and Lebanon,as well as the United States,Jerusalem,and (Asian) Georgia (Moscati 1969). Religion and Art. Assyrian religion and art were not expressed in Palestine. The fortress of Abu Salima--originally ascribedby Petrieto the Babylonians,but seen as Assyrian by more recentexcavators-provides the lone exception with is possible temple, but its excavations did not produce coherent results. Burials.Tel CAmalproduced a few tombs with Assyrian pottery in them, though this is not strong enough evidence to identify the site or the burials as Assyrian. One type of burial container usually identified with the Assyrians, but actually found in most regions, was the "bathtub coffin." Ammon Extent.This was the era of greatestprosperity Geographical for Ammon, but, until the summer of 1996, there was conflicting information about its southern border. All we knew for certain was that it was somewhere between Rabbath-Ammon and Dibon. Using the archaeologicalfinds from Heshbon, which appeared to be Ammonite, maximalists

A The circulartower of Rujmel Malfuf(N). Likeother such structuresin the region, this tower occupied a strategicsite with good views. Photographcourtesyof the author.

asserted the border was perhaps between Madaba in the south and Heshbon in the north (Herr 1992a). The minimalists, basing their arguments on biblical texts, suggested that the biblical prophets First Isaiah (ca 700 BCE)and Jeremiah (ca 600 BCE)placed Heshbon in Moab, limiting the Ammonites to a very small territory surrounding modem Amman (Hiibner 1992). However, the biblical texts may be understood in two other ways. The first one is to posit literary dependence on one text. Only one biblical text (Isa 16:8-9)puts Heshbon clearly in Moab. The others place it (1) clearly in Ammon (Jer49:3);(2), clearly not in Moab (Jer48:12, 45), or (3) maybe not in Moab (Isa 15:4 and Jer 48:34). Jer 48:34 quotes part of Isa 15:4,making Jeremiahdependent on Isaiah. The one text which clearly places Heshbon in Moab (Isa 16:8-9)also uses formulae based on 15:4.This central text (Isa 15:4) is the literary key to the problem, for it alludes to the Song of Heshbon in Numbers 21:21-30,which may have been an early taunt song against Moab and does not claim Moab controlled Heshbon (Hanson 1968). Thus, it would seem that Isaiah and Jeremiahwere more interested in rooting theirpropheticoraclesabout Heshbon in Israelitereligious literary or oral tradition (the Song of Heshbon) than in the geopolitical realities of the day. The second solution sees the Song of Heshbon as being later than First Isaiah or even Jeremiah and would ascribe geopolitical reality to Isaiah 16:8-9 (Heshbon in Moab) and Jeremiah 49:3 (Heshbon in Ammon). This solution places the city in Moab before the seventh century and in Ammon during Iron IIC.

< Administrativecomplex at cUmayri.cUmayriwas one of a number of towns that grew up aroundthe Ammonitecapital,RabbathAmmon. It may have been more of an adminisrativesite than a residentialtown, however.The first complete buildingat the bottom of the photographwas apparentlybuilt accordingto the four-room house plan:three narrowrooms (the top room begins at the center of the shot) branchoff a broad room at the backof the building. Administratorsat work in this complex probablyattended to the productionof wine at the plethoraof smallfarmsteadswhich sprung up in the region duringthe IronIIC.Aerialphoto by T E.Myers, courtesyof the author.

Archaeological finds at Heshbon 16 in Iron IIC-pottery, writing style and language on several ostraca, and other finds-all suggest that the site was Ammonite. During the summer of 1996, excavations by the Madaba Plains Project at Jalul east of Madaba and excavations and survey by the Wadi Thamad Project south of Jalul gave us a clear border. Two inscriptions (one seal and one ostracon) from Jalulwere written in Ammonite writing and containedtypicalAmmonite names (personal observation thanks to Randall Younker). These inscriptions go along with the Ammonite pottery and figurines also found there.However, about 14 km to the south at Khirbat al-Mudayna in the Wadi Thamad, archaeologists discovered an ostracon with clear Moabite writing and a name probably containing the name of the Moabite god Kemosh (personal observation thanks to Michele Daviau). Accompanying this inscription was a corpus of pottery completely unlike that found in Ammonite regions, but with strong parallels at Dibon in Moab. I suggest that the border can be plotted on the northernrim of the Wadi Waladrainage of which the Wadi Thamad is a tributary,because Ammonite pottery was found at Kh. al-Hari approximately 11 km south of Jalul and 3.5 km north of Mudayna (personal observation BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

169

thanks to Andrew Dearman). The conwas thus a large city-statewith its major clusion that Hari and Jalul on the one capital city surrounded by scattered hand and Mudayna on the other were towns, fortresses,and ruralfarmsteads. contemporary is based on identical Exactly how farther flung towns like Ammonite pottery forms found in great Heshbon, Jalul, and perhaps Madaba numbers at Jalul and Hari, but also (be related to the capitalhas yet to be deterit in very low frequencies)at Mudayna. mined. SubsistencePatterns.Rainfall in the However, IronIICpottery from the new excavations at Madaba displays strong Transjordanianhighlands is sufficient for dry farming. Grain was produced elementsof both Ammoniteand Moabite in the valleys and plains, while orchards forms (personal communication from Tim Harrison).The excavations at Madand vegetables grew on the hillsides, and flocks grazed in the open spaces aba may show us that the border came to the north in this region. between fields and on the easternsteppe Because of Ammon's prosperity,we bordering the desert. This agriculture may possibly also include sites in the helped Ammon achieve its prosperous subsistence level. Later,when Babylon Jordan Valley east of the river as controlled the area and the Ammonite Ammonite, though their material culture was not as homogeneous as sites king Bacalyashac(biblical Bacalis;a seal on the plateau: Deir cAlla VI, Mazar, impression of one of his officials was Nimrin (Dornemann 1990:158-59),and found at 'Umayri) conspired with a Sacidiyeh IV. The northern border of prince of Judah (Jer 40:14) against it, Ammon may also have extendedbeyond Babylon conquered them and placed the Wadi Zarqa (biblical JabbokRiver) them under tribute (Josephus Antiquito include the settlements in Gilead in ties 10.9:7). The administrative site of the absence of a strong Aramean state The eight lines of the SiranBottle inscription cUmayri was built at that time most at Damascus. The desert was a natcreditAmminadab,son of Hassalcel,son of likely to oversee the crown's investment in wine production at scores of farmural boundary on the east (Herr 1992a). Amminadab,with variousconstruction SettlementPatterns.The settlement steads in CUmayri'shinterland to pay projects,includingan orchardand pools. this tribute (many of the rural sites in pattern of Ammon was centered on its The inscriptionlabelsAmminadaband his capitaland centralsite,Rabbath-Ammon, two progenitorsas kingsof Ammon.Since CUmayri'shinterland were associated with one or more winepresses). These where, unfortunately, no major multionly one Amminadabis known from other sources(Assyrianrecords),the ten cm bottle sites continued into the Persian period season excavation has yet taken place. makes a contributionto royalAmmonite The several small projectsthat have dug with no apparent break in activity. UrbanPlans. No Ammonite site has there have not cleared enough area in historyby adding two namesto its king list. The Ammonitewriting on the bronze bottle Iron Age strata or published enough been excavated extensively enough to informationto obtaina coherentpicture. dates to ca. 600 BCE. Courtesyof the Amman gain a clear picture of an urban plan. However, the imposing site itself, ArchaeologicalMuseum. cUmayri affords the best glimpse, but it was not a normal residential site and towering over the headwaters of the ZarqaRiver(biblicalJabbok),is enough to emphasize its strate- was founded very late in the period. It included adminisgic importance.Small fragmentsof city fortifications,building trative buildings in the southwestern quarterof the site with walls, and collections of material culture including fine pot- domestic structureshousing the bureaucratsto the north and tery and a Proto-Ioniccapital,all speak of a thriving royal city. east. There was no city wall, but a monumental entrance Surroundingit were smallertowns, such as Saffiton the north, structurewith a small shrine (standing stone and basin) were Jawa, Sahab,and, later,'Umayri on the south, and the Jordan found facing the valley where the Kings' Highway most likely passed. Unfortunately,no streets have been found. Jawa was Valley sites on the west. Smaller villages or agricultural sites dotted the hinterland, such as the scores of farmsteads a fortified residential site with houses inside a casemate wall, in the highlands around Amman (among them Rujm Selim but here, also, nothing can be said about street plans. Architecture. The plan of the Ammonite fortresses is and two Khirbat al-Hajjars;Younker 1991). Some of these smaller sites were fortresses (Rujmal-Henu, Dreijat,Rujmal- best seen at Rujm al-Henu in the BaqcahValley. It consisted Malfuf (N), Rujmal-Malfuf(S),and one of the Kh.Al-Hajjars; of both circular and rectangular towers and a casemate Kletter 1991a); that is, they were situated in strategic loca- system of rooms around a courtyard. A similar picture, but tions, were somewhat larger than the agricultural sites, and without the circulartower, was discovered at Dreijat,which, had no associated agriculturalinstallations like winepresses. however, received major reworking during the Hellenistic The fortresses could be either round towers with other period. A similar history of re-use (including Roman occuassociatedbuildings or rectangularfortifiedstructures.Ammon pation) plagues the study of the Iron IIfeatures of the Malfuf 170

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and Hajjartowers. bowls called, fittingly enough, "blackThe palace of the Ammonite kings, burnished ware." or at least a majoradministrativebuildOne wall at Jawa looks very much at have been found like Phoenician walls built in the pier ing, may Rabbath-Ammonin the east-centralpart and quoin construction style. of the site by a French-Jordanianteam Trade.The imported items found in et al. the the 1989:362).Certainly (Zayadine palace at Rabbath-Ammon as well an was one with as the Ammonite black-burnishedbowl important building a walls courtretrieved from Batash in Judah indicate very large surrounding with a active trade high-quality plaster yard paved patterns for Ammon (Kelm floor. The rich finds and their interna- The Bacalisseal impression.Along with and Mazar 1985:fig. 16:4).There was a scoresof seals and seal impressions tional flair (a clay mask, Phoenician major north-south road in Transjordan a lazuli unearthed at administrative ivories, green glass goblet, lapis cUmayri's traditionally called the "Kings' Highand this one of four doublethe complex, royaldesign (e.g., fragments, perhaps way," and at least two other roads must faced Hathor heads) suggest a palatial flying scarabbeetle) ties the site's have crossed the Jordan Valley from The buildinto administrative administrators a network Rabbath-Ammon to Jerusalem and the emanating interpretation. at had from thick walls the The identifies Samaria region. Trade on the Kings' capital. inscription ings cUmayri very to 2.0 meters and were conthe seal's owner as a minister of thick) Bacalyashac Highway is represented in the lists of (up structed with basements, a rarity in Ammonite mentioned in (an Jeremiah). goods on the Heshbon ostraca (soon to king Palestinianconstruction.Designers con- Drawingcourtesyof the author. be published in full in a book of colstructed one of the cUmayri buildings lected essays by F. M. Cross). The sites in a large four-room house plan similar to residences in the Jordan Valley may have seen more traded items than found so frequently in Israel and Judah, though the broad- those on the plateau (except for Rabbath-Ammon) because room at the back was considerably wider. A large tripartite they were on both north-south and east-west highways. The tombs at Mazar illustrate this with their Assyrian, Judean, building at Jalul is the first one found in Transjordan. walls included casemate structures at and and Phoenician vessels (Yassine 1984). There are also indiJawa City the fortress of Rujm al-Henu. Solid walls may have been cations from sites on the plateau for trade with Phoenicia: found at Rabbath-Ammon which also possibly included a artistic motifs suggest Phoenician themes (Bordreuil 1973); circular tower. A city gate was discovered at Jawa, but its pottery from tombs in Amman (Gal 1995:90-91);and a seal written in Ammonite script mentioning Astarte of Sidon (see plan has not yet been published. A house at cUmayri, only partially excavated, may also below). The lenticularbody of a New YearFlask from Egypt, have had a four-room plan with a cobbled long room and made of a greenish-turquoise faience was found in a storage a cobbled broadroom. But this layout is otherwise rare in cave near an agricultural site in the cUmayri region. These vessels were traded all over the Mediterranean during the Ammon, and there does not seem to be a typical Ammonite house plan. One of the houses at Jawa contained two stair- Saite (twenty-sixth) Dynasty (seventh-sixth centuries BCE; ways and monolithic pillars separating some of the eleven Homes-Fredericq 1992:198). rooms (Daviau 1995).Otherhouse fragmentshave been found Writing. Ammonite scribes developed their own disat Deir cAlla VI, Jalul,Saftit, and Sahab. Several houses have tinctive writing style after borrowing the Aramaic script at over ten interconnected rooms. It is possible that these are the beginning of Iron IIB(Cross 1975;Herr 1980).The formal basements supporting a more coherent plan in the upper script is characterized by vertical stances; the heads of some letters opened very late in the seventh century, following an story. Aramaic development that began a century earlier.The most Technology.Ammonite pottery entered its most distinctive and superior phase in Iron IIC as potting technologies important inscription of the period is the Siran Bottle, found at a small site on the campus of the University of Jordan.This improved, most likely with Assyrian inspiration. Very few of the typical vessel forms found in Ammon have been dissmall bronze bottle contained eight lines of Ammonite writcovered outside the region. Several excavations on the and mentions at least three kings ing dated to around 600 BCE Ammoniteplateauhave produceda greatamountof Ammonite of Ammon (Thompson and Zayadine 1973; Cross 1973a). pottery in the last two decades, including Heshbon, Rujm al- There are also scores of seals with several found in situ at Henu, 'Umayri, Jawa, and Jalul. Jordan Valley sites have it, cUmayri and one of its agricultural farmsteads. The most famous one is the seal impressionof an officialof an Ammonite too, but not in the same proportions. Several types of bowls were made of fine wares used by the more wealthy. king named Bacalyashac(biblical Bacalis in Jer 40:14) who These included elegant shallow bowls or plates sometimes reigned in the early sixth century BCE(Herr 1985). There was rivaling the much later Nabatean ware for fineness. There also a group of ostraca found in the fill of the Heshbon 16 were also decoratively burnished bowls, some with a gray reservoir; several of them represent receipts of trade items. burnish made with a manganese tool. The most distinctive Like most of the other small nations of the southern Levant, the Ammonite script gave way to Aramaic in the middle of development occurred with a variety of burnished black BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

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the sixth century. Some of the late Heshbon ostraca, though in Aramaic script, are still in the Ammonite language (Cross 1975). The Ammonite language belonged to the "Canaanite" family of Northwest Semitic, but contained what appears to be an element of Arabic,especially in names, perhapsbecause of Ammon's proximity to the eastern desert. Ammonite differs from neighboring Hebrew and Moabite in small but not insignificant ways. Unfortunately, few texts in Ammonite are long enough to determine how many of these differences existed (Jackson 1983:108). One distinction seems to have been a different pronunciation of sibilants (Hendel 1996). Religion.The religion of Ammon continued to be centered around its god Milkom, who may be depicted by several male figurines wearing the atef crown from Jawa and elsewhere (Daviau and Dion 1994). Like Yahweh in Judah, he was probably an El deity; his iconographic symbol of a bull with huge hornsis ubiquitouson Ammoniteseals (Aufrecht 1989). That Astarte was also worshipped by Ammonites is suggested by a seal written in Ammonite script that mentions Astarte of Sidon. No Ammonite temples have been found, but small shrines or cultic corners were found at cUmayri (a standing stone with a basin at the entrance to the settlement) and perhaps in the palace at Rabbath-Ammon. Art. Iconic representationcontinued in Ammon, but there is less evidence of monumental art than in Iron IIB,although some of the statues discussed above may have come from IronIICas well. Human and animalfigurinesarenow extremely frequent. Fertilitygoddess figurines, some with eyes bugged out and noses made by pinching the clay between thumb and forefinger, are the most frequent human types, while horses with riders, bovines, and lions are the most frequent animals depicted. Whetherthese always representholy objects or can also be toys is presently debated. Seals also present iconographic scenes. One example from cUmayri, though it is extremely small, is so nicely carved we can suggest the species of bird on the seal was an orangetufted sunbird, a small nectar-feeding bird still seen today (Herr 1992b:188). The seal impression of the official of Bacalyashaccontained the depiction of a flying scarab beetle, probably a royal symbol as it was in Judah on the Imlk jars (Younker 1985). Burials.The tombs from the Amman region were chambers cut into bedrockcliffs,much like those fromthe Jerusalem area. They contained pottery and figurines among other objects.A very large cemetery in the JordanValley at Mazar, which was made up mostly of pit graves, produced a cornucopia of finds, including pottery, glass, stone and metal vessels, bronze weapons, jewelry,beads, seals, and bone and shell objects (Yassine 1984). WaterSystems.The reservoirat Heshbon 16 probably continued through this period. Moab On the Moabite borders, see above the Iron IIB discussion and that of the southern border of Ammon in Iron IIC. The Moabite remains from Mudayna represent the north172

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IronIICPrimaryExcavatedSites

Moab Baluc? Dibon? Lehun Mudayna (WadiThamad)

houses;pottery pottery fortress casematecity wall; six-chambergate

Edom Aroer (Negev) III-Il terraces;fortresstower;Edomiteseal & pottery Bozrah(Buseirah) palace;city wall 5-4 fortress;shrine .Hazeva Kadesh-Barnea? upper fortress Kheleifeh offset-insetwall; gate fortress Edomitepotteryand figurines MalhataC Late (poss. also Israel) shrine;statuettes Qitmit Tawilan houses;unfortified Umm el-Biyara houses form cUza (temporarily?) eastern border; it may have gone farther north in the western part of the plateau near Madaba. Some feel that Moab was eclipsed at this time by Arab tribes (Olkvarri-Goicoechea 1993:93).Fromthe few excavations that have been conducted in Moab, it would seem that the most substantial remains were from IronIIB.But the pottery of Moab is not well enough known for us to easily subdivide Iron II.However, an Egyptian New YearFlask was found at Lehun confirming trade on the Kings' Highway during Iron IIC(Homes-Fredericq1992). The houses at Baluchave only been partially excavated, and we do not have enough to suggest coherent plans. The six-chamber gate recently found at Mudayna had a length of 13.7 meters, somewhat smaller than the Iron IIA examples found in the royal cities west of the Jordan(Daviau 1996). The finds inside the gate reflect some of the activities that went on there. Gaming pieces suggest, perhaps, old men waiting for news (or gossip) from other places as well as biding time until they could be called upon to witness covenants or court cases, one of the primary gate activities according to the Bible (Ruth 4, for example). Other finds reflect storage and worship. Although worship is typical of other gate complexes, the idea of storage in a gate seems oddly informaluntil one remembersthat Mudayna is a small site and probably supported no more than a few extended families. We should probably understand informalityto have been a key feature at such sites. However, for a site this small, there was considerablework spent on fortifications.Not only was there a casemate wall connected with the six-chamber gate, there was also a lower wall or rampart encircling the site part way down the slope, probably built on a natural promontory. Five, and possibly six, Proto-Ionic capitals have been

The small village of Ummal-Biyarasits atop this plateau that towers over the remainsof the latercity of Petra.Whythe Edomite settlement landscapeextended to such inaccessibleheights is not clear,unlessthe sites were designed to providehavensduringtimes of attack. Photographcourtesyof the author.

located in ancient Moab. Four are known at Mudaybiya, an imposing fortress site east of Kerakbordering the desert. New excavations there by the Kerak Resources Projecthave probably unearthed another one, but it is still lying upside down. The capitals are associated with very large ashlar stones used for lintels and pillars, making the gateway at this site one of the most monumental in all of Iron II Palestine. Just why such a monumental royal construction was located this far away from other major centers will be discussed for a long time. Another capitalwas found recentlyin a restaurant wall at a spring immediately below Kerak (Knauf 1985). A few (under twenty) Moabiteseals from this time, whose owners carrythe theophoric element Kemosh in their names, indicate that at least some organized entity of Moab existed. In fact, one seal refers to its owner as a mazkiror official "recorder",probablyof the government (Israel1987).Moabite writing was similar to Hebrew but with largerheads on some letters and a squatter look overall. A beautifully preserved papyrus contains a short inscriptionin Moabitewriting which refersto a marzeah (Bordreuiland Pardee 1990),usually interpreted to be a funerary feast such as the one described in Amos 6:4-7 (King 1988:137-61). Some scholars doubt the authenticity of the document, however, because is was purchased on the antiquities market and is in remarkably good shape for an ancient document. The Moabitelanguage was very closely relatedto Hebrew, except for a few differences,such as -in for the masculineplural ending instead of Hebrew -m (Jackson 1983:108).The best inscription for Moabite is the Mesha Stele which is dated to IronIIB;it is virtually identicalto what remains of the Hebrew of that period. In Iron IIC it is possible that there may have been, like Ammonite, more influences from Arabic. Edom GeographicalExtent. If Moab was in decline during Iron IIC, the opposite was true for Edom. Almost all Iron Age

remains in Edom date to this period. The Edomites were also expanding to the west, taking over large parts of the southern Negev from Judah so that their northern border seems to have been just south of the Beersheba-Arad area, perhaps as far as cUza near the end of the period. The Arad ostraca mention Edom and seem to imply the need for mercenaries, suggesting conflict with Judah in that area. At Negev sites such as Aroer III-II,Malhata C Late, and Qitmit, pottery and inscriptions both suggest a significant Edomite element (though Mallata has also produced a Hebrew ostracon [Beit-Arieh 1995b]). That the Edomites took over this area at the begrudging expense of Judah seems apparent from the railings of the biblical prophets, who could see no good in Edom (e.g., Jer 49:7-22), and from the presence of Judean fortresses in the Negev that seem to confront the Edomite centers.Otherscholarsinterpretthe Edomiteremains as simply the product of Edomite population groups living in these areas. However, this view does not account for the Judean fortresses nor for the suggestion of military activity in the Arad ostraca and the Bible. SettlementPatterns.The core territoryof Edom, however, was in Transjordan,southeast of the Dead Sea around the capital city of Bozrah (Buseirah) situated on a ridge with a stunning view overlooking deep wadis. Bozrah offers the only majorpublic architecturalremains so far found in Edom, except for the fortresses at Kheleifeh and Hazeva 5-4 (if the latter was Edomite). Small towns include Tawilan, Aroer (Negev) III-II,and possibly Malhata C Late. There were also several small settlements in out-of-the-way locations high on rugged mountain tops, such as Umm el-Biyara in Petra and others located by surveys but not yet excavated (Lindner 1992). The difficult access to these "acro-sites"reminds one of the rocky fastnesses with which the biblicaltexts sometimes connect Edom (2 Chr 25:12).Indeed, one term used for a territoryor site in their region, Selac,means "rock."Because these mountain-top sites consisted of residences and not fortresses, they present a problem of interpretation. Why were they inhabited?Wereconditions so bad that people simply moved there to live? How could they support themselves 300 meters above the floor of (later)Petra at Umm el-Biyara? Were these sites constructed much like the ghorfas of the Berbers in North Africa as places of retreat during military invasions or raids? In fact the small rooms, low doors, and lack of streets at Umm el-Biyara remind one of the Lilliputian featuresof the ghorfas,although they are not multi-storied like the Berberstructures.Perhaps the Edomites were preparing themselves for possible attacks from the region's Arab tribes which the Assyrian and Babylonian texts mention. SubsistencePatterns.The Transjordanianportion of Edom was located in a narrow strip of cultivable land where dry farming could occur in the highlands east of the WadiArabah which reach over 1500 meters in altitude. Outside this strip where the climaticconditions are that of a semi-desert at best, subsistence demanded a strong element of nomadic pastoralism that was either incorporated into Edom or allied with it. There could be limited agriculture in valley bottoms BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

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where dams could retain rain runoff, allowing it to soak into the ground. This difficult climate probably inhibited Edomite sedentarism in the earlier parts of the Iron Age even though we find the Edomitesmentionedby name on Egyptianinscriptions of the Late Bronze Age. It may be the Edomite ability to eke out a living in these marginal zones which allowed them to move into the Judean Negev. However, except for Bozrah, Edomite material culture does not reflect a highly prosperous subsistence. A significant part of the population was forced to remain nomadic even in the best of situations. This nomadic element could be a blessing and a curse for those attempting to settle down. Only under Assyrian control did settlement prosper. UrbanPlans.Becauseof the idiosyncraticnatureof Edomite sites, it is difficult to draw a good picture of a typical Edomite urban plan. Bozrah was the capital, but very little is known of residential areas. Not enough has been excavated at Tawilan, Aroer, and Malhata C Late to understand their plans during this period. Kheleifeh and Hazeva were trade and military fortresses, and Qitmit was a religious site without noteworthy residences. A solid city wall surrounded Bozrah,with a simple opening in the wall two meterswide for a gate (probablya postern). Two phases of a largebuilding, possibly a temple in the Assyrian style, occupied the middle of the site. A portion of another public building-possibly an Assyrian style palace-was excavated to the south of the possible temple. Some even suggest the Assyrians may have constructed the buildings for themselves, but there is little other evidence for a dominant physical Assyrian presence. If some of the Edomites were in the process of settling down during this period of Assyrian patronage, it is possible they used Assyrian ideas for their structures or that the Assyrians helped them build. Residential areas probably surrounded the monumental buildings. Whatever the specific interpretationof the major buildings, the plan and contents of Bozrah certainly suggest a capital city. The residential towns of Tawilan, Aroer III-II,and Malhata C Late confirm the low level of urban activity in Edom mentioned above. Tawilan was unwalled, but excavations were too limited to gain a good picture. No streets are visible in the plans, leaving one with the impression of a warren of walls and rooms. Aroer III-IIwas also unfortified, but a tower seems to have been constructed to protect the site in the last phase. Although it is difficult to tell from the meager publications, Malhata C Late seems to have been walled. The acro-siteof Umm el-Biyaraat Petra also reminds one of a warren. The excavations were fairly wide-spread, but no streets were found. The plan of the fortress at Kheleifeh is clear during three phases (Pratico1993).In the earliest phase a large structure was surrounded by an inset-offsetwall, while in the later periods a new, thickerwall encompassed the structureand a large area probably included a few residences. The fortress at Hazeva 5 rebuiltthe same structuresof the IronIIAfortress with its casemate wall but along smaller lines. The Edomite 174

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t'25

0

m

25

Recent reexaminationof Glueck'sexcavation resultshas clarifiedthe stratigraphyand plan of Kheleifeh,a fortressstationed just northof the tip of the Gulfof Aqaba/Elat.The IronIICfortressboasted an offset-inset wall that encompassedan earliercasemate structure.The position of the fortressmakes its associationwith trade inescapable. Thus,its centralbuidlingmay have servedas a secure depot for goods in transit.Planadapted from Pratico1993.

identification of this fortress rests primarily on the discovery of a shrine outside the walls with Edomite pottery and statuary and an Edomite seal inside the fortress. Architecture.The possible palace at Bozrah has a plan much like Assyrian buildings, with large open courts surrounded by rooms (though much of the building lies below a modem school and cannot be excavated). The thickness of the walls and the size of the rooms suggest the structure was a very important one. The more completely excavated public structure in the middle of the site may have been a temple. After entering a courtyard,one could turn to the right and walk up a series of broad stairs and enter a long room which may have been the cella. Two stone bases flanked the entrance at the top of the stairs where they may have supported columns or statues. Because of the presence of pottery statuary at Edomite shrines at Qitmit and Hazeva 5, the latter suggestion may be correct, although no statuary has been found at Bozrah, as far as I know. Other rooms flanked the central structure in this monumental compound. The open-air shrine at Qitmit comprised several buildings, including a rectangular one with three more-orless equal rooms; a platform, a basin and altar enclosed by a small wall; and another building interpretedas a residence.

o0m 50

-3II

Borzahis the most well known archaeologicallyof the Edomite settlements. Itsplan, which possiblyincludesa palace and a temple, impliesthe city'scapital status.The architecturebetraysmuch Assyrianinfluence, reflectiveof the era of pax assyriacaduringwhich Edombecame a recognizableand effective polity.Planadapted from NEAEHL 1:264.

The statuaryand ceramicvessels fromthis site aretrulyremarkable (see below). The central building in the fortress at Kheleifeh was a large version of a four-room house; while no central structure has yet been found at Hazeva 5. Perhaps the casemate rooms of the latter site were used as storerooms. When the city walls existed, they tended to be solid, such as the offsetinset wall at Bozrah;those of fortresses could be casemate or solid (offset-inset). Towers were built at Aroer and Hazeva 4 as part of the fortress.Too few complete common residences have been excavated at Edomite sites to be certain if there was a typical Edomite house plan or not. It is also difficult to separate one house from its neighbor. Several houses at Tawilan had pillars. One feature of houses in Edom appears to be their close connection to neighboring buildings. The warren-like nature of their residences at Tawilan and Umm el-Biyara may reflect a lack of privacy or an intense awareness of kinship. A few door lintels were preserved at Umm el-Biyara;their low height of about 1.3-1.5meters probably indicates economy or a temporary/emergency type of settlement rather than short stature of the people. Technology.Edomite architectureat Bozrah lacked ashlar masonry for the most part. Rather,their structureswere characterized by how they adapted the available resources to their construction styles. Mudbrick was used at Kheleifeh, where stone would have had to be brought from several kilometers away; flat slabs of stone were used at Umm el-Biyara because they were ready at hand; rough field stones were used at Qitmit. Edomite painted pottery, characterized by multi-colored bands and geometric patterns, is distinctive and easily recognizable. Even the unpainted pottery such as jugs and cooking pots can be clearly identified as Edomite. Another

aspect of Iron II pottery in the southern reaches of Transjordanand the Negev is called Negev ware. It was handmade and is found from southern Transjordan to Sinai. But ratherthan identifying II it with Edomites, it should more propwith the erly be identified of pastoral-nomadic lifestyle the desert people; it could have been made by any group living in the area. Trade.The Edomite fortresses of Kheleifeh and Hazeva 5-4 were clearly connected with trade. Kheleifeh, situated at the tip of the Gulf of Aqaba had access to shipping on the Red Sea. Although it is presently situated about half a kilometer from the coast, in antiquity the coastline was farther inland. Its main building was probably a well fortified storehouse or emporium for receiving and sending shipped goods. Hazeva 5-4 was located most of the way up the Wadi Arabah at a junction of the north-south road in the Arabah and an east-west road leading from the Kings' Highway via the Wadi Hasa and northern Edom to Aroer (Negev), Beersheba,and Gaza or into the southern highlands of Judah. This was an important strategic site for Edomite control of their Negev sites confronting Judah: Aroer and Malhata. These last sites also contained pottery and other finds that could be related to Judah, and their attribution to Edom is somewhat tenuous. If the sites were Edomite, these finds must have been the result of trade with (or perhaps even booty from) Judah. The upper fortress of Kadesh-Barnea may also have been Edomite, securing its western flank. This attribution could have easily arrived on some Edomite pottery found there, but it is perhaps more likely that it got there by trade. Holding these sites would have secured in Edomite hands the Arabian caravan trade from southern Transjordan almost to Gaza. Other groups interested in this trade would have been Judah, Philistia,and Arab tribes. The threats from these groups may have made Edom especially aware of security needs. Writing.Edomite script is characterized by a syncretistic use of some letters in a Hebrew style and others in an Aramaic style. Many of the names in this scriptuse the theophoric element Qaus (or Q6s), the Edomite deity known from the Bible. Several seals have been found in both Transjordanand the Negev, and ostracawere found at Kheleifeh, Bozrah, and CUza.The ostracon at this last site is of interest because it was found at a site that otherwise belonged to Judah (twenty-six other ostraca were in Hebrew script). The ostracon contains a blessing in the name of Qaus and appears to have been written to the Edomite commander of the fortress. The excavatorsreasonablythinkcUza had been capturedby Edom (Beit Arieh and Cresson 1985:97). The Edomite language, based on inscriptions virtually all coming from Iron IIC,is closely related to Hebrew within the "Canaanite" family of Northwest Semitic. Indeed, one BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

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scholar has recently stated that there are no features which would suggest Edomite was an independent dialect from Hebrew (Vanderhooft 1995). Religionand Art. Because of the sensational finds at Qitmit and, more recently, Hazeva 5-4, we can now say more about the iconography and visual aspects of Edomite religion than any other group among the nations of the southern Levant. The religion of their national deity, Qaus (or Q6s), was probablyvery much like that of Yahwehin Judah,Milkom in Ammon, and Kemosh in Moab. If he was the one depicted on the statues found at Qitmit (his name figures prominently in the inscriptions found there; Beit-Arieh 1995a), Hazeva, and Malhata(Beit-Arieh1995b),he had a barrel-chest(because the statues were made from inverted storage jars!),a beard and mustache, and was dressed in a pointed headdress and possibly a fringed garment. Alternatively, the statues could depict priests or other votive functionaries. The three rooms of the rectangular structure at Qitmit suggest a triad of deities, including no doubt the goddess Asherah (or Astarte) whose figurines were found at Aroer and Qitmit. Other figurines at Qitmit could represent the third god. Among the animal figurines from Qitmit was a stunning example of a cherub, or sphinx, leading one to suggest a similarity to the Jerusalem cult of Yahweh whose primary iconography was the cherub (a guardian composite beast). WaterSystems.Waterwas always a problem in Edom. Its relative scarcitydid not allow the Edomites to reachthe same prosperity as their northernneighbors, and it limited the rate at which they could sedentarize. Springs could be found in the low valleys, but the residents of the acro-sites depended completely on cisterns. Indeed, the name Umm el-Biyara means "Mother of Cisterns."

Conclusions and Generalizations During the Iron II period the southern Levant was made up of small regional polities, several of which, as individual entities, were new to history (Dever 1994b:413). They probably grew out of tribal alliances or confederations that gradually coalesced during the Late Bronze and Iron I Ages. The material culture of Palestine exhibits a gradual growth in the self-awarenessof these small nations as they jockeyed for control of as much territoryas they could claim. By the seventh century BCE,near the end of the period, there is a clear demarcation in certain aspects of the material culture along these territorial lines, including pottery, writing, language, art, and religion. These features, seen as a whole, can be used in general ways to identify the nationality of the people. A true urbanism developed during Iron II from rather primitive agriculturalroots in Iron I, with the gradual development of specialized economies and majorcities organized in a hierarchical system (also called "rank-size hierarchy"), in which major urban centers were surrounded by towns which were, in turn, surrounded by villages and farmsteads. Agricultural goods produced in rural areas were traded up the hierarchy and processed goods were traded down. All 176

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ranks of the hierarchy were needed to support each other. The control of this system was in the hands of an elite class living in royal and other major centers. At the close of the Iron Age, which we have suggested should be dated to the middle to late sixth century BCE,most of the national groups we have discussed here were intact, although parts of some, such as Judah, were scattered in the larger Near East. The new era of empires, especially under the Persians,fostered a sense of internationalismwhich gradually abated the sense of nationalism for out groups, so that, by the Hellenistic and Roman periods, only the Jews and, perhaps,the Ammonites(whose territorywas called"Ammonitis" by the Romans; Hilbner 1992) remained. It is possible the Edomites were partially absorbed by the Nabateans and, although we never hear of them again, the Philistines gave their name to "Palestine." The best use of biblical archaeology is to treat excavation results as an independent source of knowledge which we can use together with the Bible to understand the biblical period as-awhole. This articlehas been an attempt to do that by marching through space and time to view the biblical world primarily from an archaeological point of view, but also with an eye to help us understand the world of the Bible better.

Acknowledgments A preliminary draft of this paper was read by my colleagues Walter Aufrecht and Gloria London. Their many suggestions and counsels are greatly appreciated.I also wish to thank the Trusteesof the Albright Institute for appointing me Annual Professor there during 1993-4.The Albright field trips helped me understand the Iron II Period. Thanks also go to the Dorot Foundation for supporting my stay there and to the Albright's director, Sy Gitin.

Abbreviations AASOR: Annual of the American Schoolsof Oriental Research ABD: Anchor Bible Dictionary ACOR: AmericanCenterof Oriental Research ADAJ: Annual of the Departmentof Antiquities of Jordan ASOR: American Schoolsof Oriental Research BA: BiblicalArchaeologist BAR: BiblicalArchaeologyReview BASOR: Bulletin of the American Schoolsof Oriental Research BR: BibleReview El: Eretz-Israel ESI: Excavationsand Surveys in Israel IEJ:Israel ExplorationJournal JNES:Journalof Near EasternStudies JSOT:Journalfor the Study of the Old Testament NEAEHL: The New EncyclopediaofArchaeological Excavations in the Holy Land OEANE: OxfordEncyclopediaof Archaeologyin the Near East PEQ: Palestine ExplorationQuarterly RB: Revue Biblique SJOT:ScandanavianJournalof the Old Testament

TA:TelAviv VTSup: Vetus Testamentum,Supplements ZDPV: Zeitschriftdes Deutschen Pali'stina-Vereins

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1991 Archaeological Surveyof theKerakPlateau.Atlanta:ASOR. Miller, J. M. and Hayes, J. H. 1986 A History of Ancient Israeland Judah.Philadelphia: Westminster. Miller, P. D., Hanson, P. D., and McBride, S. D., eds. 1987 Ancient IsraeliteReligion. Philadelphia: Fortress. Mommsen, H, Perlman, I, and Yellin, J. 1984 The Provenience of the ImlkJars. IEJ34:89-113. Moscati, S. 1968 The Worldof the Phoenicians. Translated by A. Hamilton. New York: Praeger. Moscati, S. et al.

1969 An Introductionto the ComparativeGrammarof SemiticLanguages. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowotz. 1988 The Phoenicians.New York:Abbeville. Muhly, J. D. 1985 Phoenicia and the Phoenicians. Pp. 177-91 in BiblicalArchaeology Today,edited by J. Aviram et al. Jerusalem: IES.

Nalaman, N. 1986 Hezekiah's Fortified Cities and the LMLKStamp. BASOR 261:524. 1991 The Kingdom of Judah under Josiah. TA 18:3-71. 1992 Israel, Edom and Egypt in the 10th Century B.C.E. TA 19:7193. 1993 Population Changes in Palestine Following Assyrian Deportations. TA 20:104-24. 1994 Hezekiah and the Kings of Assyria. TA 21:235-54. Nakhai, B. A. 1994 What's a Bamah? How Sacred Space Functioned in Ancient Israel. BAR 20.3:18-29. Naveh, J.

1982 EarlyHistoryof theAlphabet. Leiden:E.J. Brill. 1985 Writing and Scripts in Seventh-Century B.C.E.Philistia:The New Evidence from Tell Jemmeh. IEJ35:8-21. Noth, M. 1960 TheHistory of Israel. New York:Harper & Row. Oded, B. 1970 Observation on Methods of Assyrian Rule in Transjordaniaafter the Palestinian Campaign of Tiglath-Pileser III. JNES 29:17786. Olivarri-Goicoechea, E. 1993 Aroer (in Moab). NEAEHL, edited by E. Stern. Jerusalem: IES. Olyan, S.

1988 AsherahandtheCultof Yahweh in Israel.Atlanta:Scholars. Ottoson, A.

1980 Temples andCultPlacesin Palestine.Uppsala. Ottosson, M. 1993 The Iron Age of Northern Jordan. Pp. 90-103 in History and Tra-

ditionsof EarlyIsrael:StudiesPresentedto EduardNielsen,edited

by A. Lemaire and B. Otzen. Leiden: E. J. Brill. S. and Paul, Dever, W. G. 1973 BiblicalArchaeology.Jerusalem: Keter. Peckham, J. B.

1968 TheDevelopment of theLatePhoenicianScripts.Cambridge:Harvard University. 1972 The Nora Inscription. Orientalia41:52-72. Pederson, J. 1926-40 Israel:Its Lifeand Culture. Copenhagen: P. Branner. Perrot, G. and Chipiez, D.

1985 Historyof Art in PhoeniciaandIts Dependencies. London:Chapman and Hall. Platt, E. E. 1979 Jewelry of Bible Times and the Catalogue of Isa 3:18-23.Andrews

UniversitySeminaryStudies17:71-84,189-202. Prag, K. 1987 Decorative Architecture in Ammon, Moab and Judah. Levant 19:121-28. Pratico, G. D.

1993 NelsonGlueck's1938-1940Excavations at Tellel-Kheleifeh: A Reappraisal.Atlanta: ASOR. Pritchard, J. B. 1962 Gibeon. Wherethe Sun Stood Still. Princeton: Princeton University. 1970 The Megiddo Stables: A Reassessment. Pp. 268-76 in Near East-

ernArchaeology in theTwentieth Century,edited by J.A. Sanders. Garden City: Doubleday. Pritchard, J. B., ed.

1969 AncientNearEasternTextsRelatingto theOldTestament. 3rdedition with supplement. Princeton: Princeton University. Rainey, A. F 1983 The Biblical Shephelah of Judah. BASOR 251:1-22.

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1994 Hezekiah's Reform and the Altars at Beer-sheba and Arad. Pp. 333-54 in Scriptureand Other Artifacts, edited by M. D. Coogan, J. C. Exum, and L. E. Stager. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Rast, W. E.

1992 ThroughTheAgesin PalestinianArchaeology. Philadelphia:Trinity Press International. 1994 Priestly Families and the Cultic Structure at Taanach. Pp. 355-65 in Scripture and Other Artifacts, edited by M. D. Coogan, J. C. Exum, and L. E. Stager. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Redford, D. B. 1985 The Relations between Egypt and Israel from El-Amarna to the Babylonian Conquest. Pp. 192-205 in Biblical Archaeology Today.Jerusalem: IES. Riklin, S. 1994 Bet Arye. ESI12:39. Ritmeyer, L. 1996 The Ark of the Covenant: Where It Stood in Solomon's Temple. BAR 22.1:46-55. Routledge, C. 1995 Pillared Buildings in Iron Age Moab. BA 58.4: 236. Sass, B. 1990 Arabs and Greeks in Late First Temple Jerusalem. PEQ 122:5961. Sauer, J. A. 1985 Ammon, Moab and Edom. Pp. 206-214 in Biblical Archaeology Today.Jerusalem: IES. 1986 Transjordanin the Bronze and Iron Ages: A Critique of Glueck's Synthesis. BASOR 263:1-26. 1994 A New Climatic and Archaeological View of the Early Biblical Traditions. Pp. 366-398 in Scriptureand OtherArtifacts,edited by M. D. Coogan, J. C. Exum, and L. E. Stager. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Sawyer, J. F A. and Clines, D. J. A., eds. 1983 Midian, Moab and Edom.JSOT Series 24. Sheffield: JSOT. Schniedewind, W. M. 1996 Tel Dan Stela: New Light on Aramaic and Jehu's Revolt. BASOR 302:75-90. H. Shanks, 1985 Ancient Ivory-The Story of Wealth, Decadence and Beauty. BAR 11.5:40-53. 1995 Is This King David's Tomb? BAR 21.1:62-67. Shiloh, Y. 1970 The Four-Room House: Its Situation and Function in the Israelite City. IEJ20:180-90. 1978 Elements in the Development of Town Planning in the Israelite City. IEJ28:36-51.

1979a TheProto-Aeolic CapitalandIsraeliteAshlarMasonry.Qedem 11.

Jerusalem: The Hebrew University. 1979b Iron Age Sanctuaries and Cult Elements in Palestine. Pp. 147-58

in Symposia theSeventy-Fifth Anniversary oftheFoundCelebrating ing of theAmericanSchoolsof OrientalResearch,edited by F.M. Cross. Cambridge, MA: ASOR. 1980 The Population of Iron Age Palestine in the Light of a Sample Analysis of Urban Plans, Areas, and Population Density. BASOR 239:25-35. 1987a South Arabian Inscriptions from the City of David, Jerusalem. PEQ 119:9-18. 1987b The Casemate Wall, the Four Room House, and Early Planning in the Israelite City. BASOR 268:3-16. Shiloh, Y. and Tarler,D. 1986 Bullae from the City of David: A Hoard of Seal Impressions from the Israelite Period. BA 49:196-209. Silberman, N. A. 1980 In Search of Solomon's Lost Treasures. BAR 6.4:30-41.

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Silver, M. 1983 Prophetsand Markets.Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff. Smith, M. S.

1990 TheEarlyHistoryof God:Yahweh andtheOtherDeitiesin Ancient Israel. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Soggin, J. A.

1985 A HistoryofAncientIsraelfrom theBeginningsto theBarKochba Revolt. Philadelphia: Westminster.

Stager, L. E. 1976 Farmingin the JudeanDesert during the IronAge. BASOR221:14558. 1985 The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel. BASOR 260:1-36. 1990 Shemer's Estate. BASOR 277/278:93-108. Stager, L. E. and Wolff, S. R. 1981 Production and Commerce in Temple Courtyards:An Olive Press in the Sacred Precinct at Tel Dan. BASOR 243:95-102. Stern, E. 1975 Israel at the Close of the Period of the Monarchy: An Archaeological Survey. BA 38:26-54. 1976 Phoenician Masks and Pendants. PEQ 108:109-118. 1990a New Evidence from Dor for the First Appearance of the Phoenicians Along the Northern Coast of Israel. BASOR 279:27-34. 1990b Hazor, Dor and Megiddo in the Time of Ahab and under Assyrian Rule. IEJ40:12-30. 1994a Dor, Ruler of the Seas. Jerusalem: IES. 1994b The Eastern Border of the Kingdom of Judah in Its Last Days. Pp. 399-409 in Scripture and Other Artifacts, editedd by M. D. Coogan, J. C. Exum, and L. E. Stager. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. 1995 Tel Dor-1992/1993. ESI 14:61-71. Stieglitz, R. R. 1984 Long-Distance Seafaring in the Ancient Near East. BA 47:134-42. Stone, B. J. 1995 The Philistines and Acculturation: Culture Change and Ethnic Continuity in the Iron Age. BASOR 298:7-32. Tappy, R.

1992 TheArchaeology ofIsraeliteSamaria. Alpharetta,Ga. 1995 Did the Dead Ever Die in Biblical Judah? BASOR 298:59-68.

Taylor, J. G.

1990 YahwehandtheSun:BiblicalandArchaeological Evidence for Sun Worshipin Ancient Israel.JSOT Series, 111. Sheffield: JSOT. Thiele, E. R.

1951 TheMysterious NumbersoftheHebrewKings.GrandRapids:Eerdmans. Thompson, H. 0. and Zayadine, F 1973 The Tell Siran Inscription. BASOR 212:5-12. Thompson, T. L.

1992 EarlyHistoryof theIsraelitePeoplefromthe WrittenandArcheologicalSources.Leiden:E.J.Brill. 1995a "House of David": An Eponymic Referent to Yahweh as Godfather. SJOT9:59-74. 1995b Dissonance and Disconnections: Notes on the bytdwd and hmlk.hdd Fragments from Tel Dan. SJOT9:236-40. Tigay, J. H.

in theLightofHebrew 1986 YouShallHaveNo OtherGods:Israelite Religion Inscriptions.Atlanta: Scholars. Ussishkin, D. 1973 King Solomon's Palaces. BA 36:78-105. 1976 Royal Judean Storage Jars and Private Seal Impressions. BASOR 223:1-14.

1977 The Destructionof Lachishby Sennacheriband the Dating of the RoyalJudeanStorageJars.TA4:28-60. 1980 The 'LachishReliefs'and the City of Lachish.IEJ30:174-95. 1982 TheConquest TelAviv:Instituteof ArchaeofLachish bySennacherib. ology,TelAviv University. 1988 The Date of the JudaeanShrineat Arad.IEJ38:142-57. 1990 Notes on Megiddo, Gezer, Ashdod, and Tel Batash in the Tenthto Ninth CenturiesB.C.BASOR277/278:71-92. 1993 TheVillageof Silwan,TheNecropolis fromthePeriodof theJudean Jerusalem:IES. Kingdom. UssishkinD. and Woodhead,J. 1994 Excavationsat TelJezreel1992-1993: SecondPreliminaryReport. Levant26:1-48. VanBeck,G. W.and Jamme,A. 1958 An InscribedSouth ArabianClay Stampfrom Bethel.BASOR 151:9-16. Vance,D. R. 1994a PhoenicianInscriptions.BA57:2-19. 1994b The PhoenicianInscriptions,PartTwo.BA57:110-20. Vanderhooft,D. S. 1995 TheEdomiteDialectand Script:A Reviewof Evidence.Pp. 13758 in YouShallnotAbhoran Edomite,edited by D. V. Edelman. Atlanta:Scholars. Vander Toorn,K. 1994 FromHer Cradleto Her Grave:TheRoleof Religionin theLifeof Woman.Translatedby SaraJ.DentheIsraeliteandtheBabylonian nery-Bolle.Sheffield:JSOT. VanSeters,J. in theAncientWorld 1983 In SearchofHistory:HistoryandHistoriography andtheOriginsof BiblicalHistory.Leiden:E. J.Brill. Vaux,R. de 1961 AncientIsrael:Its LifeandInstitutions.New York:McGraw-Hill. Weippert,H. Zeit.Munich:Beck. 1988 Paldstinain vorhellenistischer Wilkinson,T.J. 1982 The Definitionof AncientManuredZones by Meansof Extensive Sherd-SamplingTechniques.Journalof FieldArchaeology 9:313-22. Williamson,H. G. M. 1991 Jezreelin the BiblicalTexts.TA18:72-92. 1996 TelJezreeland the Dynasty of Omri.PEQ128:41-51. Wood,B. G. 1990 TheSociologyofPotteryin AncientPalestine.Sheffield:JSOT. Worschech,U. and Ninow, E 1994 PreliminaryReporton the ThirdCampaignat the AncientSite of el-Balucin 1991.ADAJ38:195-203. Wright,G. E. 1961 The Archaeology of Palestine. Pp. 85-139in TheBibleand the AncientNearEast,editedby G.E. Wright.New York:Doubleday. Yadin,Y. 1958 Solomon'sCity Walland Gateat Gezer.IEJ8:80-86. 1969 An InscribedSouth-ArabianClay StampfromBethel?BASOR 196:37-45. 1970 Megiddo of the Kingsof Israel.BA33:66-96. 1972 Hazor.London:OxfordUniversity. Yamauchi,E. 1983 The Scythians:InvadingHordesfrom the RussianSteppes.BA 46:90-100. Yassine,K. A. Amman:Universityof Jordan. 1984 Tellel MazarI: Cemetery

1988 TheArchaeology Amman:University ofJordan: EssaysandReports. of Jordan. Younker,R. 1985 Israel,Judah,andAmmonandthe Motifson the BaalisSealfrom Tellel-cUmeiri.BA48:173-83. 1991 ArchitecturalRemainsfrom the HinterlandSurvey.Pp. 335-41 in MadabaPlainsProject2, edited by L. G. Herr,et al. Berrien Springs,MI:AndrewsUniversity. Zayadine,E, Humbert,J.-B.,and Najjar,M. 1989 The 1988Excavationson the Citadelof Amman,LowerTerrace, AreaA. ADAJ33:357-63. Zertal,A. 1995 ThreeIronAge Fortressesin theJordanValleyand the Originof the AmmoniteCircularTowers.IEJ45:253-73. Zevit,Z. nd TheReligionsofAncientIsrael:A SynthesisofParallactic Approaches. In press. Zimhoni,O. 1985 TheIronAge Potteryof TellCEton andItsRelationto the Lachish, TellBeitMirsimand AradAssemblages.TA12:63-90. Zorn,J.R. 1994 Estimatingthe PopulationSize of Ancient Settlements:Methods, Problems,Solutions,and a Case Study.BASOR295:31-48.

Professor LarryG. Herr received his Ph.D. in Near EasternLanguages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1977. He has taught for over a decade in the Department of Religious Studies at Canadian University College, Alberta. Dr. Herr has received numerous awards for his teaching and scholarship,most recently a White-Levy Research Grantfor Archaeological Publication.In 1993-94,he held the prestigious appointment as the Annual Professorof the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research.He currentlyserves as Associate Editor of BASORas well as President of the American Schools of OrientalResearch in Canada. Herr's excavation experience stretchesback to 1971 and includes work at Hesban, Gezer, Hesi, and Carthage.He was directorand principal investigator of the Amman Airport excavations and directs the on-going excavation of TallalCUmayrias part of the Madaba Plains Project.The editor and author of many articles and books, his most recent volumes include PublishedPotteryof Palestine(Atlanta:ASOR, 1996) and MadabaPlainsProject3: The1989 Seasonat Tellel-'Umeiriand Vicinityand SubsequentStudies(BerrienSprings, MI:Andrews University,Institute of Archaeology).

BiblicalArchaeologist60:3 (1997)

183

Arti-Facts A

Rejoinder

to

the

"Was

In an article entitled "Was the Siloam Tunnel Built by Hezekiah?" published in the September 1996issue of BA,John Rogerson and Philip Davies argue that the Siloam Tunneland its accompanying inscriptiondo not date to the time of Hezekiah in the eighth century BCE.They base their argument on three sets of evidence: the history of the Gihon water systems and the line of the city walls; biblical referencesto the Gihon water systems; and the genre and paleography of the Siloaminscription.In a rejoindersolicited by BA and published in the December 1996 issue, Ronald S. Hendel demonstrates that Rogerson and Davies' paleographic arguments are deeply flawed. Rogerson and Davies' historic arguments that the Siloam Tunnel cannot date to the time of Hezekiah because the Siloam Pool lay outside the bounds of the fortified city during the Iron Age II and because as long as Warren'sShaft lay inside the bounds of the fortified city Jerusalemdid not need an additional strategic water supply system, are equally flawed and equally deserve a rejoinder. In support of their argument that the Siloam Pool lay outside the bounds of the fortified city during the Iron Age II, Rogerson and Davies assert that Kenyon's "excavations on the south-eastern slope of the western hill yielded no Iron II relics," and that "Shiloh's...excavationswere unable to provide any either" (1996:141). These assertions not only misrepresent but actually misstate the evidence because, contrary to Rogerson and Davies' assertions, Kenyon found remains dating to the Iron Age II on the southeastern slope of the western hill and in the lower reaches of the Tyropoeon Valley, and Shiloh found remains dating to the Iron Age II on the southeastern slope of the western hill. Following each of her first four seasons of excavation, Kenyon published accounts of finding IronAge IImaterialon the bedrock in Site F-located at the southeastern corner of the western hill (1962:84-85;1963:19; 1964:11;1965:16-17,fig. 2). Moreover, at the

Siloam

Tunnel

Built

mouth of the TyropoeonValley,Kenyon discovered IronAge II deposits extending over 1.25m in depth, covering a network of partly rock-hewn and partly stone-built plasterlined tunnels (1965:16).Because these Iron Age II deposits lay directly atop quarried bedrock and because she did not find architectural remains other than the network of tunnels associated with them, Kenyon concluded that these Iron Age II deposits did not evidence a fortified settlement on the western hill (1974:93, 146, fig. 26, 158). Like Kenyon, Shiloh found Iron Age II material deposited above bedrock on the southeasternslope of the western hill in Area H-the only area that he excavated on the western hill (DeGrootand Michaeli 1992:35, 49, fig. 27, 51). Due, however, to the nature of archaeologicalaccumulationin Jerusalem, where builders of all periods sought to found their structures on bedrock and in so doing often damaged and/or destroyed remains of earlier periods, Shiloh rejected Kenyon's conclusion and accepted the sparse-but of the incontestably present-remains Iron Age II as evidence that the western hill was both occupied and fortified at that time (1984:25,72, fig. 34). Rogerson and Davies argue that the Siloam Tunnel was not needed as a strategic water supply system as long as Warren's Shaft lay inside the bounds of the fortified city because "it seems...rather excessive to assign both Warren'sShaftand Hezekiah's TunneltoJudeankings.Afterall, if in Hezekiah's time there already existed a perfectly safe watersupply...why would he need to build another one, especially one which went underneath the city and came out the other side?" (1996:142,italics in original). The answer to their query lies in the nature of the Gihon which is a syphon-type karstspring, fed by groundwaterthatgushed intermittentlythrough cracksin a cave floor (Gil 1994:27;Simons 1952:163).Because the frequency and force of the Gihon's outflow varied with the season of the year and the annual precipitation,its waters could not be

6O. rchaeolagist

by

Hezekiah?"

used efficiently unless they could be captured,stored,and distributed.WhileWarren's Shaft provided access to the waters of the Gihon as they gushed forth and flowed into its feeder channel, it provided no means of using the Gihon's excess waters. Both the Siloam Channel and the Siloam Tunnelwere designed to capture, store, and distribute the excess waters of the Gihon. Because the earliest of these two systems-the Siloam Channel-was a partly open, partly closed channel that ran outside the line of the city's fortificationwall, it served no strategicfunction and, as assertedby Rogersonand Davies, it is "unlikely to have been constructed [or used] in times when there was even a threat of war" (1996:138).However, once the threat of war arose,therealso arosethe urgentneed to constructa strategicwater supply system designed to capture, store, distribute, and conceal the excess waters of the Gihon. The Siloam Tunnel answered this need. Rogerson and Davies' arguments concerningthe historyof the Gihonwatersystems and the line of the city walls bespeak their unfamiliaritywith the archaeologicalrecord, the nature of archaeological accumulation in Jerusalem,and the natural characteristics of the Gihon spring that spawned the need for the city's three subterraneanwater supply systems. Finally,BA'sreadersshould know that-although not generally available prior to Rogerson and Davies' publication-the most recent evidence supporting the Siloam Tunnel'straditionaldate comes from a stalactite removed from its ceiling which produced a radiocarbondate calibrated to the eighth century BCE(Gil 1996:22).

Bibliography DeGroot, A. and Michaeli, D. 1992 Area H: Stratigraphic Report. Pp. 35-53in Stratigraphical, Environmental, and Other Reports,edited by D. T. Ariel and A. DeGroot. Excavations at the City of David 1978-1985:

ts-

rrI

~

Directed by Yigal Shiloh, vol. 3. Qedem 33. Jerusalem: Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University. Gil, D. 1994 How They Met:Geology Solves the Mystery of Hezekiah's Tunnelers. BiblicalArchaeologyReview20 (4):2033, 64. 1996 The Geology of the City of David and its Ancient SubterraneanWaterworks. Pp. 1-28 in VariousReports, edited by D. T. Ariel and A. DeGroot.Excavationsat the City of David 1978-1985:Directed by YigalShiloh, vol. 4. Qedem 35. Jerusalem: Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University.

Spirit

Hendel, R. S. 1996 The Date of the Siloam Inscription: A Rejoinder to Rogerson and Davies. BiblicalArchaeologist 59:23337. Kenyon, K. M. 1962 Excavationsin Jerusalem,1961.Palestine ExplorationQuarterly94:72-89. 1963 Excavationsin Jerusalem,1962.Palestine ExplorationQuarterly95:7-21. 1964 Excavationsin Jerusalem,1963.Palestine ExplorationQuarterly96:7-18. 1965 Excavationsin Jerusalem,1964.Palestine ExplorationQuarterly97:9-20. 1974 DiggingUpJerusalem. London:Ernest Benn.

Rogerson, J. and Davies, P. R. 1996 Was the Siloam Tunnel Built by 59:138Hezekiah?BiblialArchaeologist 49. Shiloh, Y. in theCityof David1:19781984 Excavations 1982: InterimReportof the First Five Seasons.Qedem 19. Jerusalem:Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University. Simons, J. 1952 Jerusalemin the Old Testament.Leiden: E. J. Brill.

JaneM. Cahill City of David ArchaeologicalProject Instituteof Archaeology HebrewUniversityof Jerusalem

Houses

From January 17th to August 31st, 1997 the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelonapresented the exhibit Spirit-Houses (5500 BCEto 300 CE):The EarliestModels in History. This exhibit explored representations of architecture from the ancient Mediterranean both as architects' models and magicians' or priests' equipment. Spirit-Houses was the first exhibition devoted to the plans and models of antiquity.Itshowcasedapproximatelyone hundred pieces, almost all originals, representing votive objectsas well as some of the few preserved documents createdby architects.The exhibitionincluded a selectionof works from the four main interactive cultures of the ancientMediterranean:Egypt,Mesopotamia, Greece,and Rome.The objectswere arranged according to culture, function (civil, military, and religious), and typology. The exhibition was completed by some images of architecture in the arts of the past. Model of a tower dating to the ca. 1600Spirit-Houses traced the development 1200 BCE from the middle Euphratesregion and use of models and plans from the earof Syria(59.5 x 30 x 38 cm). liest three-dimensional models in stone and clay of houses, granaries, and temples to architects'plans and models similar to those of today, including orthographicprojections

and perspectives. The exhibit emphasized the enduring magicaland religious quality of architecturalplans and models by examining the early use of models in the cult of the dead as dwellings for the soul and, for the latertechnicaldrawings, the tendencyto attributearchitecture to divine or royal inspirationratherthan the architect or craftsperson. SpiritHouses offered us a window, not only on where and how people of the ancient Mediterraneanlived, but also the image those people had of their built environment. Coinciding with this exhibit, The Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelonaalso organized a seminarduring Februaryand May 1997 entitled The Modelsof Architectsof Antiquity, under the direction of exhibit curator Pedro Azara.

Centre de Cultura Contemporania de BarcelonaPress Dossier,adapted

iblical Archaeotjgsti1

Smart

of Art to Host Special of Sumerian Temple Institute from the Oriental

Museum

Exhibition Treasures Museum

"Inthe Presenceof Gods:ArtfromAncient Sumer in the Collection of the OrientalInstitute Museum" displays a rare collection of ancient Sumerian statues, relief carvings, elaborate stone vessels, and precious inlays from the temples of ancient Mesopotamia. This exhibition, which opened at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago on July 1 1997, will continue through March 8, 1998. The Sumerian civilization is thought to be one of the oldest in the world, flourishing from about 3000 to 2000 BCE.From their homeland in what is now southern Iraq,the Sumerianscontributedthe earliest advances in writing, sailing, agriculture, and urban life. "In the Presence of the Gods" exhibits objects of many types which the peoples of Sumer dedicated to the gods and goddesses they believed dwelled within their temples. It includes dramatic stone statues of worshippers clad in characteristic tufted garments. These statues, shown with their hands clasped in prayer and their eyes fixed upon the deity, once stood

in temple sanctuaries. The Sumeriansburied other statues,cast in copper alloy, in foundation boxes much like contemporarycornerstones.Priestsused the exhibit'selaborateritualvessels to "feed" the deities their daily meals, and relief carvings showing scenes of musical celebration and feasting were dedicated for use as partof elaboratetemple door-lockingdevices. Most of the forty-threeobjectsin the exhibition were excavated by Oriental Institute archaeologists. The collection of Sumerian artifactsat the Oriental Institute Museum is consideredto be among the best in the world. Its galleries are closed until winter of 1998 as part a renovation and expansion project designed to provide a climate-controlled environmentfor all areaswhere objectsfrom the collection are exhibited, stored, or studied. The SmartMuseum is locatedHyde Park on the campus of the University of Chicago.

The Oriental Institute Museum Adaptedfrom PressRelease

Statuesof men and women, their hands clasped in Statue of a prayingman from TellAsmar,Iraq,EarlyDynasticPeriod,ca. 2900-2600BCE. a in This 40 cm statue were set ancient depicts man wearing the characteristicSumerianfleecy skirt. high Mesopotamiantemples. prayer, up Hiseyes, fixed on the god, are inlaidwith shell and stone. Courtesyof the OrientalInstituteof the Universityof Chicago.

International Eastern

Conference

Near

Archaeology

LoyolaMarymountUniversity,LosAngewill host an InternationalConferencein les, NearEasternArchaeologyfrom January9-12, 1998. Emphasis will be on the significant changes in the archaeological scene in the past ten years in the respective areas, and how these changes will play out in the next ten years. Presenterswill speak both on their country's archaeology and their own special work. At the conference, in addition to

rhaeologist 60s3 .•!i -.

in

?.

the speakers from the Near East,will be special invited guests, archaeologists emeriti. Housing and meal arrangements for those wishing to attend will be announced shortly. Speakers include: Zahi Hawass, Egyptian Department of Antiquities for Giza Plain; Kent Weeks, American University in Cairo, Egypt; Ghazi Bisheh, Director of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities; Pierre Bikai, Director,American Center of Orien-

tal Research(ACOR),Jordan;Israel Finkelstein, Tel Aviv University, Director of Archaeological Institute at Tel Aviv University and Directorof Megiddo excavations; Moa'wiya Ibrahim, Professor of Archaeology, Sultan Qabus University of Muscat, Oman; Layla Badr, American University of Beirut;and a speaker from Cyprus, to be announced. For more information please contact William J. Fulco, S.J.,Jesuits at Loyola University, P.O.Box 45041, Los Angeles, e-mail: CA 90045-0041, U.S.A., [email protected].

: ';T .-'

i

First

Civilizations:

Ancient

By RobertChadwick,viii + 242pp. Ayers Cliff(Quebec):Les EditionsChamp Fleury,1996;n.p. This modestly produced textbook is explicitly designed for the growing number of undergraduates who arrive in college classrooms knowing nothing at all about ancient history or the Near East. For them, the author has provided a "user-friendly" guide which is at its best in explaining fundamentals. For example, in treating such potentially sleep-making topics as ancient calendars and chronology, archaeological methods and purposes, the development of writing, and ancientcosmologies, Chadwick is admirably straightforward. He is able to demonstrate general points by engaging his readers with specific examples. Concepts difficult for beginners (such as the heliacal rising of Sirius or radiocarbon dating) are made clear through a number of shrewdly designed illustrations. Just as helpful is the balance the author brings to discussions of controversial issues such as the origins of agricultureor the nature of the religious revolution under the "heretic pharaoh" to Akhenaten. Limiting coverage a a and is also defenEgypt Mesopotamia sible option: after all, these two were the most important cultural traditions of the ancient Near East, and Chadwick does not pretend to have written a comprehensive history. Within its stated parameters, then, I have no quarrelwith what thisbook attempts to do, and I daresay many students (especially in courses lasting one-semester) will find it more digestible than, say, Amelie Kuhrt's splendid two-volume survey (The AncientNearEast[London:Routledge,1994]), which is not only longer but more complex. So much of what Chadwick does here is scrupulous and even-handed that it is a shame to find these felicities undermined by mistakes in style and method. Students (who should be encouraged in good writing and researchhabits)areset a bad example by the inconsistent and confusing bibliographic entries on p. 22 (e.g., what articles in vol. 4 of TheAnchorBibleDictionary?)and elsewhere. Misspellings also intrude (e.g., "LabibHibachi"),and though some of these

-

Mesopotamiaand

may reflect only careless proofreading, it is striking that they all turn up in the chapters on Egypt, with which the author is apparentlyless at home thanMesopotamia. More damaging, however, is a tendency to oversimplify that is most evident in the historical chapters. Several important periods are omitted, for example, from the Mesopotamian section, notably the Third Dynasty of Ur (though the chronology chart on p. 29 refers to it), the Isin-Larsa period, and the Persian Empire.Though the Kassite Dynasty is described as "powerful" (p. 81), it is barely mentioned, and misleadingly dated only to 1200 BCE(p. 69), as the author leaps from Hammurabi'sDynasty in the first half of the second millennium to the rise of Assyria in the first! Perhaps this imbalance might be correctedin a later edition by including a chapter on the "first internationalism" (fifteenth to twelfth centuries BCE).

More serious sins of comission are found in the Egyptian section-for example: (p. 139) the etymology "He of the Bee" for the title of the so-called King of Lower Egypt, even if it is valid, may well be secondary: (see Thomas Schneider, Zeitschriftfiir die 120 [1993]:178Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 81); (pp. 139-41) Chadwick's reasonable discussion of Narmer's role in the unification is compromised by introducing as the unifier only Menes-described from Eighteenth Dynasty onwards-into the subsequent FirstDynasty,without explanation; (p. 166) TheAdmonitionsoflpuwerare categorically assigned to the First Intermediate Period, overlooking the strong and widely accepted case for redating this composition to the Second (see John Van Seters, Journalof EgyptianArchaeology50 [1984]:1323);(p. 186)Chadwick'saccountof Thutmose III'sfirst campaign and his Annals contains some serious confusions, most damagingly, the killing of the mare by the soldier Amenemheb took place laterand in frontof Kadesh, not Megiddo; (p. 188) Chadwick comments on the "marked change" from warlike to pacific occupations by Amenhotep III but omits the cause-namely, that he was the beneficiary of the peace with Mittanni concluded under his father,Thutmose IV!(Here

Egypt

too a chapter on the "firstinternationalism" is missed); (pp. 194-6)Chadwick's dating of Akhenaten's "hijrah" to el-Amarna in year 6 reflectsa conventionalwisdom which has been abandoned for some time (see G. I [LonT Martin,TheRoyalTombat El-Amarna don, 1974], pp. 1, 106); (pp. 199-201) Chadwick's basically sound discussion of Akhenaten's physical characteristics and family relationshps is similarly marred by reliance on older sources; (p. 201) Michael Rice (n.48) is not the only (or the best) authority to challenge the conventional notion of Akhenaten as a monotheist: among other views, Chadwick could have considered Redford's(in Akhenaten,theHereticKing:fundamentally an atheist); (cf. J. P. Allen, "The Natural Philosophy of Akhenaten" in W. K. Simpson, ed., Religionand Philosophy in AncientEgypt[New Haven, 1989]:89-101); (p. 207) Would Chadwickcareto say in which decree of TutankhamunAkhenaten was vilified as a criminal? In the chart, placing "Amarna Period Kings" between Tutankhamunand Ay is misleading; (p. 208) Chadwick states, again categorically, that Ay executed the Hittite prince Zannanza who was on his way to marryTutakhamun's widow-yet it is quite unclear whetherthe young man was murdered, or by whom; (pp. 209-210) the figures-sixteen years for Sety I, with Ramesses II appointed coregent in his father'sseventh year and reigning from 1290 BCE-are unprovable and, even as reasonable speculations, out of date (students should not be lulled into a false sense of security!);(p. 214) having described how the Hittite king Hattusili III deposed his nephew, Mursili III, why does Chadwick then omit the impact which the latter'sflight to Egypt had on the subsequent peace negotiations? Cumulatively, such failings overwhelm this book's decided merits and render it unacceptablefor college use. Properlyrevised and somewhat expanded, however, it might yet be a valued textbook for a one-semester introduction to the history and civilization of the ancient Near East.

William J. Murnane The Universityof Memphis

iblical Archaeo,

Life

Daily

of

the

Egyptian

By Dimitri Meeks and Christine FavardMeeks, translated by G. M. Goshgarian, vii + 249 pp., 27figures. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996; cloth US$45.00, paper US$17.95. This outstanding work, accurately and readably translated from the French,is a significant addition to the increasingnumber of good books on ancient Egyptian religion; its fresh perspective and profound erudition make it a notable contribution. "The daily life of the gods" encompasses both their autonomous existence and the institutionalized cult in which they interface with humanity. In the latter, the king's intermediation is crucial. The Introduction summarizes the history of the study of Egyptian religion, emphasizing the tendency to project the scholar's world-view onto Egyptian conceptions. The authors describe the surviving artifacts related to the deities and identify the primary featuresof the religious system. They then divide the book into two parts comprising five chapters each: "The Gods among Themselves" (by D. Meeks) and "Mediating between the Gods and Humankind" (by C. Favard-Meeks).Abbreviations, notes, a glossary of deities, a chronological table, and an index complete the book; a table of the Family of Heliopolis appears as well. The volume's black-and-whitephotographsand line drawings arewell-chosen,dear,and well-captioned. Chapter 1 opens "The Gods Among Themselves"with a presentationof the major events, primeval and cyclical, in which

Gods

the deities figure, and explores the gods' origin and eschatological destiny. A rebellion of humankind resulted in the withdrawal of the gods, who left the kingship (occupied by an earthly Horus), and the temple ritual, as means of intermediation.Chapter2 treats "Hierarchies,Prerogatives,Groups"in divine society. The number of deities is indefinite; a netjer (usually translated "god") is defined as any entity possessing a cult and a ritual. A chapter on "Divine Bodies" explores the paradoxes of the deities' physicality, distinguishing characteristics, manifestations, bodily functions, and life changes, clarifying the important concepts of kheperu("projection") and iru (tangible and perceptible "projection").A deity can have many kheperuand iru and can serve as the kheperuof anotherdeity;thus syncretisms and identifications become comprehensible. In this context, a discussion of the composite depiction of deities and its possible relation to masking would have been helpful. Chapter4 examines the "Spacesand Places" of divine habitation and action, including the "Hereafter;" even the creator has no power over uncreated chaos. Part I concludes with a chapter on divine "Intelligence and Knowledge," including inherent and acquired knowledge, knowledge of names, and the written and spoken word. Here statements such as Rekhmire's about the king's omniscience could have been noted. Sincethe daily and periodicritualsuphold the cosmos, it is appropriate that Part II begins with "The Machine of the Universe and the Universal God," i.e., the solar cre-

ator,whose daytime voyage across the sky and nightly transit through the body of his mother Nut are described, as is the role of Thothas creatorof time. "TheGods on Earth" ranges over the divine origin of the king, the temple, divine cult, important festivals, and sacred animals. A chapter on deities of the Hereafterpresents a tour of the underworld, confronting aspects that belie the stereotype of its idyllic nature. The section on the sun's night journey through that realm (complementing his passage through the body of the sky goddess) is especially valuable for its discussion of the Book of Caverns. "From the Dead to the Newborn God" examines the cult and mythology of Osiris and his family,culminating in the birth of the divine child/royal successor; it includes an informative considerationof the mammisior "birth temple." The intriguing title of Chapter 10, "The Machine of the Universe Tottering on the Brink,"refers to the five epagomenal days, the liminal period before the New Year during which the cosmic order and its guarantor,the king, are most vulnerable, and the ritual reaffirmation of stability and continuity. The authors illuminate virtually every subject they touch; their command of original sources and scholarly literature is encyclopedic, their synthesis thoughtful, their methodology sophisticated, and their emphasis on often-neglected aspects salutary.They communicate to both scholar and general readera concrete,coherent,and immediate vision of the ancient Egyptian deities and the rich religious life of that civilization. Edmund S. Meltzer Plover,WI

but the best-stocked libraries. Such is the dauntingsituationfacingstudentsand scholars of ancient Mesopotamia. While many publications of the "materialsand industries"genre deal with a single technological domain, such as metallurgy, watercraft,or irrigation agriculture, Daniel Potts' MesopotamianCivilization:TheMaterial Foundations endeavors to introduce the salient featuresof ancientMesopotamia's in one broadsweep. "materialinfrastructure"

Civilization: Mesopotamian The

Material

Foundations

By D. T.Potts, 340 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996; US $62.50. Familiaritywith the vast corpus of scholarly publication on ancient Mesopotamia's physical environment,culturalpatterns,nat-

i

ural resources, and technology is fundamental to the study of its history. Yet such information is typically relegated to brief introductory chapters in most textbooks. The relevantsource materialis often obscure and, more often than not, absent from all

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The work focuses specifically on southern Mesopotamia in the third millennium BCE. However, coverage is not restrictedto these parameters. The author frequently alludes to the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf region and uses evidence from many periods of Mesopotamian history. The book is aimed at the college undergraduate and would likely accompany one of the traditional textbooks of Mesopotamian political history. Through the course of fourteen thematically-organized chapters the reader is presented with a solid, concise introduction to the archaeological and philological documentation regarding materials and technology,as well as the pertinentsecondary sources. The book opens with a discussion of Southern Mesopotamia's geography and climate,followed by a chapteron the region's aboriginal population and a synopsis of the "Sumerian Problem." The following chapters deal with agriculture,naturalresources, watercraft,pottery,metallurgy, and writing and sealing. Several chapters are oriented more toward the cultural side of material

culture, including kinship in cities, mortuary practices, and the material correlates of Mesopotamianreligion.Two additionalchapters are dedicated to interregional contacts. One largelyfocuses on the evidence for interaction between Mesopotamia and the Indus region, while a chapterentitled "Westmeets East"disguises a survey of Greek influence and the Seleucid period in Babylonia. The book concludes with a brief chapter on the author's view on the currentstate and future of Mesopotamian studies. The book contains a number of minor misprints or typographic errors,but they in no way detractfrom the book's content.Since the work contains no historical overview, backgroundinformationis often interspersed within the presentation of the archaeological and textual evidence. This occasionally disrupts the continuity of the text, and in some cases, contributes little to the chapter's objectives. For example, an aside regardingthe political struggle between Sargon IIand Marduk-apal-iddinaIIis included in a section on gardenvegetables.The book's numerous illustrations are excerpted from

other published sources and, so, vary in terms of their quality and enrichment of the text. This volume distills into 300 pages all the information deemed by the author as core knowledge for students of ancient Mesopotamia. Naturally, there is likely to be little agreement between scholars as to what constitutes the fundamentals of the subject,and dealing with every conceivable topic is beyond the bounds of any single volume. A second editionmight includenorthern Mesopotamiaand add such subjectsas architecture,urbanlayouts,storage,land transport, pyrotechnology, and warfare. The author has succeeded in producing a useful compendium of stand-alone essays covering some of the often-glossed-over aspects of ancientMesopotamiancivilization.The book is sure to become familiar reading to students of the ancient Near East-a testament to its merit.

Michael Danti The Universityof Pennsylvania

L'habitatpriv4 en Palestineau BronzeMoyenet au BronzeR4cent [PrivateDwellingsin Middleand LateBronzeAgePalestine] Chantal Foucault-Forest, 147 pp. + 115

plates. BARInternationalSeries 625. Oxford:TempusReparatum,1996;n.p. Chantal Foucault-Forest has taken on the task of organizingall the published information on the built environment of Middle and Late Bronze Age sites in Palestine, providing students and researchers with a valuable resource. Following a brief introduction in which she defines the scope of the book and situates it in the time-space systematics of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, the author takes us site-by-site through descriptions of the settlement plans and domestic architecture of a dozen sites that date to these periods. For each, where the evidence is available,she discusses aspects of town plan and urban character,the form of houses and other buildings that might be granaries or

cts

public buildings, and the relationships between them. This results in a quite useful collection of data. Wherever possible, she also offers her analysis of the built environment in terms of concentric zonation, street circulation, and other attributes that may hint at "les principes d'urbanisme qui gouvernent cette organisation" (p. 101). The most interestingchapter,to my mind, is the "synthese" in which Foucault-Forest attempts to summarize what all these sites may tell us about urban society in Palestine during the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. Here she makes no claim to provide answers to the big questions about Palestine'surbanism, but only to offer a brief introduction to the analysis of the urban habitat. She takes somethingof a "top-down"approach,assuming that it is preferable to examine first the overall patterns at the scale of whole settlements, then to zoom in on their parts. She

iblical

sees the sites as being built up to the point that the only space left within the enclosing city walls is the bare minimum needed for circulation, which she likens to arteries through the tissue of buildings. This network of streets is typically "radio-concentrique" with the peripheral zone, near the walls, reservedfor elite and public buildings, and with no largespacein which citizens could assemble. Only one, or at most two, of the sites seems to be organized instead in a grid-like fashion, namely Tell el-Ajjul (p. 102). She notes a fair degree of regularity within the built "tissue"of these settlements, due in part, she proposes, to space limitations imposed by other construction and to the fact that it is easier to build on top of a demolished building if you do not alter the plan or dimensions too much. The result tends to be linear bands of structures,especially in the periphery of radioconcentric

Archae?

sites, or islands of structures that are two buildings wide, although she is tempted to see more chaotic "agglomerations" of buildings as well in the older, central cores of settlements. She describes the results as something of a balance between the "organizational whims" of individual or small-group builders and the "intervention of authority," the latter being, in her view, not only essential for the organization of the urban space, but "the source of every form of urbanism" (p. 104). She concludes by noting the lack of public space in these sites, and reminding us, quite correctly,that they were essentially agglomerations of houses for a predominantlyagriculturalpopulation (p. 105). In the next section of the synthesis, the author changes scale to examine habitations. Here she notes how our relativelygood sample of houses allows her to search out the characteristics they have in common, with emphasis on functional and organizational aspects, yet she takes a decidedly typological perspective. She begins by discussing the forms of houses, dividing them into four classes plus a class of "exceptions"(pp. 106107). Her discussion of spatial organization within them focuses mainly on size and shape, partly because evidence for the system of circulationbetween rooms is inconsistently preserved (p. 113). She also deals with the issues of whether or not the center of "courtyard houses" was actually roofed (pp. 114-16),of how rooms were lit (p. 116), and of functional differentiationwithin (pp. 116-20). She briefly compares her sample with houses of the Early Bronze and Iron Ages (pp. 121-22), and puts houses in their wider context, along with palaces and granaries. The book suffers in several ways, however. First, as a matter of the reader's convenience, it would have been extremely helpful to have the illustrationsincorporated into the text instead of grouped into a section of plates at the end. It is impossible to follow the discussionwithout frequentexaminationof the plans,and this requiresconstant flipping of pages back and forth. Second, most of the plates are reproduced from old publications,with highly variabledrawing conventions and sometimes conflated stratigraphy.It would have been very helpful to have redrawnthe figuresto a consistent

al rchaeologist60:3

format and with Iron Age walls and other sources of confusion removed. Third, very few of these sites have very broad exposures, and none is completely excavated, so that the author's inference of settlement structure as radioconcentric or grid-like is often tenuous. Tell el-Ajjul is presented as one of the best cases, but excavations therewere in factquite patchy,and her reconstruction of long, parallel streets is far from certain. More puzzling, however, is the apparent lackof any coherenttheoreticalorientation for the analysis of these settlements. For example, Foucault-Forestmight have made more use of the literature on the built environment that urban geographers, architects, and archaeologists have generated. Literatureon primitiveand vernaculararchitecture shows that a great deal of regularity, including "standard"house plans and radioconcentricand grid-likepatterns,can emerge in settlements without any conscious town planning (see, for example, Rapoport 1969:3-6;Hillier and Hanson 1984;Banning 1996a; 1996b; Byrd and Banning 1988). Although Foucault-Forest attributes regularities in settlement to a cultural norm or model (p. 104), she seems unaware of the techniquesavailableto help discernthe structure of this model, including what is now sometimes called EBS(Environment-Behavior Studies; Rapoport 1990).Some attention to this literaturemight have helped her disbetween what she calls tinguish "organizationalwhims" of the builders("distributed" structure) and what she views as the necessary intervention of some public, managerial coordinating institution ("nondistributed"structure,Hillierand Hanson 1984:11-12,62-63,78). I am not convinced that small hints that there were elements of communal organizationin these settlements (e.g., encircling ramparts or main streets) are sufficient for us to conclude that palace officials dictated the location or shape of individual houses. Foucault-Forest'srecognition of the role of kinship networks contradictsher assertionthatdecisions about "global"aspects of settlement organization must be made at a high level, such as a palace elite. In traditional societies, it is common for new constructionto be a communal venture involving neighborsand relatives,much of pioneerNorthAmerlike the bamrn-raisings

ica, and this accounts for the near regularity of plan and organization. Some graph-theoretical techniques would have helped her to discern pattern in the circulation systems of houses. In short, Foucault-Forest has authored a very useful book that also presents some interesting ideas about the organization of space in Middle and Late Bronze Age settlements, but could have benefitted from application of some newer models and analytical techniques.

Referencescited: Banning, E. B. 1996a Houses, Compounds and Mansions in the PrehistoricNear East.Pp. 16585 in PeopleWhoLivedin BigHouses: ArchaeologicalPerspectiveson Large Domestic Structures, edited by G. Coupland and E. B. Banning. Madison, WI: Prehistory Press. 1996b Patternor Chaos?New Waysof Looking at '"TownPlanning"in the Ancient Near East. In Debating Complexity. Proceedingsof the26th Annual Chacedited by D. Meyer, moolConference, P. Dawson, and D. Hanna. Calgary: Archaeological Association of the University of Calgary. Byrd, B. F. and Banning, E. B. 1988 Southern Levantine Pier Houses: Intersite Architectural Patterning During the Pre-PotteryNeolithic B. Paleorient14: 65-72. Hillier, B. and Hansen, J. 1984 TheSocialLogicof Space.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rapoport, A. 1969 HouseFormandCulture.Engleewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. in Environmental 1990 HistoryandPrecedent Design. New York:Plenum Press.

Edward Banning Universityof Toronto

t

CAUGHT IN ELECTRONIC

OPPORTUNITIES

Writingthis column in Rome has been interesting:in Italy, there's neighborhood e-mail service! Which reminds me: "local servers" are good and very popular, as the large percentage of subscribers to the major archaeology lists demonstrates. Continuing from the last issue's column, I'm still intrigued by the use of the web for presenting informative course syllabi with lots of hot links. Since these syllabi are on-line, they should also have great potential for educational out-reach. Finally, I lurk on the e-mail discussion list, "Anahita" (Women and Gender in the Ancient World), whose contributors are also interested in the educational process. Whenin Rome ... I'm writing this issue's "Net" in late May in Rome at the "Centro" (the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome), a lovely villa on the crest on the Janiculumwith the spacious gardensof the VillaPamphylijustbehind.Already I'm scheming to come here for a year of work and Max-walking. Justbefore I set off, I telephoned my parents;my mother and sister were considering coming over, and we were wondering how they would inform me precisely of their arrival plans (as it turned out they couldn't make it, which was a pity). Fatherand mother write a newspaper column about their community's activities, so they've been computer-literatefor years, but, egad!, they have no e-mail (!) and no fax machine, either!The telephone was a possibility,of course,but it seemed old fashioned and even obsolete-my own telephone gets mostly used by telemarketers who call so incessantly I've stopped answering it. In fact (now that I come to think of it), e-mail has become my telephone, and my telephone has become the equivalent of junk-mail (the real junk-mail has tapered off significantly). Maybe there's really been no great improvement after all, just everything has moved up a notch. In any case, how would my parents contact me? I'm tagging along with the Duke-University-in-Rome Program, and as we students walk down the street in the morning to one or the other of the bus lines that takes us down to the Forum for the day, we pass several "Internet Servizio" shops where you can send faxes or do the occasional e-mail.The Centrohas its own e-mail account,of course, and I'll be sending this piece from there, but if you're not completely hooked up at home you can go down to one of these Servizios and, as it were, jump into the mainstream, at least temporarily. In the States, of course, there are various shops with fax services, but too bad my parents cannot take a stroll over to a shop that provides e-mail services for the walk-in customer! YourServer Such a situation means, of course, that in the States one Caught in the Net

THE

NET

IN ARCHAEOLOGY

Paul Bagot'smodel of the Colliseumfound at http://www.unicaen.fr/ rome/romel2.shtmlmaintainedby the Centred'Etudeset de Recherchesur I'Antiquite(CERLA) of the Centrede Ressources Caen. de de Informatiques I'Universite

either has to do without e-mail or become a fanatic about it. Although I personally have never used any server outside the one my university provides, I am nonetheless impressed by the good words people say about their local servers. In the last issue, I presented some statistics about the national affiliations of archaeological discussion lists; when I was preparing that section I also compiled stats on the nationalities of subscribersto AegeaNet and ANE, and on the types of servers they used-this was easy, I just requested a list of subscribers (send "who aegeanet" or "who ane" to the majordomo server). I could identify from e-mail addresses both the nationalities and the kinds of servers used of some 70% of the subscribers. Over half of ANE (52%)and AegeaNet (62%) subscribers are from the US and Canada, about 17% from western Europe, 10%from countriesthat border the Mediterranean, and 4% from countries in the Pacific; about 13%of ANE subscribersand just 5%AegeaNetters come from Scandanavia.A handful of subscribersto both lists reside in eastern Europe, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. I could not identify any subscribersfrom India, Pakistan,or the Middle East, apart from Israel. Obviously globalization is not here yet. As for the servers-again, over half of ANE (51%)and AegeaNet (65%)subscribers are affiliated with universities or similar organizations (educational, governmental, military); their suffixes end in .edu or .org. All the remaining subscribers are served by private companies; their suffixes end in .com or .net. There are three companies that serve 10 or more subscribers:America-On-Lineserves 40 subscribers BiblicalArchaeologist60:3 (1997)

191

to each list (some 8%), while CompuServe and IxNet serve roughly 10 each (some 6%). The restof the ANE (35%)and AegeaNet (23%)subscribers maintain internet accounts with small, local companies that serve only one or occasionally two of our subscribers each. I find this result fascinating. The majority of those who subscribe to these two archaeology discussion lists from nonuniversity or organization addresses find their local servers not only adequate for their needs but, as I hear, also accessible and fair in their rates. Like most of my listowner colleagues, I urge you readers to check out your local servers, especially if you think the largercompanies are, well, too large. Hot (-Linked)Syllabi A couple of issues ago I reported on what seemed to be a sensible approach to on-line course syllabi: web sites that brought appropriate materials together by using hot links to Perseus and other sites for graphics and explanatory texts. Such a method is very useful, especially since the memory space our serversallot us is always too small for what we want to do with it. This linking seems to be catching on: at the University of Saskatchewan John Porter's new course on the archaeology of daily life offers on-line bibliographies and resourceson a site designed by Porterand Ann Devito. At the University of New Castle uppon Tyne, Kevin Greene has put togethera challenging"ElectronicCompanion"to an introduction to archaeology.Bothof these tools use numerous links

to outside sources. Such course compilations and linked syllabi will soon become, I'm sure, standard. A truly helpful syllabus would present basic images as aide-memoiresand short,explanatory texts of terms and concepts to guide students as they pursue the course.Few of us, however,have our own images to download (we certainly don't want to breech copyright!), and we clearly don't have the in-house memory capability.Of course, I could spend a lot of money to purchasean expensive "tower" for the memory and then spend a lot of time downloading the graphics and text into it, but l'd thus be broke and have no time to enjoy this stay in Rome! In any case, I plan to give this concept of an integratedsyllabus a try for my Hellenistic and Greco-Roman Art course this fall. Last spring the students from my Classical Greek artcourse produced a fairlyserviceableand intriguingon-line introduction to the subject.The site contains some innovative sections you might like to check out: they "painted" some sculpture, including a kore and sections of the Parthenonand Hephaisteion friezes, and they "pasted"together all the slabs of the Bassaefrieze which you can horizontallyscrollthrough. So "chiao!"fromRome;next issue I'lltell you about Tunisia, too! If you have any comments or questions, or would like to see a topic discussed, e-mail me: [email protected] or check out my Web home page: http://www.duke.edu/ web/jyounger/.

Internet Sites for the Classicaland Ancient Near EasternWorlds A general list of archaeologicale-maildiscussion lists

"subscribeanenews", "subscribeanenews-digest". an archaeologicalsearch-engine: Argos, http://www.duke.edu/web/jyounger/archlist.htmi ForAncient Near Eastsites: httpJ/argos.evansville.edul John Porter'sUniversityof Saskatchewancourse on the ABZU(http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/RAABZU/ABZU_ NEW.HTML) archaeologyof daily life: ForAegean, Greekand Romanweb sites: http:/www.usask.ca/classics/coursenotes.html#class220 Kapatija(httpJ/www.duke.edu/web/jyounger/kapat97.html) KevinGreene's"ElectronicCompanion"to archaeology: Sites &servicesmentioned in the text: httpJ/www.ncl.ac.uk/-nktg/wintro/ JohnYounger'scoursesin Greekart: ANE:to subscribe,mailto "[email protected]" one of the following: "subscribeane", "subscribeane-digest", 123/ and /cs124/ httpJ//www.duke.edu/web/classics/cs

ANAHITA list (Womenand Genderin the AncientWorld) FromNovember1996 through March1997 the list (justunder400 subscribers)was generating about two messages a week, usually from a few contributors,includingthe list-owners.Anahita'ssubscribersare a livelylot whose wide range of subjectscontains items that are certainto intrigue. As I'vecome to expect with women's issues,the subjectshere concernednot only women in antiquitybut also women in the profession.Therewere the usualannouncementsof conferences,includinga splendidreview of a symposiumon women in ancient Egyptin Cincinnati(8-10 November1996).SusanneLorenzasked why a Romangirl was buriedin a sarcophagusshowing male scenes;could girlsand boys be treated similarlywhen young? Some sarcophagialso representwomen in male roles:a woman as Heliosand a victoriouswoman athlete. Another interestingthread concernedwomen's hair in antiquityas an expressionof sexuality;there were the usual helpful citationsof ancient sourceson the sensualityof hairand its appropriateness as a religiousdedication. To subscribeto Anahita,mail "subscribeanahita YourName"to "[email protected]".

192

BiblicalArchaeologist 60:3(1997)

Caughtin the Net

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Jewish Wisdom in the HellenisticAge

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With this series, WestminsterJohn Knox Press,in collaboration with J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), presents the most up-to-date, comprehensive presentation of the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls material available. The project is under the direction of James H. Charlesworth and includes the participation of virtually every notable scholar in the field today.

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS,VOLUME4

Angelic Liturgy,Prayers,and Psalms James H. Charlesworth, Senior Editor

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The newest volume of the PrincetonTheologicalSeminary DeadSeaScrollsProjectprovidesstate-of-the-artpresentations of DeadSeaScrollsprayerand liturgicaltexts. Includedare many prayers,psalms,and other texts possiblyused in the Qumrancommunity'sworship.

Also available THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS, VOLUME 1

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS, VOLUME 2

GRAPHIC CONCORDANCETO THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

Rule of the Community and Related Documents

Damascus Document, War Scrolls,and RelatedDocuments

James H. Charlesworth, Senior Editor

James H. Charlesworth, Senior Editor

James H. Charlesworth, Senior Editor

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"Herefinally is the first volume of a projectedset of ten which has been in the making for well over a decade...The IPrincetonproject provides a major landmarkin general public access to the Dead Sea Scrolls. The student or scholar first becoming interested in a

This ground-breakingbook, like its companion (Volume 1), accuratelypresents the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls in a state-ofthe-art manner. Following the same format as the first volume, each text and its English translation is preparedand fully

certain nonbiblical manuscript found at Qumran will now be able

annotated by one of the foremost scholars in the field. This is an

to see state-of-the-artwork, as of 1994, on that particular manuscript, when published, in the introductions and notes here provided by the scholar or scholars assigned to each document."

important referencebook for both specialists and non-specialists alike.

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eumran community, broaden their study of late biblical Mishnaic Hebrew,and compare the Jewish concepts and theologies preservedby the Qumran Christian concepts." - Theology l)igest

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JOHN KNOXPRESS 100 Witherspoon Street

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Near

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An International Conference hosted by Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles 9-12 January 1998 of Antiquities Department SpeakersareZAHIHAWASS, Egyptian in Cairo; forthe GizaPlain;KENT American WEEKS, University GHAZI Directorof the Jordanian BISHEH, of Antiquities; PIERRE BIKAI, Department American Centerof Oriental Director, Research,Amman, Jordan;ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN, Director, Archaeological Instituteat TelAvivUniversity; MOAWIYAH ofArchaeolIBRAHIM, Chair,Department Muscat, ogy,SultanQaboosUniversity,

American of Beirut; Oman;LEILA BADRE, University DEMETRIOS of Cyprus. MICHAELIDES, University Forregistration formsor information, contact:NearEasternArchaeology Officeof International Conference, Programs, LoyolaMarymount University,

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Onthe frontandbackcovers: Theextraordinarily beautifulandserviceableimageson the frontand backcoverswereproduced to BiblicalArchaeologist's specificationsby R. L. W.Cleave and RohrProductionsLtd. Thecoversofferthesameobliqueview--an unconventionalnorthvantagepoint-that encompasses nearlythe whole of ancientPalestine,apartfromthe southwesterncomer where the data are not presentlyavailable.On front,the computer-generatedimage representswhat Cleavehasbeenmakingavailableforseveralyearsandwas displayedprominentlyin National (187/6 [June1995]).In it, coloredLandsatdatahas been mergedwith higher-resGeographic olution gray-scaledata fromthe FrenchSPOTsatellite.Computerscientiststhen integrated the resultantimage with the topographicdata of a digital terrainmodel. This combinationof top-down satellite imagerywith elevation data createsthe three-dimensionaleffect of the images and permitsone to sit at a computer terminaland conjureup a view fromany angle,even "tofly"over the landscape.The image engendersthe unmistakableimpressionof the land'svariegation. The rearcoversportsthe same imagewith a novel colortreatment.Calleda layertint,the more map-likeimage combinessatellitedatawith computer-generated height-relatedcolorsbasedon a digitalterrainmodel.Theimage's elevationcolors (layertints)optimize the relief,with the colorschangingat heights thathelp to distinguishhigh groundfromlow.Inthebackground,the satellitetexture-renderedgray--makesroadsandothersurfacedatastand out. The painting-likequalityof the resultantimagehelps the eye discernthe crucialfeaturesof the ancientPalestinianlandscape:the massiveJezreelvalley system, the costalblockadeof the Carmelmountainrange,the dome of the Judeanand Samarianhills, and the sharpdissectionsof the Transjordanian plateau. Cleave is in the process of preparing a new atlas featuring a comprehensive system of ancient highways, oblique satelliteimagerydocumentinghistoricalsites and geographicalfeatures,and a videotape of 3-D animation sequences.Thewhole will be supportedby aerialand ground-levelphotography. Additionalinformationis availablefromRohrProductions,Ltd.,6 MichalakiKaraolisSt.,#402,Box3312,Nicosia, Cyprus.Telephone:3572 365082.Fax:3572 477350.

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