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BiblicalArchaeolo Perspectiveson the Ancient Worldfrom Mesopotamiato the Mediterranean
Volume59 Number1
A Publicationof the American Schools of OrientalResearch page 2
2
March 1996
"ForeverGordon":Portraitof a Master Scholar with a Global Perspective
Meir Lubetski and Claire Gottlieb A rare combination of scholarly gentleman, mentor, and teacher par excellence, Cyrus Gordon'slife overflows with unique experiences and soaring achievements. Often blazing trails on the edge of scholarship, it is gratifying to behold the esteem in which growing circles hold this "scholar for all seasons." 13
Homer and the Near East:The Rise of the Greek Genius Louis H. Feldman Once the eccentricity of pioneers like Gordon, the postulate of an early Greek acquisition of the alphabet from the Phoenicians permits Homer to be recast as a literate poet, much influenced by the Near Eastern epic tradition.
22
A "MediterraneanSynthesis":ProfessorCyrusH. Gordon's Contributionsto the Classics Howard Marblestone Cyrus Gordon's most emblematic and enduring intellectual legacy will undoubtedly be his vision of cultural synthesis interweaving the East Mediterranean axis of Syria-Palestine, the delta of Egypt, and Minoan Crete which became the multiplex foundation of Greek and Hebrew civilizations.Recent scholarship on contactbetween these cultures and, indeed, the work of Rome's greatest poet Vergil,vindicates Gordon'sfarsighted vision.
31
A ContinuingAdventure:Cyrus Gordon and Mesopotamia
Martha A. Morrison Mesopotamia figures prominently from the beginning of Gordon'scareer.His observations as a field archaeologist and epigrapher from Ur to Tellel-Amarna brought philological and cultural issues in the Nuzi tablets to his attention.The parallels he drew between Nuzi and the Hebrew Bible were to resonate through succeeding generations of scholarship.
36
"SomeoneWill Succeed in DecipheringMinoan":Minoan LinearA as a West Semitic Dialect GaryA. Rendsburg After a decade of research on the interconnections between Greece,Ugarit, and Israel,with Crete as the hub, Gordon approached the decipherment of Minoan Linear A. Previous scholars had realized that Linear A was not Greek as in Linear B. Gordon stepped in to assert, controversially,that the language of Minoan Linear A was a West Semitic dialect.
44
page 14
The Father of Ugaritic Studies David ToshioTsumura From his provision of basic tools for Ugaritic study to his specific linguistic contributions, from his analysis of literary style to his view of the entire ancient Near East as the world of the Hebrew Bible, Gordon'simpact on Ugaritic and biblical studies reaches the proverbial seven times seven.
51
Magic Bowls: CyrusH. Gordon and the Ubiquity of Magic in the Pre-ModernWorld Edwin M. Yamauchi Magic bowls illuminate everyday human concerns-fears and worries, jealousies and hatreds. They remind us of the presence of magic in the ancient-and indeed, modernworld. Gordon'swork on magic bowls carried on the interest of his teacher Montgomery, and he himself passed the passion on to a congeries of his students.
Archaeological Applications of Advanced ImagingTechniques
:
i
! D.....................
GregoryH. Bearman and Sheila I. Spiro Utilizing techniques developed by NASA, the imaging of texts on papyri, parchment, pottery,or plaster can capture much information invisible to the naked eye. Multi-spectral imaging and computer manipulation of digital images enhances legibility of obscured Dead Sea Scroll texts and faded ostraca alike.
On the Cover:Superimposedupon Gordon'stranscriptionof a Ugaritictext, an ivory plaque (H = 24 cm) from RasShamraportraysa goddess nursingtwo children.FromSyria31 (1954):pl. 8.
From
the
Editor
Specially devoted to the warp and woof of Cyrus H. Gordon'sfascinating and remarkable scholarly life, this issue arouses joy and celebration.It also provokes multiple reflections on the state of the study of the ancient world-Gordon's career sets the challenges archaeology faces in high relief. The need to break out of old habits of thinking and research comes first to notice. Emblematic of Gordon's scholarship, this current need arises out of the expansion of archaeology's intellectual horizons and the shattering of generations-old political boundaries. In the light of Gordon's masterly control of the vast arena of ancient history, concerns also surround the fractionalization of the archaeological discipline even as "global"realities and ideologies take cultural center stage. Moreover,with Gordon'spenchant for synthesis in mind, the turbulence that besets the late twentieth century engenders a deep desire for synthesis that transcends the requisite restraint of data collection. Above all, the impetus to communicate-to tell archaeology's story to a wider public, to deepen appreciation for the legacy of the ancient world-animates discourse at public meetings of the discipline and private conversations among colleagues. Whether born of a sense of declining institutional support or negative reaction to the "popular"presentation of matters archaeological, it is our growing concern about effectively telling the story of the ancient world that Cyrus Gordon'svoice foils so intensely. He was, by all accounts and in published word, a master storyteller.We are,by all accounts, having difficulties communicating. Satiricalsongwriter TomLehreroffered advice decades ago (and availablenow on CD!) to any caught in the communication miasma: "If you're having trouble communicating," advised Lehrer, "the very least thing you can do is to shut up." Not likely! And not exactly a constructive solution to Near Eastern archaeology's dilemma! I suggest instead to begin at the base level of grammar.Most manuscripts arrive at BiblicalArchaeologist dressed in the passive voice. This voice says a lot about how archaeologists conceive of themselves. Adopted from scientific literature, it portrays archaeologists as objective experimenters and recorders of data. Adopted from older ethnographic writing, it portrays archaeologists as detached observers. But despite the refinement of archaeological science, archaeologists will never be scientists. Despite the use of ethnographic analogies, we will never observe the behavior that correlates to the material we excavate nor interview live informants exhumed from the deepest of squares. Archaeologists are fundamentally humanists investigating a human subject. In place of the rhetoric of detachment, I urge a more complete acknowledgement of ourselves. This may mean a renewed encounter with the force that drew most of us to archaeology in the first place, the desire to know a remote human world. What was life and living like in the past? It will demand recovering or liberating our empathetic imaginations, the key to our entry into lives long dead. More fully acknowledging oursleves also points in the direction of animated storytelling as the primary mode of archaeological presentation. Archaeological storytelling empowered by our empathetic imaginations may (re-)kindle our readers' interest in the results of our labors. Presented with subjects described from an objective remove, can archaeology's audience be blamed if it transfers the impersonal portrayalto the ancient actors themselves? What a tedious and lifeless lot most of our subjects must seem! An active voice inspired by the empathetic imagination will both tell appropriately the story of who we archaeologists are and faithfully the story of who our ancient subjects were. Naturally,the stories into which we weave "silent"archaeological data cannot be tapestries of fantasy.Archaeology must protect the integrity of the past that can be known, if only partially.And the choice of narrativedesign cannot be a matter of indifference.Clearly, the grand narrativeis beyond our grasp.Unobtainable,too,is V G. Childe'sstory of progresswhere none of history's troughs ever descends to the level of the preceding one and each crest out-tops its last height. Perhaps we can tell narratives of core and periphery, of dominance and resistance in the multi-cultural, power-brocaded reality of the world system. This is a story palpably made available to us during the final throes of the twentieth and the first breaths of the twenty-first centuries. Let us hope that honoring Cyrus Gordon as synthetic thinker and storyteller will to seize the challenge of communicating the story of archaeembolden BiblicalArchaeologist ology in animated voice.
'iArtlL
HtL9rr
Biblical
Archaeologist
Perspectiveson the Ancient Worldfrom Mesopotamiato the Mediterranean EditorDavidC.Hopkins
Art DirectorBucky Edgett,LuckyProductions Book Review EditorJames C. Moyer Arti-FactsEditorsBruce and Carolyn Routledge
EditorialAssistants MaryPetrinaBoyd,EllenRowseSpero EditorialCommittee KennethG.Hoglund JefferyA. Blakely ElizabethBloch-Smith DouglasA.Knight MaryJoanLeith BetsyM.Bryan GloriaLondon J.P Dressel ErnestS.Frerichs JodiMagness RonaldS.Hendel GeraldL.Mattingly RichardS.Hess GaetanoPalumbo PaulZimansky Annualsubscription ratesare$35 Subscriptions forindividualsand$45forinstitutions. Thereis a specialannualrateof $28forstudents,thoseover 65,physicallychallenged,orunemployed.Biblical is alsoavailableas partof the Archaeologist benefitsof someASORmembership categories. PostageforCanadianandotherinternational addressesis an additional$5.Paymentsshould be senttoASORMembership/Subscriber Atlanta,GA30333-0399 Services,P.O.Box15399, Bitnet:SCHOLARS@ (ph:404-727-2345; orderscanbe VISA/Mastercard EMORYUI). phonedin. BackissuesBackissuescanbe obtainedby or callingSPCustomerServicesat 800-437-6692 writingSPCustomerServices,PO.Box6996, GA30239-6996. Alpharetta, PostmasterSendaddresschangesto Biblical ASORMembership/Subscriber Archaeologist, Services,PO.Box15399, Atlanta,GA30333-0399. Second-class postagepaidatAtlanta,GAand additionaloffices. Copyright? 1996by theAmericanSchools of OrientalResearch. All editorialcorrespondence Correspondence andbooksforreviewshouldbe addressedto Biblical 4500Massachusetts Avenue Archaeologist DC20016-5690 NW,Washington, (ph:202-885emaildhopkins@cais. 8699;fax:202-885-8605; com).Correspondence regardingsubmissionsfor canbe sentto BruceandCarolyn Arti-Facts Universite d'histoire, Departement Routledge, Laval,Ste-Foy, Quebec,CanadaGIK7P4. shouldbe AdvertisingCorrespondence addressedto LeighAnderson,ScholarsPress,PO. Box15399, Atlanta,GA30333-0399 (ph:404-727Ads forthesale 2327;fax:404-727-2348). of antiquitieswill not be accepted. Biblical (ISSN 0006-0895)is published Archaeologist quarterly(March,June,September,December) by Scholars Press,819Houston Mill Road NE, Atlanta,GA 30329,for the American Schools of Oriental Research(ASOR),3301North Charles Street,Baltimore,MD 21218.Printed by Cadmus JournalServices,Baltimore,MD. OF
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o Po D o (LI[czI~~czw'71 L-o Qto Portrait Master
of
Scholar
a
with
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Global
Perspective By MeirLubetskiand ClaireGottlieb WHEN THEQUALITIES THEPRINCE, ABBIJUDAH DESCRIBING OFTHE
eminent Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah, compared the sage to a perfumer who takes his chest with him and enters a city. The townsfolk come out and inquire, "Have you fine oil? Have you spikenard oil? Have you balsam oil?" and find that he has everything [they require]. So it was with R. Eleazar b. Azariah. When a disciple came to him and inquired about Scripture he enlightened him, about Mishnah he enlightened him, about Midrash or halakoth or 3aggadoth he enlightenedhim.When the discipledeparted he left laden with [intellectual]wealth and blessing (QAboth D'Rabbi Nathan 25b). Every student of Cyrus H. Gordon (the authors included) has had the unique privilege of having studied under the Rabbi Eleazar of our generation. Cyrus Gordon is a master teacher whose erudition encompasses the entire scope of ancient studies, from the Near Eastern to the Classical world and beyond. His command of all facets of a civilization, from its language to its history and culture, has made him a phenomenon in a class of "one."We have enjoyed his wisdom and friendshipformore than two decades.The longerwe know our teacher,a man faithful to his heritage,who is a combination of scholar and worldly gentleman, the more profound is our admirationand love for him. He is a special teacherand perhaps the founder of a school, having attained the "ism" attached to his surname during his lifetime.We studied with him in a constant state of awe and enthusiastically awaited every class as we, along with his other students and devotees, looked forward to hearing another "Gordonism." 2
59:1(1996) Biblical Archaeologist
CyrusH. Gordonposes in 1983.
The Early Years
Looking back, we ask ourselves what it was that created the rare combination of scholarly gentleman, mentor, and teacher par excellence, that characterizes Cyrus Gordon? A clue to the answer may be found in a story he shared with us. He recalled that in addition to his basic secular education his father,Dr.Benjamin L. Gordon,wanted him to acquire a good religious education and enrolled him in the school at Congregation Mikve Israel, the present national landmark on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. In addition to this, at the tender age of five, his father hired a private teacher,Mr. Abelson, to enhance his education in Hebrew and the biblical text. The child's curiosity was awakened by the biblical creation story,and he asked his teacherpenetrating questions about creation,never accepting general ambiguous answers. One evening, at dinner his father asked him what he had learned that day. "Oh father,"he said, "I learned some marvelous things today.I learned that babies grow inside women." Well,his "Victorian"mother was shocked and wanted to discharge Mr.Abelson immediately, but his father assured her that he would speak to the teacher and tell him that the lad was too young to learn about these delicate matters.The literal interpretationof the biblical text could wait a little longer.
Roland G. Kent, a master of classics and Indo-European linguistics, who also taught Old Persian. In addition, he took graduatecoursesin Hebrew,Aramaic,Arabic,Assyrian,Ethiopic, Sumerian, Hittite, and Akkadian, along with comparative Semitics. His interest was not limited to ancient languages alone. He resolved to acquireproficiency in six European languages simultaneously and learned French,Italian,Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Norwegian by devoting one hour a day to each language and then reading appropriate texts to reinforcehis competence (Marblestone1994:15). Veryfew scholars today can boast of such fortitude and erudition! Although Gordon remembers all of his mentors as extraordinary,he considers JamesA. Montgomery (1866-1949),Max Leopold Margolis (1866-1932),and William Foxwell Albright (1891-1971)as the triumvirate who influenced him most significantly.
Montgomery
A special relationship was forged between Montgomery and Gordon. The teacher treated the disciple as a son and Exegesisin theVulgate supervised his doctoral thesis, "Rabbinic Proverbs." felt that with his background in of Montgomery and Semitic Hebrew, Classical, languages, Gordon would be able to understand Rabbinics. It was a difficult task, but if Montgomery thought he was capable of completing it, Gordon was determinedto fulfill his mentor'sexpectations.Gordon says,
Along with Max Margolisand W. E Albright,JamesAlan Montgomerywas one of Gordon'smost significantmentors.Gordon wrote a "BAPortrait"on his teacher who "heads my brief list of scholarsand gentlemen" (BA46:3 [1983]:187-189).
Mr.Abelson stayed on and his young disciple's search for the precise meaning of the biblicaltextnever ceased.This quest became his mission in life. In later years he would introduce one of his books with this cri de cceur(cry of the heart): "the truth of primary sources has a way of triumphing in due time over the fallacies current in secondary literature"(Gordon 1965:5). A Scholar'sEducation During his high school years the young Philadelphian studied Latinand Greekto preparehimself for advanced studies in college. He entered the University of Pennsylvania in the autumn of 1924,majoring in Hebrew.At the same time he studied at Gratz College, and in 1926he graduated as a certified teacher of Hebrew and Judaica.He received his A.B. in 1927,his M. A. in 1928,and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1930at the ripe age of twenty-two. While developing proficiencyin the Semitic as well as the classical languages, he was privileged to study under such noted scholars as Solomon Zeitlin, who taught him Talmud, Ephraim A. Speiser, who trained him in Assyriology, and
When I accepted his suggestion that I write on the rabbinic influences on Jerome'swritings,he and I were echoing a precious historic process: the collaborationof Christians and Jews in probing the meaning of the Scriptures they shared and cherished (Gordon 1986:48). This training influenced Gordon'sphilosophy of teaching. St. Jerome recognized the impracticability of working from translations and the need to read a text in the original. Not afraid of committing heresy,he met with Palestinian Rabbis at night,benefiting from their knowledge and friendship.Later, as a teacher,Gordonwould counsel his studentsto do as Jerome did (and as he himself had done from his earliest childhood): find the most learned teachers, go to the original texts, and read the translations and commentaries only after the originals had been mastered. Montgomery was a senior professor when young Gordon became his disciple in the mid-1920s.Yearslater,when Gordon reached this status while teaching at NYU, he would say to his students, Montgomery taughtme to think young and healthy Great education and instruction are not necessarily realized throughbooks,but throughintimate contactwith a teacher over a period of time. Montgomery also advised a student to develop proficiency in related disciplines since these are usually the components that kindle creativity (private conversation). Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
3
Margolis
Professor Margolis possessed an extraordinarybent for Northwest Semitic linguistics.Under his tutelageGordonpolishedhis phenomenalcommandof languageand comprehension of grammaticalanalysis.Margolis symbolized the epitome of a serious scholar who strives to read and understand texts in their original form and context. He also proclaimed that while knowledge of secondary sources is important, the ultimate authority is always the original text.Margolis'greatest strength lay in philological analysis of the Hebrew Bible. In introducing his students to the fundamentals of Semitic grammar,he skillfully reduced the basic principles of biblical Hebrew grammarto several charts and formulae.These were intended to be used in place of the standard grammarbooks. The professor stressed the fact that the meaning of a word or phrase in a biblicalpassage depended on the contextrather than the authorityof commentatorsand dictionaries.Not only was Gordonimpressedby this masterlinguist,but he embraced his approach completely and later transmitted it to generations of students. The mentor also became a living presence in our classes as Gordon related the anecdotes that Margolis used to tell his own students. Pointing out to us that most of what we acquire in a classroom is common knowledge, Gordon would quotehis reveredteachersaying:'As your knowledge is common, please make sure that your ignoranceis common and not private."
Experienceas an Archaeologist
Gordon's education was not just in the field of academics. He is perhaps the only living Near Easternarchaeologist who worked in the field with most of the early pioneers of archaeological research.Thus he links our generation to the great scholars of the past. When Gordon graduated, James Montgomery,who was president of ASOR, counseled him to go into archaeology. During his years at the University Gordon had taken archaeology courses with George Aaron Barton,who had made it clear to him that a person cannot learn archaeology from lecture courses alone. Field experience was essential. So, after teaching graduate courses on Assyrian RoyalAnnals and the Code of Hammurabi at the University of Pennsylvania from 1930 to 1931,Gordon decided to combine Warterund Sachen (words and deeds), as advised by his professorsMontgomery and Barton. He joined ASOR's expedition to Baghdad and Jerusalem as a field archaeologist and recorder.He participated in excavationsat TellBilla and TepeGawra in Iraq,near ancient Nineveh, under the direction of Ephraim A. Speiser, and Beth-Zur and Tell Beit Mirsim in Palestine, under the direction of William Foxwell Albright.'TepeGawrahad been a prehistoric fortress, and it was here that Gordon received training in neolithic and prehistoricarchaeology.The tell was composed of "askyscraper"of over twenty layers of stratification, the latest occupation dating to the fifteenth century and the earliest possibly dating from before the dawn of the fifth millennium. The value of this site was its stratification. All of the digging was done by local laborers who were 4
Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
prodded by their intelligent, though illiterate,local supervisors. In his role as recorderGordon gave serial numbers to the excavatedobjects,made drawingsof them,and describedthem. The expedition at Tepe Gawra also provided an opportunity for Gordon to improve his proficiency in the Nuzi dialect. He requested copies of the Nuzi tablets from Chiera and while some of the othermembersof the expeditionrelievedthe boredom of the evening by card-playing and drinking, Gordon enlivened his nights with the reading of Nuzi texts.This experience stood him in good stead as he later published many articles on Nuzi grammar and culture and influenced many of his students to pursue Nuzi studies. (See articleby Martha Morrison in this issue.) TellBilla is an unusually large mound where the archaeologists dug up two Assyrian settlements, one dating to the thirteenth and one to the ninth century BCE, corresponding to two distinct strata. The earlier strata yielded exciting and important data.The group unearthed some rare clay tablets of the Middle Assyrian period that gave the name of TellBilla as Shibaniba, for the Nineveh gate opening onto the road to Tell Billa was called the Shibaniba gate in antiquity. A third level was discovered to be Hurrian. Here excavatorsfound a cylinder seal that was apparently a Hurrian heirloom as it dated back to the fourth millennium BCE.This was a lesson for Gordon who learned that even in antiquity objects could be handed down from generationto generationfor hundreds of years (Gordon 1957:54-5). In September 1931,between his first summer expedition in Palestine and his first winter expedition in Iraq,Gordon contributed to the study of Aramaic incantation bowls from Talmudic Babylonia. The study took place at the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul.Since then, he has published the texts of incantation bowls that he has assembled from museums on fourcontinents.(See articleby Edwin M.Yamauchi in this issue.) The study of magic texts was augmented by the opportunity to live with the GnosticMandeansof Iraqand the Yezidis, who are known as "Devil Worshippers,"and learn about the surviving religions. He also learned the fallacy of assuming that the past is dead. Rather,the past still lives in and with us, whether we recognize it or not. Living societies and ancient incantations can furnish an excellent synthesis for a young archaeologistseeking to understand the world of demons that many believe affect our daily lives. WithAlbrightin Palestine Exploration in the Near East brought Gordon into close contactwith the most prominent names in the field. From1931 to 1935 he excavated intermittently with William Foxwell Albright. His first assignment with Albright was at BethZur during the summer of 1931.Just as Montgomery formed Gordon'sbroad knowledge as a scholar and a humanist, and Margolis provided him with the excellent grammatical foundationnecessary for future philologicalresearch,Albright now offered him the historical perspective of Near Eastern and biblical studies. His association with Albright spanned seven years (1931-38) and included, in addition to teaching
chronology of the pottery. Albright was very generous in giving his time to the novice excavators. He spent hours every day explainingthe strataand phases of the excavationand inductedthe youthful researchersinto the most meticulous ceramic research of the day. His knowledge of Palestiniantopography and the ceramics of the individual sites was uncanny. One of the boons of the TellBeit Mirsim campaignwas the staff thatAlbright had assembled.Some of the young scholars that Gordon had the opportunity to work with were Nelson Glueck and John Bright.Another valuable outcome of the Beth-Zurexperiencewas Gordon's opportunity to meet Benjamin Mazar, whose biblical knowledge was invaluable to the expedition. This was the TellBeit Mirsimcamp (n.d.)and staff of the fourth field season in 1932. Standingare (I.to r.) beginning of an ongoing personal and WilliamGad (surveyor),CyrusGordon, A. HenryDetweiler(architect),John Bright,W. F. professional friendship.2 ProfessorAlbright'schance comment Stinespring,Eugene Liggitt,VernonBroyles,and Aage Schmidt.Seated in front are:J. L.Kelso (assistantdirector),W. F.Albright(director),M. G. Kyle,and Nelson Glueck.Gordonhad during the Beth-Zurarchaeologicalexcavation helped shape young Gordon's previouslyworked with Albrightat Beth Zur,and he attributedhis turn towards Ugaritic studiesto Albright'sadvice. career."Everystudent,"he said, "would do well to work on Ugaritic tablets."In later years Gordon would attribute his leading position in Ugaritic studies to the indelible impression of this advice. Albright foresaw the inevitability of the importance of Ugariticto Old Testament scholarship (Gordon 1986:54). WithWoolleyat Ur During the early part of 1932Gordon received a memorable assignment with Major(laterSir)C.LeonardWoolley,who was conductingone of his last campaigns at Ur.Woolley needed an epigraphist to read the Sumerian inscriptions he had unearthed.Gordonwas summoned from Tell Billa and Tepe Gawra and had the good fortune to be present when the royal tombs were still being unearthed. He witnessed the laborers carrying out objectsof lapis lazuli, gold, and other precious gems from Sumerian burials datingbackto EarlyDynastictimes (2800 to 2300 BCE).The graves yielded finds of exquisitebeauty such as elegantlyshaped vessels, golden helmets, shields, daggers and research, an intimate contact with the archaeology of of the highest artistic craftsmanship and quality, as well as Palestine. Gordon once remarked that he learned to have musical instruments (Gordon1957:68-9). The artifactsbore evihim with students from who introduced dence of and to cultural with foreign connections commercial Albright, patience the painstaking aspects of ceramic research at Tell Beit Mir- countries at a very early period. Woolley'sfinds at Ur opened sim, where the renowned archaeologist established a model up a great and new chapter in the history of Sumerian art, Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
5
testifying to their highly developed culture (Gordon1936:71). The method Woolley employed to reconstructthe chronology of the burials is known as the "group method." He only reckoned with graves that were at least five superimposed one on the other. Assuming that the lower grave was the earlier burial he skillfully attempted to establish a chronology based on stratigraphicevidence. WithPetrie in Philistia Gordon'sPalestinian experiences with Sir Flinders Petrie exposed him to another approach to solving chronological problems. The British archaeologist theorized that ceramic typology and stylistic features of unearthed artifacts might be clues to dating a stratum.Gordon considers Sir Flinders as one of the greatest of the early archaeologists. Although he was not an academician, Gordon classifies him as an "original genius." His vision to excavate the settlements in the Philistine plain, because the Philistines were Aegean masters of the jeweller'sart,proved remarkablesince he found gold in staggering amounts. He had been digging with extraordinary success at Tell el Ajjul, south of Gaza. The site was occupied during the Middle and LateBronzeAge.Among the finds were no less than five hundred scarabseals of local Canaaniteworkmanship from the Egyptian Empire period. But the most sensational discovery was a vast hoard of gold objects that had been twistedinto lumpsby an ancientsmelterwho intended to reuse the gold.SirFlindersbent the artifactsback into shape. Of signal importance was a plaque of the GreatMother Goddess, similar to the Ras-Shamra example. There were also exquisite torque earrings that,according to Petrie,were made of real Irish gold, known for its exceptional beauty (Gordon 1936:32).What luck for the history of art that the smelter had not carried out his plan! SirFlinders,while discussing the Tellel Ajjulsite with Gordon, commented that only idiots came looking for the Bible in Philistia. He maintained that archaeologists should know that where there is a high standard of spiritual living, there is a low level of materialpossessions and vice versa.This is why he found the gold-and not the Bible-in Philistia. Gordon believes that it was more than mere luck that led to the finding of so much gold by one excavator. Frenchfrom the French After his short tour of duty with Woolley at Ur, Gordon returned to Tell Billa by train where he chanced to meet M. Andrd Parrot,a young French archaeologist who later made spectacular discoveries at Mari on the Euphrates.Since Gordon'sknowledge of Frenchwas limited to reading, and Parrot did not then speak English,they spent ten hours togetherconversing in Arabic.Aware of his language deficiency,Gordon decided to take the advice of his mother who always told him that "anythingworth doing was worth doing well" (Gordon 1941:Dedication page). That spring, during his break, he went to Parisand lived with a Frenchfamilyin orderto develop fluency in French. Excavating at Ader The ASOR excavations in Baghdad had to be suspended for the year 1933-34 because of an uprising of the Assyrian 6
BiblicalArchaeologist59:1 (1996)
Christians and their subsequent massacre at the hands of the Iraqi army.Gordon thereforeremained in Palestine and had the opportunity to join a small expedition led by William E Albright.In November 1933they travelled to the site of Ader in Transjordan.Their mission was to excavate a temple that dated from about 1800BCE.Since the expedition was so small, it was necessary for everyone to pitch in with all of the tasks.Gordonbecame one of the two cooks for the expedition, a chore he had never done before or since (Gordon 1957:30). Professionally,he supervised the excavationof the BronzeAge area of the site. WithGlueckin the CArabah In the spring of 1934Gordonjoined Nelson Glueck on two expeditions in Transjordan:the biblical lands of Edom and Moab.Most of the travelingwas done on camel-backat a cost of one dollar per day per camel. They slept in sleeping bags in the open air and were protected from harm by the law of the desert.A few days into the expedition,Glueck came down with malaria-like symptoms. Since Gordon was the son of a physician,he was considered the doctorof the group.He diagnosed the patient,anticipatedhis malarialattacks,and treated him with quinine. Glueck recovered (Gordon 1957:17-21). Glueck'smethod was to investigate the surface finds of many ancient sites from different periods and recreate the occupationalhistoryof the entirearea.Thus,the singlesite excavation system was supplemented by Glueck's regional survey. To do this they rode the camels along the ancient routes and recorded the old forts, settlements, and the caravansaries.It became clear to the surveyorsthat in the Nabataeantimes the CArabahwas alive with commercial traffic,though laterit was deserted and lost importance.At Khirbet Nahas and similar sites Glueck and Gordon discovered large groups of smelting ovens near mines of copper-bearingstone. Heaps of slag indicated that copper had been smelted there.At the time Glueck felt that he had found King Solomon'smines (Gordon1957:2022; Pratico1985).
The University Years
Although Gordon'searly years in the field were satisfying, he decided to forgo his promising careerin field archaeology and devote himself to teachingand research.While he wanted to keep his hand in field work, he realized that with his academic knowledgeand archaeologicalbackgroundhe had more to offer as a teacher than as a "digger."Discovering and deciphering ancient texts was exciting, but their message had to be conveyed to the next generation of scholars. The written parchment,the clay tablet,and the hieroglyphic papyrus: all tell a story.Even the mute potsherd could open its mouth to relatethe history of bygone times. Gordonwas in the forefront of the scholarswho fathomed the meaning of the artifactsand shared their findings with the academic community. However,his initiationinto academiawas not easy He had to pay a heavy price in spiritual torment for trying to take his place among the already established scholars whom he had considered his mentors.Twoincidents illustratethis point. The first occurred in 1931 while he was still working as an
archaeologist at TellBilla under the direction of his teacherof Assyriology,E.A. Speiser.Gordon wanted to prepare a beginner'smanual of Akkadianbased on Hammurabi'slaws.Speiser prohibitedthe undertakingunder the pretextthat"onlya senior scholar should write an elementary book in any field."Since he had already asked Speiser for his permission, Gordon did not want to oppose his authority.He abandoned the project and determined that from that time onward he would not seek the advice of any of his superiors on any project he intended to undertake (Gordon 1986:71). The second incident involved Albright, who had now begun to devote himself to teaching and researchand offered Gordon a position as a teaching fellow at Johns Hopkins University from 1935to 1938.Gordon was in the process of writing a manual designed for biblical scholars. his UgariticGrammar He had begun the work in Sweden, where a fellowship of the American-Scandinavian Foundation had brought him and affordedhim the opportunity to deepen his knowledge of the Scandinavian languages.Albright was displeased when Gordon informed him that the work was already underway and would soon be published. The senior professor vehemently opposed the project, telling Gordon that the task was presumptuous and impossible.When the ground-breaking opus was published by the Pontifical Biblical Institute in 1940Albright, the "Dean of Biblical Studies," was gracious enough to confess his mistake in print and hail the work as an achievement of singular importance (Gordon 1986:54-5).3 Gordon'ssubsequent publication of his three-volume Ugaritic in 1965furtheropened the door to Ugariticstudies for Textbook many prospective scholars. The trilogy shed new light and understanding on biblicalinterpretationand broughtthe relationship of the Ugariticlanguage and literatureto the Hebrew Bible into full focus. Albright's initial disapproval was the deciding factor in Gordon'sdecision to leave Johns Hopkins. In 1938he moved on to Smith College,where he taught Hebrew and ancient history,though his primary task was preparing Sumerian and Babyloniantabletsin the college collection for publication.He was also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. WorldWarII Gordon'steaching careerwas interruptedby the outbreak of WorldWarII.In 1942-43he served as an officerin the United States Army Signal Corps. His major forte as a cryptographer led to his work in the intelligence service. There he founded America'sfirst cryptanalytic unit to decipher the Near East intercepts in Arabic,Turkish,and Persian.After his unit had decoded all the Near East systems, Gordon requested service in the PersianGulfCommand.From1943to 1945he was assigned to the Office of TechnicalInformationwith varied tasks including advising the Commanding General on Near East affairs. His service was invaluable to the military, and he is now a colonel in the United States Air Force Reserve. The war experience reinforced Gordon'sperception that all of the human race belongs to one world. While this may seem to be a banal notion today,it was not clear to Americans
who, in the early decades of this century, had been reared on the principles of isolationism. His world view permeated his future writings. The Road to Egyptology After the war Gordon returned to his native city,Philadelphia,wherehe became Professorof Assyriologyand Egyptology at Dropsie College, teaching there from 1946 to 1956.Gordon's interest in Egyptology had been launched many years previously while he was still a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.At that time he decided that he needed a course in Egyptian to round out his knowledge of ancient texts and enrolled in a course at Dropsie College taught by Nathaniel Reich, a specialist in Demotic. Cyrus Gordon and SamuelNoah Kramerwere the only studentstakingthe course. The course lasted for three sessions, after which Gordon continued to study Egyptian on his own. He succeeded so well that many years laterhe was appointed Reich'ssuccessor at Dropsie college. As Professor of Assyriology and Egyptology, Gordon taught at least one course in Egyptian every semester for ten years (privateconversation).He realized that Egyptian was a significant link to understanding the cultural interrelationshipof the communities of the Mediterraneanlittoral.It was clear to him that Canaaniteand Hebrew literature had roots in the Egyptian legacy,and Ugaritic literatureprovided evidence of an Egypto-Semitic/Eteocretan [pre-Greek peoples of Crete]connection.The fact that the assertion of the interconnection of these three cultures altered the course of biblical studies is now widely accepted. The Brandeis Years In 1956Gordon moved on to Brandeis University,where he was appointed Professor of Near Eastern Studies. Recognizing Gordon'serudition, gift for organization, and unique approach, the University decided to inaugurate the Department of MediterraneanStudies under his chairmanship.There he assembled a diverse staff of remarkablytalented teachers and trained a cadre of future scholars in all the branches of Mediterraneanstudies.He had the satisfactionof implementing in the classroom the very ideas he had published: Old TestamentPalestine was subject to many influences: Canaanite,Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hittite,Arabian,etc. It remains to add another majorfactor:the Mediterranean. Standardbooks such as ANETcompletelyomit the Mediterranean factor.The Minoan, Mycenaean and Homeric texts have every bit as much bearing on the OT,as the religious, economic and literarytextsof Mesopotamia,Anatolia and Egypt. Moreover,it is precisely the Mediterranean factor in the OTthat links the Biblewith the dawn of civilization in Europe (Gordon 1963). Minoan Linear A Gordon considers the identification of Minoan Linear A as Northwest Semitic to be the most important breakthrough of his career.Minoan had been on his mind since 1931when he took his first ocean voyage eastward.The ship was passing the northern part of Crete. Standing on the deck, he told a 59:1(1996) Biblical Archaeologist
7
group of friends that he considered the deciphermentof the Minoan inscriptions to be the greatestchallengeto future scholars.Embarrassedby the chiding of one of his friends who told him he was talking like an adolescent, he did not mention it again, but it was always in the back of his mind. The impetus to work on it came to him in 1952-3when MichaelVentrisdeciphered Mycenaean LinearB as Greek (privateconversation; see also Ventrisand Chadwick1956).Gordon published the results of his research on Minoan LinearA in 1957without consulting anyone.The establishedscholarly communitycastdoubtson Gordon'sfindings,causingundue delayin the acceptance of his identificationof Minoan LinearA as a Semitic language.Gordon'sMinoan identification was reconfirmed by the discovery of the Eteocretan-Greekbilinguals fromDeros,Crete,in the early1960s.4 An enormous cache of tablets-a commercialarchive-fallen from their shelves and (See articleby GaryA. Rendsburgin this uncovered in the excavationsof TellMardikh(Ebla).Gordonestablishedthe Centerfor Ebla Researchat New YorkUniversitywhere he had gone to teach in 1973. issue.) The sea trip had reminded Gordon that the Biblelands arepartof the Mediterraneanworld.More- other Syriansites in 1983.He had alreadyconcurredwith other over, the material findings in the archaeological excavations scholars that the language and culture of Eblabelonged to the of Palestine,climaxed by his Ugaritic studies, verified the fact Semitic grouping. Although many isoglosses connected the that there was intercourse between the lands of the Greeks languageto that of EastSemiticAkkadian,Gordonnoted many and the Hebrews from at least the second millennium. Gen- isoglosses connecting it to Northwest Semitic and even to esis 9:27 and 10:2-5 demonstrate not only knowledge of Egyptian (Gordon 1990:127-39; 1992:1.). Ionia and the Greek Isles,but also inform us that Japhethwas Retirement? ProfessorGordon's"official"retirementcame in 1989at the destined to be the ancestor of the Aegean world. Many of his later writings focused on the Hebrew-Greek nexus (Gor- age of 81,and he is now emeritus professor at both Brandeis don 1965;see also article by Louis Feldman in this issue). University and New YorkUniversity. Actually Gordon has In his work on Minoan, Gordon was following a pattern never considered himself retired and served as Visiting Prothat he would duplicate time and time again. He would pub- fessorin the Departmentof Asian Studies at DartmouthCollege lish his research, thereby disseminating his findings and during the spring of 1990.During the spring of 1993he was and refine the further to his develop disciples Visiting Professor of Maritime Civilizations at the University encouraging to "new horizons." of Haifa. He continues to lecture and publish insightful and went on he himself while theory, New YorkUniversity provocative articles on a regular basis. Gordon taught at Brandeis until 1973 and then moved Gordon as a Teacher on to New YorkUniversity as Professor of Hebraic Studies. in the ancient in the forefront of the latest As a teacher,Cyrus Gordon stands in a league of his own. developments Always Near East,he soon inaugurated the Center for EblaResearch, He more than embodies all the characteristicshe so admired serving as its director.Gordonrealized that "Eblaiteis expand- in his distinguished teachers.He gave his students the tools to be able to be proficient in practically every area of ancient ing our knowledge of the language and culture of the Holy Landback to the EarlyBronzeAge,a millennium beforeUgarit, studies by providing courses in Akkadian, Egyptian, Copand nearlya half millennium beforeMinoan"(Gordon1994:18). tic, Aramaic, Sumerian, Hittite, Eblaite,Nuzi Studies, Arabic, All qualified scholars were invited to participatein studies at Hebrew, and Ugaritic. Not only were his students equipped to do in-depth work in their chosen areas of specialization, the Ebla Center. In addition to the Ebla seminars,Gordon arrangedannual they were also enabled to navigate the related fields. Gordon shared the fruits of his prolific mind with his stuconferences at which prominent scholars in the field updated the students and faculty on the progress of Eblaresearch.The dents. He taught that the entire ancient world, its culture, Center publishes the Eblaitica series, of which three important art,and literature,including the Hebrew Bible,were connected. Since we now have a rich legacy of written materialthat antevolumes have already appeared. Gordon visited Ebla and 8
59:1(1996) Biblical Archaeologist
dates the literatureof the Hebrews and the Greeks by over a millennium, Gordon utilized these texts to the maximum to illustrate the uniqueness and originality of the insight of the biblicalauthors.This element provided fertileground on which the students' knowledge of biblical vocabulary,poetic structure, comparative philology, and cultural history grew and developed. He forced his students to delve into the hidden meanings of the texts,asking them, "What can we learn about the Bible from other ancient Near Eastern literature?" Gordon constantlyemphasized the importanceof Ugaritic to Old Testament scholarship (Gordon 1994:10).In his Bible seminar Gordon would quote the late Professor U. Cassuto, who succinctly portrayed the Hebrew Bible as "new wine in old bottles." The language and literary technique were old since Israeladopted them after the settlement and employed them as conveyorsof new messages.Yetnowhere are the ideas of the Bible more unique than when they are contrasted with the paganistic values of Canaan as exhibited in the Ugaritic texts. (See article by David T Tsumurain this issue.) In class he employed every type of document, from historicalto administrativeto mythological,to illustratehis points and show how much could be learned about the history of an era from the texts.And each one had to be read in the original! In the field of philology he taught students to recognize the chronological changes in languages by the study of grammar and vocabulary.He introducedhis studentsto comparative Hebrew linguistics, emphasizing the impact of Ugaritic and otherCanaanitedialects.Studentslearnedhow Egyptiandeveloped from early to late to Coptic, as well as the differences in the Nuzi dialect from the Akkadian of the annals and the mythology.Nothing was omitted for the student who wanted to learn. Cyrus Gordon went beyond the call of duty to enable students to achieve their highest potential both intellectuallyand academically.When several students wanted to learn to read Egyptian hieroglyphic texts in the original, although this was not part of the curriculumin his departmentat New YorkUniversity,he taught the subject on his own time. Realizing that it would add another important dimension to their scope of knowledge, he gave a class one day a week, without compensation, for anyone who wanted to participate. The only requirement was that one work hard, do quite a bit of homework, and come to class prepared. In these classes Gordonstressednot only the language,but the impactof Egyptian culture and literature on that of the rest of the ancient world, especially on the area of Canaan.5 Students remember Gordon's warmth and humor. His classes were provocative,stimulating and highly exhilarating. Every session was an academic adventure. Writing a dissertation was a unique and unforgettable experience.He scrutinized each one with infinite attention to every detail, taking pains to eliminate a superfluous word or to "digup" the most descriptiveidiom or adjective.His concern became a legend among the students and a source of much mirth as writers hunted for the "impossible expression" in order to please him.
Gordon'sadvice was not limited to academic questions. He was a guidance counsellor,a careeradvisor,a mentor,and a friend. He always gave his students practical advice for advancing professionally. In addition to his often repeated maxim,"goto the originaltext,"another of his pragmatic"Gordonisms"was,"Thinkwhat you want,butdon'tpublishanything controversial until after you have tenure." If the greatest pleasure a teachercan have is to see his students succeed,then Gordon'scup must be brimming over with joy. He has trained more than eighty Ph.D's, approximately sixty of whom are productive and leading scholars in major universities all over the world. They teach in fifteen to twenty differentdisciplines including Semitics,Bible,CuneiformStudies, Egyptology,Archaeology (including MarineArchaeology), History and Museum Studies, and other related areas. His legion of studentsspans more than a generation.GordonYoung, the son of Gordon'sfirst Ph. D. graduate, G. Douglas Young, followed in his father'sfootsteps and years later earned his own Ph. D. as a student of Cyrus Gordon. Gordon always enjoyed the stimulation of the interchange of ideas with his students. He took pride in their successes and magnanimously recognized any indebtedness to their ideas or suggestions in print.This was one of his ways of helping the student achieve recognition and advancement. Recognition Gordonfsliteraryoutputis mind-boggling,as he has authored more than six hundred publications, including over twenty books or monographs on the Mediterranean and the Near East. His publications span an entire ecumene.Yet for many years Gordon deemed it his destiny to be a resident alien in the academiccommunity.The rejectionof some of his groundbreaking research by his peers made him feel that he was an outsider ratherthan a full-fledged participant.His achievements and reputationas a linguist and archaeologist/historian did not bring him the regard that he merited. Perhaps this neglect resulted from the fact that althoughhe is familiarwith the ideological struggles among the various biblical schools, he has always kept himself aloof from them, concentrating instead on the linguistic aspects of scholarship and the overall scheme of history. It may be because he was never afraid to tread the unknown. His daring insight opened new vistas in Bible research.His philosophy was and is: Pioneers open fields and leave the refining process to less inspired but more meticulous successors.I shall endeavor to render justice to the refining process, but my sympathies are squarely with the pioneers, and against their destructive critics (Gordon 1982:x). Our teacherhas always been a master refinerand a dauntless pioneer. Today it is clear that Gordon's lifelong pursit of new vistas has been justified. The academic community now acknowledges that he stands head and shoulders above his detractors.In 1975the RoyalAsiatic Society elected him as an honorary fellow for his contributions to Ugaritic,ComparaBiblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
9
tive Semitics, and Minoan. In June 1993 he was invited to lecture on his "SixtyYearsof Ugaritology" at the College de France. Boston Hebrew College granted him the degree of "D.Litt."(honoriscausa)on June 11,1995.He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Jewish Research. Students and peers have honored him with Festschrifts,each commemorating a different milestone in his life (Brandeis 1962; Hoffner 1973; Rendsburg 1980). New Horizons One of the most meaningful events in Gordon'slife took place in Chicago in November 1994when he was honored at a special dinner and program at the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical LiteratureAnnual Meeting. The program was entitled, "Scholarfor All Seasons-A Tributeto Cyrus H. Gordon."The reception hall was overflowing with admirers, relatives, friends, teachers, and students. Rising to his feet, his emotion visible, Cyrus Gordon addressed the assembly.Without a note in his hand, he recalled his earliest beginnings, his disappointments, and his glorious successes. He acknowledgedthe contributionsof the old and gave advice and encouragement to the young. Typicalof his never-ending search for truth,he outlined new vistas for scholarly research and challenged others to pursue them. He maintained that unless we reckon with the nautical dimension, there can be no real sense of the history of antiquity. He also challenged scholars to refute his specific findings of Atlantic crossings prior to Columbus and the Vikings. Moreover,he informed the audience that since 1987he has been collaborating with Sinologists who are trying to provide an explanation for the similarityof twenty two Chinese calendricgraphsdating from about 1200 BCE,several of which have characters shaped as Ugaritic cuneiform letters. They may also have an alphabetic function. This research links the Near and the Far East and expands the concept of global diffusion. Gordon'swords were simple and direct and came from his deepest personal conviction. One sensed the tremendous seriousness of a scholar'sscholar,and one was fascinated for a moment by the perception of the majesty of life, when wisdom becomes inseparable from dignity and excellence. Scholarship will gain immeasurably if researchers follow in Cyrus H. Gordon'scourageous footsteps,open-mindedly welcoming fresh knowledge and ideas,and always on the lookout for "new horizons." Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore,ye soft pipes, play on; (JohnKeats,"Ode on a Grecian Urn")
Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Professor Cyrus Gordon for personally communicating to them much of the information in this paper.
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Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
Gordonand his wife Constance(Connie)seated for the banquet held by the NationalAssociationof Professorsof Hebrewat the 1994 annual meeting of the Societyof BiblicalLiteratureand the AmericanAcademyof Religion.The dinnercommemoratedGordon's eighty-fifth birthday.The occasionwas markedby the deliveryof a group of scholarlypapers,after which Gordonaddressedthe convocation.
seal of the son of King Jehoiakim mentioned in I Chr.3:22. 3 See Albright'sreview where he states,"Gordon's is of greater lasting significance UgariticGrammar for OT research than any dozen assorted recent commentaries taken together" (1941:438).In his review of Gordon's UgariticHandbook,Albright states, "We hope that the generous collaboration of the Pontifical Biblical Institute will make revisions of the mandbook possible from time to time, so that it will continue to hold the place in Canaanite studies that the dictionary and grammarof Gesenius hold in Hebrew"(1950). Albright' wish has more than come true.
Bullvaulting in Creteis capturedby this Minoanbronze figurine. Sumerianart appearsalso to depict bull-grapplingas a sport. In his 1962 volume, Before the Bible:The Common Backgroundof Greekand Hebrew Civilizations,Gordonargued that both manifestationsare reflexes of a common tradition. Gordon'smany books (overtwenty!) and hundredsof articleson all facets of ancient civilizationset a standardfor breadththat has hardlya rival.
4 Since Gordon's identification was confirmed others have tried to take credit for his findings. In an articlepublished by Dr.JanBest on the decipherment and interpretation of Minoan Linear A, the writer claimed that he and a team of scholars had succeeded in showing that the inscriptions were Semitic,closely related to Ugaritic.Not only did Best's work lack originality, but his presentation indicated weakness in handling the Semitic material (Best 1982;see response by Rendsburg 1982;Gordon 1984). s The authorsof this articleare especially indebted to Prof. Gordon since they have subsequently pursued an interest in the Egyptian impact on the Bible and have lectured and published articles on this subject.
Bibliography Albright, W E 1941 Review of UgariticGrammar by C. H. Gor-
don. Joural Literature 60:434-8. ofBiblical
1950 Review of Ugaritic Handbook by C. H. Gor-
don.Joural Literature 69:385-93. ofBiblical
Best, J.
1982 Talanta: Of theDutchArchaeoProceedings logicaland HistoricalSociety.Vol. 13: Supplementum Epimaphicum Mediterraneum. Middelie: Studio Pieter Mulier.
BrandeisUniversity,MediterraneanStudies Dept.
1962 A Student Presented toCyrusH GorTribute don.Waltham: Brandeis.
Notes 1 Gordon spent three winter campaigns at Tepe Gawra. It was at BethZur,however,that Clarence Fisher gave him his start in understanding field archaeology with his explanations of the work on the site. Fisher was an unrivaled master of excavating and of ceramic studies, though he has not won the recognition he deserves. 2 Mazar
pointed out that an impression of a seal of about the seventh century BCEreading, "Belonging to Ge'alyahu, son of the king," was a
Gordon, C. H. 1936 Buried Treasures of the Near East, Part I. Asia 36:28-33. 1941 TheLivingPast.New York:John Day Company. 1957 Adventuresin theNearestEast.London: Phoenix House. 1963 The Mediterranean Factor in the Old Testament. VetusTestamen-
9:19-31. tum,Supplements 1965 TheCommon andHebrew New York: Civilizations Background ofGreek W W. Norton. 1966 Evidencefor theMinoan.Ventnor,NJ: Ventnor Publishers. 1982 ForgottenScripts.New York:Basic Books. 1984 Reflections on the decipherment of Minoan. Orientalia53:453-
55.
BiblicalArchaeologist59:1 (1996)
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1986 ThePennsylvania Tradition ofSemiticsAtlanta:Scholar'sPress. 1990 Eblaiteand NorthwestSemitic.Pp.127-39in Eblaitica 2. Indiana: Eisenbrauns. 3.Indiana:Eisenbrauns. 1992 Introduction.P.1in Eblaitica 1994 TheBackgroundto JewishStudiesin the Bibleand in theAncient East.Shofar 12/4:1-46. Hoffner,H. A.,ed. 1973 Orientand Occident:EssaysPresentedto CyrusH. Gordonon the Occasion NeauKirchener: Verl,Butsonand ofHisSixty-fifth Birthday Bercker. Howard. Marblestone, 1994 FromHebrewand Ugariticto Cretanand Eblaite.Hadoar 74:11-1894,pp.14-17;12-2-23.(Hebrew). Pratico,G. D. ExcavationatTellel Kheleifeh:A Reap1985 Nelson Glueck's1938-1940 Schoolsof Oriental Research 259:1-32. of theAmerican praisal.Bulletin Rendsburg,G.A 1980 TheBibleWorld: New York:KTAV. EssaysinHonorofCyrus Gordon. H. LinearA. Journal 1982 On JanBest's"Decipherment"of Minoan of the AncientNearEastern Society14:79-87. M.Ventris,M. and Chadwick,J. in Mycenaean Greek.Cambridge:CambridgeUniver1956 Documents sity Press.
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Homer and The Rise of
the the
Near East: Greek Genius
The two outstanding examples of this new trend in classical studies pioneeredby ProfessorGordonareWalterBurkert, ATOXFORD The Orientalizing PROFESSOR OFGREEK NearEasternInfluenceon GreekC0dN HISINAUGURAL LECTURE ASREGIUS Revolution: ture the Archaic in 1936,E. R. Dodds urged classicists to learn "something in Early Age(1992),and Sarah Morris, Daedalos and the which Greek Art Greek at firsthand of thatworld backgroundagainst (1992).Most recently Ludwig KoeOriginsof culture arose and from which it was never completely iso- nen, in his presidential address in 1993 to the American lated save in the minds of classical scholars" (1936:11).In a Philological Association, warned that we can no longer look at early Greece in isolation from the Near East but admitted recent letter to me, Martin Bernal writes that he looks upon that "what is known to researchers,however,does not always in works seminal Cyrus Gordon, who pioneered composing and as "one of the reach the classroom, and the general public is hardly aware Near Eastern worlds, connecting the Greek that of our and most scholars the twentieth century." picture of ancient cultures and, in particular,of early original greatest Gordon's into Greek Levin has Professor As Saul culture,has undergone dynamic changes"(1994:1).The remarked, insight that to fact the Gilgamesh epic has been found not only in has supplied something unique Ugaritic mythical poetry has Hellenists: he Mesopotamia but this shown how also, to be sure in more form, fragmentary poetry is BCE in Asia Minor and akin to Greekepic in Palestine, and than any other that it was transliteratureSemitic that lated into Hurrian and,for matter; and Hittite,should more akin than what has come to have been a clue of Anatolian for us of the unity light of the literaturein IndoEast Mediterranean European world. languages (letter What has, I to author Nov. 13, other While believe, revolu1994). scholarshave purtionizedthesubject of East Meditersued mainly the of to the ranean influence are four the rediscovered Greece Bible, Ugaritic corpus upon relationship hypotheses which are the Professor Gordon has sensed the greater affinity of spirit One is the thesis that the increasingly gaining day. marked a Greek renaissanceand the specbetween Ugariticand Homeric poetry.It is interesting to note eighth century BCE thatclassicistsarenow coming aroundto his view of the Bronze ulationas to the roleplayedby the Near Eastin thatrenaissance. Age EastMediterranean,without,in most cases,fully acknowl- Second is the thesis that the Greeks acquired the alphabet from the Phoeniciansnot in the eighthcentury BCE but as early edging him. Most significantly, in the preface to the second as 1100 BCE. Third wrote is the edition of his EarlyGreece, to Milman Oswyn Murray prophetically: challenge Parry'stheory of Homer as an oral poet and the impact of a Near Easternwritten tradition of epic upon Homer. Fourth is the increasing Finally, an observation about the future of my subject, which is the formation of Western culture. Each year it recognition that Hesiod, Homer's alleged younger contembecomes more obvious that thereis no such thing as Greek porary,was influenced by Near Easternmotifs.At last,literary history, as distinct from Roman history,or the history of scholars,who generally do not work as easily across national the Phoenicians or the Etruscans. Seas unite more often frontiersas do archaeologists,are beginning to catchup. I wish than they divide, and the Greeks discovered themselves here to comment on recent scholarship pertaining to the four when they discoveredtheirsea and the peoples which sur- theorieswhich have challengedthe communis sensuswith regard round it. It is not Greece but the Mediterranean world to the connection of the Near East with the rise of the Greek which possesses a history and a destiny of its own genius. (1983). Establishing Influence First,a word about method. We must avoid falling into the
By Louis H. Feldman
The impetus for the eighth-century
Greek
renaissancemay have been contact with Near Easternculture,includingepic literature,just as contact with the Eastmay have served as one of the catalystsfor the Renaissancein the fourteenth century CE.
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were bilingual poets who, in the second millennium wcr,had trap of parallelomania.If we wish to assert the likelihood of that it was it to been able to translate from Akkadian to Hurrian to Hittite. establish is influence, chronologiimportant and to have there were bilingual experts already in the third contact occurred for commercial Indeed, cally possible that such contact was considerable and over a period of millennium, translating from Sumerian to Eblaite and from time, the implication being that cultural contact generally fol- Sumerian to Akkadian, among other languages, and some lows traderoutes This has surelybeen established;forexample, of them may have been poets, as Hallo has suggested (letter to author Dec. 6,1994). we know that many Achaean merchants and craftsmen lived at Ugarit. Secondly, the literary material must have existed at the time of the commercialcontact.The argument goes that The Greek Renaissance In 1981a ground-breakingsymposium was held in Athens, since there are striking similarities between the art, archithe Achaean and the the theme of which was the Greek renaissance of the eighth of and administration tecture, palaces such as Mari century BCE(Higg 1983).The participantsof that symposium non-Greekcentersof the second millennium BCE, on the Euphrates and Ugarit in Syria, the cultural influence agreed that the so-called DarkAges in Greek history between the twelfth and eighth centuries BCEwere hardly as dark as may well have included poetry (Kirk 1962:106).Thirdly,the actual literaryand other culturalparallelsmust be sufficiently they are generally regarded.Still, the eighth century marked unique to fulfill a rigorous set of relevant criteria. Fourthly, important new developments, which, indeed, form the the parallels,both in the realm of ideas and in actual language, background of the great Greek civilization with which we are all familiar.This is the century marked by a rapid growth of must be sufficiently numerous, complex, and detailed, and must involve centralfeatures of the materialbeing compared, population that led to the founding of colonies and the expanso as to rule out sheer chance (Penglase 1994:7).One impor- sion of commerce beyond the Aegean. There was a revival tant caveat: to show influence is not to show origin; and to of representational art, a marked progress in sacred and show origin is not to show fundamental influence. The works,abovecited,by Burkertand Morris,go fartoward establishing the fulfillment of these four criteria.Indeed, as early as the Mycenaean period (2000-1200 BCE),we find that a number of Near Eastern words have already entered the Greek language: Linear B kiton, "tunic,"Phoenician ktn; Linear B ku-ru-so, Greek khrusos,"gold,"Phoenician hrs;Linear B e-re-pa,Greekelephas,"ivory,"Hittite lahpa;Linear B ku-mi-no Greek kumninon, "cummin," Hebrew kmnmon;Linear B sa-sa-ma,Greek In Homer "sesame,"PhoenicianSrrnm. ssamnon, we find a number of words which appear to be derivedfrom the Near East:lis(Iliad15275) "lion,"Hebrew layig;gaulos(Odyssey9.223), "bowl,""bucket,"Ugaritic gl, Hebrew gullah;kaneon(Iliad9.217),"basket,"and kanon, "shield-grip"(Iliad13407),Ugariticqn,Punic and RoyalAramaicqn',Hebrewqaneh; knkos, Hebrewkarkm,Akka"saffron" M14348) (Iliad dian kurkanfi; othone,"fine tissue" (Odyssey In particular,we may Hebrew 7107), note thatPhoenician efti.n.craftsmenhad apparently settled in Crete,Euboea,Attica,and as early as Sardinia(Balmuth1992:215-27) and Greeks,in turn, the ninth centuryBCE; were trading with settlements on the How is coasts of Syria (Braun1983:5-14). it that Near Easternmotifs and scientific and mathematical information could Among the craftsmenmentioned in Homer-carpenters, seers, and singers-one special have been transmitted to the Greeks technique of seers is noteworthy:hepatoscopy.Thisdivinationprocedureoriginated in when there was an obvious language Mesopotamiawhence hailsthis inscribedlivermodel (FirstDynastyof Babylon).Hepatoscopy barrier? It would appear that some of spreadto the West in remarkablysimilarform and terminology.Itsdocumentation by Homer the Near Easternsettlers were bilingual suggests that contact with Near Easterntraditionsmay have played a role in the eighthpoets,just as in the Near Eastitself there centuryGreekrenaissance. 14
BiblicalArchaeologist 59:1 (1996)
~Qd6~4'QA~k9
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Comparingthe characteristictraits of the West Semiticscriptwith those of the earliest Greekinscriptions suggests that the Greeksborrowedthe alphabet by approximately 1100 BCE, centuriesbefore the eighth-centurydate of earliest known Greekinscriptions.The Izbet Sartaostracon(ca. twelfth centuryBCE; ca. 9 x 11 cm) displaysthe evolution of pictographicscriptinto linear letters.Thisappearsto be the stage of alphabeticdevelopment at which the Greeksadopted the Semiticalphabet. Borrowedthis early, the alphabet was availablefor use by Homer.
the alleged introdomestic architecture(Snodgrass 1971:416), duction of the alphabet,a revival of interest in the heroic age which culminated in the development of epic poetry, and, most probably,the formationof the polis.WasHomer the cause or the effect of these developments? A clue may be found in the fourth book of the Odyssey, which tells of Menelaus' wanderings to Cyprus,Phoenicia,Egypt,North Africa,and the western Mediterranean. Moreover, Burkert (1983a:115-20) has called attention to the passage in Homer (Odyssey173835) which mentionscraftsmen(8qgtoEpyoi), includingcarpenters, seers,and singers,noting striking resemblanceswith SumeroAkkadian incantationtexts.In particular,he notes one special technique of seers, namely hepatoscopy,which originated in Mesopotamia and which spread to the West in remarkably similar form and terminology.The impetus for the eighth-cenrenaissance,indeed, may have been contactwith Near tury BCE Eastern culture, including epic literature, just as contact with the East may have served as one of the catalysts for the Renaissance in the fourteenth century CE.
When Was the Alphabet Borrowed?
Anyone who has tried working with the clumsy syllabic script of LinearB will recognize how great a handicap it must have been to the development of literature.The usual view is that it was in the eighth century BCEthat the Phoenicians introduced the Greeks to the Phoenician alphabet, the so-
called Cadmean letters.Not only the names of the lettersand their orderbut also the formsof the earliest Greek letters are clearly indebted to West Semitic (Naveh 1982).1An eighth century BCEdate for this borrowingseems to be confirmed by the fact that no Greek inscriptionsusing the alphabethave been found from before that period (Carpenter193327)2Howeve;if Joseph Naveh is correct,a comparativeanalysis of the characteristic traits of the West Semitic script and those of the earliest Greek inscriptions indicates that the Greeksborrowed the alphabet approximately three centuries before the earliest known Greek inscription. This is a classic case of the danger of the ex silentioand reminds one of argwnenturm the story about the Greek and the Jew who were comparing notes. The Greek said: The other day they were digging in the Acropolisin Athens, and do you know what they found? Wires. And do you know what that proves? It shows that 2500 years ago, in the age of Pericles,the Greeks had telephones. Whereupon the Jew said: The otherday they were digging in the old city of Jerusalem, and do you know what they found? Nothing. And do you know what that proves? It shows that 3000 years ago, in the age of King Solomon, the Jews already understood the principle of the wireless. De nihilo nihilfit. We may, in fact, note that though it is generally conceded that the Hebrews adopted the alphabet in the twelfth or eleventh century BCE, only one Hebrew inscripGezer Calendar (which may, in fact, be tion-the Phoenician)-definitely dates from a period (the tenth cenThe fact that the tury BCE)earlier than the eighth century BCE. earliest Greek writing is from left to right or boustrophedon indicates that it is in accord with the proto-Canaanite script of the late twelfth century,that is, before right-to-left writing became standard ca.1050BCE(Naveh 1982:177-8). Moreover,on these earliest Greek inscriptions the sigma has the shape of the thirteenth- and twelfth-century vertical shin; the mu, with five equal strokes, is like the pictographic memresemwith a dot in the center,resembles the bling water;the omicron, an pictographic ayin, eye with the pupil, which is found in eleventh-centuryProto-Canaanite inscriptions(Naveh1982:181)3 The Phoenician script was a uniform one, whereas there are considerablelocal variationsin the Greekscript,which would seem to be due to its development over a period of time. Most of the writing materials,notably wax tablets and leather rolls, Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
15
It is more likely that alphabetic writing had been in existence for some time and that poets realized its advantages. It is no longer heresy to ask whether the importation of the Phoenician alphabet influenced Homer in more than merely providing the letter forms.In the story of Bellerophon in the Iliad(6.169),Burkert notes (1983b:52),the fatal letter is written on a folded tablet.5It is not written in clay; but this Homer as LiteratePoet If this dating of the borrowing of the alphabet is correct, is perfectlyconsonant with a wooden tablet,such as was used the so-called DarkAge of illiteracyin Greece must be revised. by the Phoenicians.Muhly observesthatall earlyGreekinscripwith only two possible tions down to approximately550 BCE, The fact that Phoenician inscriptions dating from the ninth century have been found in Cyprus and Sardinia and that exceptions,are in dactylic hexameterverse,indicating that the there was a Greek settlement in Phoenicia in the ninth cen- epics were well known (1990:93).EvenParry'sson, Adam Parry, tury indicates that the two peoples lived side by side during had come to the conclusion that the Homeric poems could the so-calledDarkAge.An inscriptionrecentlyfound at Qubur not have been composed without the aid of writing (1966:177el-Walaydah in the Negev, dating from ca. 1200 BCE(Cross 216).6Indeed,severalstudies have shown that the epithets used 1980:2-4);an ostraconfound at cIzbetSartah,east of TelAphek, by Homer are not meaningless formulas, as one finds in and an oralpoetry,but ratherdeliberatelyand carefullychosen (Whaldating from the twelfth century BCE(Naveh 1978:31-5); inscription found on a bowl unearthed in Crete near Knos- lon 1969;Austin 1975).Moreover,JasperGriffinnotes important sos, dating from the lateeleventh century BCE (Cross1980:15-17), differencesbetween the style and language of the speeches of have led Cross to conclude that they give added support to characters in the Iliadand the direct words of Homer himself (1986:36-57).Furthermore,in a highly sophisticated study, Naveh'stheory.All of this gives us reason to dispute Muhly' conclusion that during the period from 1000 to 700 BCEthere Shive criticizesParryfor working from lexicaof Homer rather was no direct involvement of Greece in the Near Eastand that than from the text itself. Shive concludes that far from being the Homeric epics developed in a period of virtual isolation thrifty (as an oral poet would be expected to be), Homer has been profuse, naming Achilles, for example,in the dative case from the eastern world (1970:19-64). alone in thirty-two ways. He concludes that "the underestiMoreover, Albright (1950:165)has noted that the word, mated factor of equivalence...allows the poet to choose the in Homer's which Odyssey appears puphtvo; ("papyrus"), (21.391)and which is derived from the name of the Phoeniphrase whose meaning is more suitable in the particularconRecent criticshave increasingly demonstrated text"(1987:130). cian city Byblus,was most probablyborrowed at a time when Homer's metrical and formulaic effects, his the the brilliance of and on Canaanmost was the port important city Byblus ite coast,namely from the early third millennium to the early patterns of imagery and theme, his use of simile (Scott 1974), eleventh century BCE.After that date, Byblus lost its preemi- and his narrativestrategies (Hobka 1991:472).Finally,a glance at the extensiblesheet at the end of Whitman'sbook on Homer nence to Sidon and Tyre.If this is so, as Albright concluded, (1958)indicates,most remarkably,that the six major episodes we need no longer hesitate to admit the continuity of the tradition of writing in the Greece of the early Iron Age.4If of Book 24 of the Iliadcorrespond precisely to the six major the alphabet was borrowed by the Greeks from the Phoeniepisodes of Book 1,except that they are in precisely inverse Homeror his syndicate order.This hardly seems like the work of an illiterateoralpoet. ciansas earlyas the eleventhcenturyBCE, or his scribes may well have used Since the epoch-mak.it. ing articles by Milman Parry (1971),itheprevalent view has Homer and Near EasternEpics On the contrary,the Homeric poems, in their deliberate been that Homer,genius though he was, was an illiteratebard, seem to have much more in common with the various formuan who as oral organization, manipulated poet operating laic expressionsby numerous permutationsand combinations. epics of Mesopotamia,all of which were written,and with traIf so, we may ask, what was his genius? He was nothing more ditions of writing and schools of scribes.Evenin epithets there between the are parallels, as noted by Burkert (1992:115-16), than an expert card player. Indeed, H. T.Wade-Gery, troubled by this,conjecturedthat the Greeksadopted the alphabet characteristicepithets of the chief charactersin the Akkadian for the expresspurpose of recordingthe Homericpoems (1952). epics-for example, the hero Enlil in Atrahasis1.8 (=Gilgamesh Albert Bates Lord,Parry'sco-worker in Yugoslavia,suggested 10-11)-and 11.16)and Utnapishtim "the far-away"(Gilgamesh that the very idea of recording the Homeric poems, as well as in the Ugaritic epic where Baal is "the rider of clouds." Epithe Cyclic epics and the works of Hesiod, came from obser- thets such as "knowledgeable in battle" (Gilgamesh4.6.30) and "good in shouting" (Gilgamesh are surely reminisvation of or from hearing about similar activity going on in 11.117) cent of Homer (Burkert 1992:116).Like Zeus in Homer, the the Near East (1960:156).Lord theorized that Homer dictated his poems to a person who could write (1953:124-34). moon-god Nanna in the Sumero-Akkadianprayerto the moon is referredto as "father,begetterof gods But, as Lloyd-Joneshas remarked, these theories raise more god (ANET1955:385-6) as in Homer "speakto their difficulties than they resolve (1992:56).In the first place, the and men."Charactersin Gilgamesh Burkert1992:116). own heart"(Gilgamesh There is a simnew invention would have been intelligible only to the 10.1.11ff; inventor and his immediate circle. ilar verbal parallelbetween command and performanceof an were not durable;hence, we have no Greekalphabeticinscriptions before the eighth century BCE. Writing,in all probability, was in the hands of a very small number of specialists, as it was in the Near East,and thus inscriptions did not appear on pottery.
16
59:1(1996) Biblical Archaeologist
Aol rc~'r ~
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Gilgameshand Enkidubattle wild beasts on this Akkadiancylinderseal impression.The earlycirculationof the GilgameshEpicinto the Aegean explainsthe relationshipsbetween it and the Greektraditionsembodied in Homer.The two share parallelepithets and stereotyped formulasas well as motifs.
act (Burkert1992:116-17). and Homer have Likewise, Gilgamiesli similar stereotyped formulas for sunrise and sunset (Burkert 1992:116). Parallel Motifs Furthermore,there are parallels in motifs between Near Easternepics and Homer.In the first place, as ProfessorGordon, followed by Considine and Walcot(Gordon 1962:180-81; Considine 1969:85-159;Walcot1970:273-5), has noted, there are between the Baal-Anath text137,where eight striking parallels Baal is restrained from doing violence to the envoys by the goddesses Anath and Ashtoreth, and the scene in the Iliad (1.188-222),when Achilles is about to slay Agamemnon, but is restrainedby the two goddesses, Athena and Hera.Again, the very lines with which the Akkadianstory of Gilgameshbegins might well apply to Odysseus: "He who saw everything (to the end) of the land, (who all things) experienced, (considered) all!The (hidden) he saw,(laid bare) the undisclosed. He brought report of before the Flood, achieved a long journey, It was not until 1969,seven weary and worn"(Hallo1991:173-81). the of Professor after Gordon'sBefjretheBible, years publication that the text of the Akkadian epic, Atrahasis,was for the first time published in anything approachingits entirety.(Thisepic dates from a few generations after the time of Hammurabi in the seventeenthcenturyBCE.) One strikingsuch parallelbetween Near Easternepic and Homer,as noted by Burkert(1992:90),8 is the casting of lots by the gods and the division of the universe into heaven, earth (including the underworld),and sea 1.11-16, 11.15-18). Similarly,in the fliad(15.187(Atrahasis Gilgamiesh
93), Poseidon declares that as a result of the casting of lots, he received the sea, Hades received the underworld,and Zeus received the sky. In both cases it is lots, ratherthan war (as is usually the case) or inheritance,that determines the division. Likewise, as Burkert(1992:93)remarks,the oath which Hera is made to swear,by heaven,earth,and the watersof the underworld (Iliad15.36-8and Odyssey5.184-6),is paralleled in an Aramaic treaty text dating from the eighth century (ANET 1969:659;Fitzmeyer 1967).Again, the scene (Iliad5.330-431)in which Aphrodite has been wounded by Diomedes and complains to her father Zeus and mother Dione and earns a mild rebuke from her father is paralleled in Gilgamesh(6.1-9). There Ishtar,rebuked by Gilgamesh, complains to her father Anu and her mother Antum and is rebuked by Anu (Burkert 1992:98)." Similarly,as Albert Bates Lord has noted (1960:197), the closest parallel to the Patroclus narrative is to be found in the Gilgamesh epic. In both epics the gods decide that the friend of the greathero must perish for the hero,and the companion's death is followed by a lament by the hero (ANET 1969:86).Anotherstriking parallel is to be seen in the scenes (Iliad18.318-22and Gilganmes8.2.17-19)in which Achilles and Gilgamesh,respectively,while mourning over their slain companions,are compared to lions grieving over lost cubs.'>Lions, we may remark,are not frequent in Greece, and similes are most likely the work of the author, since no one asked the author to introduce them.Burkert(1992:117)"has pointed to the parallel between the opening lines of the Odysseyand the opening of Gilgaiesh: in both instances the hero wanBiblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
17
ders far and wide and sees many things,while his name is not mentioned. Again, as Gresseth (1975:8)has noted, there is a parallel between Utnapishtim and the Odyssey Alcinous in that both have a transport service, consisting of a magic ship, to take stranded mortals back home. In both cases their respectiveislands can be approachedonly across difficult and dangerouswaters.Furthermore,thereis good reason to believe that roots of the portrayalof Circe in the Odysseylie in Anatolia or Mesopotamia,especially in the Gilgamesh epic,where we find a goddess, Ishtar,who turns her lovers into animals, and in the Akkadian myth of Nergal and Ereshkigal (Crane 1988:61-85).Likewise, as Crane has pointed out, Lesky's suggestion thatAtlaswas descended from the Hurro-Hittitefigure Upelluri is attractivebecause by looking at Upelluri we may render the Homeric passages describing Atlas intelligible (Crane 1988:63).Again, there is a striking similarity in language between the Odyssey: Of such a kind is the insight of mortal men, as the day which the father of gods and men brings in (18.136-37) and the Akkadian "IWill Praise the L-rd of Wisdom":
are specifically mentioned as being "strangers,"that is, foreigners (1956:136-43). Shortly after the passage in the Iliad, where Hera says that she wishes to go to Oceanus, we find the incident (Iliad in which Hera asks Aphroditefor "loveand desire" 14.214-223) so as to bring togetherOceanus and Tethys,who had been contemplating divorce. Thereupon Aphrodite gives Hera a kestoshimas,usually translated as an "embroidered girdle." Brenk plausibly suggests that we have here a reference to a saltier,running across the chest, such as we find in descriptions of Ishtarin the DescentofIshtarto theUnderworld, and that the parallel is to the quarrel between Apsu and Tiamat,who had been "separateda long time from bed and love" (Brenk 1977:17-20;Pope 1970:178-96). Moreover,the visit to the underworld is a central motif in both Gilgameshand Homer (Odyssey,Book 11).Still another striking parallel with the Odysseyis to be found in the Hittite tale of King Gurpanzah, who shoots many princes at a banquetwith his magicbow and thus wins backhis wife (Kirk 1962:107;Hallo 1993a:183-92).
Hesiodand the NearEast
The increasing recognition that Homer's younger contemporary Hesiod was influenced by the Near East makes it more likely that Homer was similarly influenced.12Indeed, in his already standard commentary on Hesiod's Theogony, West (1966:31)goes so far as to conclude that Greece is part of between the cites the Mondi Asia; Greek literature is a Near Eastern literature. Walcot Likewise, (1990:187) parallel has shown how similar the Babylonianepic Enuma Homeric shield of Achilles : (1966:32-49) Elishis to Hesiod's Theogonyin its portrayalof an all-powerful And upon it he made the earth and the sky and the sea, and just king of the gods. Walcot(1966:51-3)has also noted a the tireless sun and the waxing moon, and all the con- close parallelbetween the Babylonianepic of Eraand an autostellations which wreathe the sky (Iliad18.483-485). Moreover,there is biographical passage in Hesiod's Theogony. a striking parallel between Hesiod's account of the Five and Psalm 136:5-9: Ages (Worksand Days:106-201)and the extant portion of the Akkadian Shulgi'Prophecy, probably dating from the end of the millennium BCE earth the second who the him made to heavens,...the upon although pretending to be much and the earlier Another the moon waters,...the great lights,...the sun..., (Koenen 1994:18-20). parallelis with the Akkaall history into five dian Atrahasis, like divides stars. which, Hesiod, In periods (Koenen 1994:20-21). particular,there is a striking a at the of the scenes on shield Furthermore, parallel between the succession myth, which recounts the city peace in which the leaders are dispensing justice, repelling aggres- emasculation of Ouranos by Kronos and the overthrow of sion,and harvesting,while the king standsby watchinghappily, Kronos by the storm-god Zeus (which is so fundamental to correspondto the descriptionin Psalm 72. Furthermore,Burk- Hesiod's work), and the version in the Phoenician-Hurrianert (1992:92-3)has pointed to the beginning of the EnumaElish, Hittite-Akkadian cosmological myths of Anu the sky god where we read that when above the heavens did not exist nor (whose very name correspondsto Ouranos,and who likewise the earth below, Apsu was there, the fresh water ocean, "the is castrated),Kumarbi,and the storm-god. The parallel also first,the begetter;"and with him Tiamat,the saltwatersea, "she exists in Herennius Philo'stranslation of the Phoenician HisIn both the Near Easternand Hesiodic who bore them all." Parallel to this is the Homeric passage toryof Sanchuniathon.3 (Iliad14.201)where Hera declares that she wishes to go to versions the parents beget children who are confined Oceanus,"originof the gods,"and Tethys,the "mother."Tiamat within their mother; the father hates them, but the mother is also written as tiamtu,"the sea,"as well as tawtu,of which does not. The first god is castratedby the second, births result Tethysis an exact transcription.Furthermore,Professor Gor- from the blood or seed of the castrated god, the father swaldon has pointed out the parallelsbetween Ugariticguilds and lows the children because they are dangerous,and stones are substituted for the children (Barnett1945:100-101). Moreover, the Homeric &rlutospyoi(Odyssey17381-6),masters of some an Burkert has noted and who or whether tradition, (1984:90) craft, independent namely prophets,physicians,builders, bards, Their insight changes like day and night. When starving they become corpses;when repletethey vie with theirgods (2.43-5).
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the Near Easternparallel in the Kumarbimyth, to the Titans, the Titanomachia, and the banishment of the Titans to TartarusThe factthatparallelsin Homerareto be foundconcentrated in the Atog'awtnarl(Iliad14.200-79)has not been satisfactorily explained, unless we suggest that there is here direct borrowing.Thereis likewise a parallelbetween Hesiod (Works and Days 799),where we find the phrase "to eat one's heart" and the Sumerian and Egyptian statement "do not eat your heart,"that is, worry. Some would say, as they did with Professor Gordon's "Homer and Bible"(1955)and BeforetheBible(1962),that several of these parallels are commonplaces; but the total effect is what counts.There is now fairly general agreement that the Near East did influence Homer's alleged younger contemporary,Hesiod, increasing the likelihood it also influenced Homer.
Conclusion In summary,I believe that whereas ProfessorGordon'sconclusions concerning the relationship of Homer and the Near East were greeted by many with skepticism and disbelief, the evidence, of which we have given a mere sample, keeps accumulating to vindicate him. Indeed, he was a full generation ahead of his time.Toappreciatehim adequatelywould require another scholar with the breadth of knowledge and versatility of a ProfessorGordon. One is, indeed, reminded of Livy's encomium of Cicero (120.50):"Virmagnus,acermemorabilis, et in cuiuslaudespersequendas laudatore Cicerone opusfuerit"'A great man, keen, remarkable,and for expounding whose praises there would have been need of a Cicero to praise him."
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to William W. Hallo and Marvin H. Pope for a number of helpful suggestions in connection with this essay.
5For Near Eastern antecedents of the Bellerophon story see Hallo 1994:915. Indeed, Parryin this article argues that his father was concerned with the oral tradition of which the Homeric poems were a product ratherthan with the Homeric poems themselves and notes several indications that his father would not have come to the extreme conclusions of his followers. 6
8 On lots and games cf. Hallo 1983:19-29;1993b:83*-8*. 9 Burkert(1992:98)notes the further parallel that Antu is the feminine form of Anu; hence they,as Mr.and Mrs. Heaven, correspond to Zeus and Dione (the feminine form of Zeus).
10On lions cf. also the parallel between the chameleon ("lion of the earth") and the "earth-lion"of Gilgamesh11.296;cf. now Sj6berg 1984:217-25. 1Withholding the name of the protagonist (or of the deity apostrophized) is standard in Sumerian poetry. 12See, for example, Walcot 1966a:1:"It is not an exaggeration to say that the publicationof textsand translationsof the HittiteKumarbiand Ullikummi myths has revolutionized our knowledge of the Near Eastern background of Hesiod's Theogony." As Walcot notes, the fact that scholars increasingly accept the hypothesis of Near Eastern influence on Hesiod is largely due to the work of Hans G. Giiterbock. (1946). 3 See Giiterbock (1948:123-34); Walcot (1966b); West (1966:19-31);Pope (1955:55-8);and Pope (1987:219-30).The four generations of gods according to Philo of Byblos (Hypsistos, Ouranos, Kronos,Zeus) are confirmed as ancient by the Canaanite-Hurrian-Hittitemyths of Kumarbiand Ullikummi, which are roughly contemporary with the Ugaritic myths. There is reason to think, as Pope suggests, that the Ugaritic myth knew of the tradition that the weather-god had displaced his predecessor El as king of the gods, just as Zeus did Kronos.The Ullikummi myth tells how Kumarbiattempted to regain the throne by using the diorite giant Ullikummi as his champion, just as Kronos used the Titansin a vain effortto displace Zeus.West (1988:171) admits that in his youthful edition of the Theogonyhe argued that the succession myth was of Mycenaean origin, but that he later came to the view that it was influenced by the Near Eastern version. He concludes, moreover, that the theogonic allusions in Homer's Iliad(1396-406,14.201-7, while differing from Hesiod's account, are equally oriental in ori15.187-193), gin.
Notes 1For a slightly different view on the earliest West Semitic letter names and their order,see Hallo 1958:324-38. 2
Barry B. Powell (1991:19-20)concludes that the Greek alphabet was created about 800 BCE. But even he admits that a parallelto the lackof inscriptions prior to this date may be found in Cyprus, where, within a certainly continuous tradition, there are no examples of Cypriote writing between the eleventh and eighth centuries BCE. 3 Other close parallels between the earliest Greek letters and the protoCanaanite are the box-shaped theta,the I-shaped zeta, the delta,epsilon,nu, xi pi qoppa,and rhaThe variations in the shapes of the earliest Greek letters would be explained as due to the fact that the Proto-Canaanite alphabet which they adopted was then in the process of evolution from pictographic to linear forms. Likewise, as Albright (1950:165)points out, the fact that the initial letters of the Greek names for Tyre (T pog) and Sidon (iES&v,Odyssey13.286etc.) go back to the time when the two initial sades were still differentiated, namely in the Bronze Age, indicates that they were borrowed by the Greeks during the Mycenaean period. 4
Bibliography Albright, W.F 1950 Some Oriental Glosses on the Homeric Problem. AmericanJournal of Archaeology54:162-76. ANET, AncientNearEasternTextsRelatingto the Old Testament 1955 AncientNearEasternTextsRelatingto theOldTestament, 2d ed., ed J.B. Pritchard.Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1969 AncientNear EasternTextsRelatingto the Old Testament,3d ed. with suppl., ed. J.B. Pritchard. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Austin, N. 1975 Archeryat the Darkof theMoon.Berkeley: University of California Press. Balmuth, M. S. 1992 Phoenician Chronology in Sardinia: Prospecting Trade and Settlement before 900 B.C. Pp. 215-27 in Publicationsd'Histoirede l'Art et d'Archeologie de l'UniversitW de Lowain,58: StudiaPhoeniCatholique cia, 9: Numismatiqueet histoire&conomique phinicienneset puniques: Actes du Colloquetenurm a Louvain-la-Neuve13-16Mai 1987,edited by
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T.Hackens and G. Moucharte. Louvain-la-Neuve: Seminaire de Numismatique Marcel Hoc Universit6 Catholique de Louvain. Barnett,R. D. 1945 The Epic of Kumarbi in the Theogonyof Hesiod. JournalofHellenic Studies65:100-101. Braun,T.E R. G. 1983 The Greeks in the Near East. Pp. 1-31in Cambridge AncientHistory, edited by J. Boardman and N.G. L. Hammond 2d ed. Vol.3, part 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brenk, E E. 1977 Aphrodite's Girdle: No Way to Treata Lady (Iliad14.214-23).Classical Bulletin54(2):17-20. Burkert,W. 1983a Itinerant Diviners and Magicians: A Neglected Element in Cultural Contacts.Pp.115-20in TheGreekRenaissance of theEighthCentury B.C.:Traditionand Innovation:Proceedingsof the SecondInternational Symposiumat the SwedishInstitutein Athens,1-5 June1981,edited by R. Higg. Stockholm: Astrims. 1983b Oriental Myth and Literature in the Iliad.Pp. 51-56 in The Greek Renaissanceof the EighthCenturyRC.: Traditionand Innovation:Proceedingsof the SecondInternational Symposiumat the SwedishInstitute in Athens,1-5 June1981,edited by R. Hdigg.Stockholm: Astr6ms 1984 Die orientalisierende HeiPeriodedergriechischenReligionund Literatur delberg: Winter. 1992 TheOrientalizing Revolution:NearEasternInfluenceon GreekCulturein the EarlyArchaicAge.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carpenter, R. 1933 The Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet. AmericanJournalof Archaeology37:8-29. Considine, P 1969 The Theme of Divine Wrath in Ancient East Mediterranean Literature. StudiMiceneied Egeo-Anatolici 8:85-159. Crane, G. 1988 Calypso:Backgromunds and Conventionsof the Odyssey Frankfurt am Main: Athenaium. Cross, E M. 1980 Newly Found Inscriptions in Old Canaanite and Early Phoenician Script.Bulletinof theAmericanSchoolsof OrientalResearch 238:2-4. Dodds, E. R. 1936 Humanismand Technique in GreekStudies.Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fitzmyer,J.A. 1967 TheAramaicInscriptionsof Sefire.Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute. Gordon, C. H. 1955 Homer and Bible. Annual26:43-108. HebrewUnionCollege 1956 Ugaritic Guilds and Homeric Srypioepyoi.Pp.136-43 in TheAegeam and the NearEast:StudiesPresentedto Hetty Goldmanon the Occasion edited by S. S.Weinberg.Locust Valley: of Her Seventy-fifthBirthday, Augustin. 1962 Beforethe Bible:The CommonBackgroundof Greekand Hebreo Civilisations.New York:Harper and Row. Gresseth, G. K. 1975 The Gilgamesh Epic and Homer. ClassicalJournal70(4):1-18.
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Griffin, J. 1986 Homeric Words and Speakers. Journalof HellenicStudies106:36-57 Giuterbock,H. G. 1948 The Hittite Versionof the Hurrian Kumarbi Myths: Oriental Forerunners of Hesiod. AmericanJournalof Archaeology52:123-34. Gilterbock, H. G., ed. 1946 Kumarbi:Mythen vom churritischenKronosaus den hethischenFragmentenzusammengestellt. Zilrich/New York:Europa-verlag. Higg, R., ed. 1983 TheGreekRenaissanceof the EighthCenturyB.C.:Tradition and Innovation:Proceedings of the SecondInternationalSymposiumat the Swedish Institutein Athens,1-5 June1981.Stockholm: Astr6ms. Hallo, W.W 1958 Isaiah 28:9-13and the Ugaritic Abecedaries. Journalof BiblicalLiterature77:324-38. 1983 The First Purim. BiblicalArchaeologist 46:19-29. 1991 Informationfrom before the Flood: Antediluvian Notes from Babylonia and Israel.Maarav7:173-81. 1993a Disturbing the Dead. Pp. 183-92 in Minhiahle-Nahum:Biblicaland OtherStudiesPresentedto NaummM. Sarnain Honourof His 70thBirthday, edited by Marc Brettler and Michael Fishbane. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. 1993b Games in the BiblicalWorld. Eretz-Israel 24:83*-88*. 1994 The Context of Scripture: Ancient Near Eastern Textsand Their Relevance for BiblicalExegesis. Pp. 9-15in Proceedings of theEleventh WorldCongressof JewishStudies,Division A The Bibleand Its World edited by David Assaf. Jerusalem: World Union Jewish Studies. Hobka, J.P. 1991 Homer, Oral Poetry Theory, and Comparative Literature: Major Trends and Controversies in Twentieth-Century Criticism. Pp. 456-81 in ZweihundertJahreHomer-Forschung: Riickblickund Ausblick,edited by J.Latacz.Leipzig: Teubner. Kirk,G. S. 1962 TheSongsof HomerCambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koenen, L. 1994 Greece, the Near East, and Egypt: Cyclic Destruction in Hesiod and the Catalogueof Women.Transactions of theAmericanPhilological Association124:1-34. Lesky,A. 1950 Hethitische Texte und griechischer Mythos. Anzeigerder Osterreichischer Akademieder Wissenschaften 87:137-60. Lloyd-Jones,H. 1992 Becoming Homer. New YorkReviewof BooksMarch 5,1992:52-57 Lord,A. B. 1953 Homer's Originality: Oral Dictated Texts.Transactions of theAmerican Philological Association84:124-34. 1960 TheSingerof TalesCambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Mondi, R. 1990 Greek Mythic Thought in the Light of the Near East. Pp. 141-98 in Approaches to GreekMyth,edited by L.Edmunds. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press. Morris, S. 1992 Daedalosand the Originsof GreekArt.Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Muhly,J.D. 1970 Homer and the Phoenicians: The Relations between Greece and the Near Eastin the LateBronzeand EarlyIronAges.Berytus19:19-64. 1990 BlackAthenaversusTraditional an Fournal Scholarship. ofMeditermnc Archaeology3:53-55,83-110.
Whallon,W 1975 Fornnula, Old Englisi,andOld ClharactrandConQext: StuLdisin I Iomcrict, Testamient PoetryCambridge, MA: Harvard Universitv Press. Whitman, C. H. 1958 Ho1lmer and the Herovic Tradition. Cambridge, MA: I larvard University Press.
Murray,O. 1983 EarlyGreece. Stanford:StanfordUniversityPress. Naveh,J. 1978 Some Considerationson the Ostraconfrom Izbet Sartah.Israel 28:31-35. Journal Exploration 1982 EarlyHistoryoftheAlphabet: An Introduction toWestSemiticEpigp)hy andPalaeogmphy Jerusalem:MagnesPress,1982. Parry, A.
1966 HaveWeHomer'sIliad?YaleClassical Studies20:177-216. Parry,M. 1971 TheMakingof HomericVerse: TheCollected PapersofMilmanParril. Oxford:ClarendonPress. Penglase,C. 1994 GreekMythsandMesopotamia: Parallels andIrfluences in theHomeric HymnsandHesiod.London:Routledge. Pope, M. H.
1955 El in theUgaritic TextsLeiden:Brill. 1970 TheSaltierof AtargatisReconsidered. Pp.178-96in Essaysin Honor NearEastern in theTwentieth Archaeology of NelsonGlueck: Century, edited by J.A. Sanders.GardenCity:Doubleday. 1987 The Statusof El at Ugarit.Ugarit-Forschungen 19:219-230. Powell,B.B. 1991 HomerandtheOriginof theGreek Alphalbt. Cambridge:Cambridge UniversityPress. Scott,W.C. TheOralNatureof theHomeric Simile.Leiden:Brill. Shive,D.M. 1987 Naming AchillesOxford:OxfordUniversityPress.
A.W. Sj6berg,
1984 Eveand the Chameleon.Pp.217-25in IntheShadow ofElyon:Es~ays onAncientPalestinian in Honorof G.W.Ahlstr6m, LifeandLitemrature edited by W B.Barrickand J.R.Spencer.Sheffield:JSOTPress.
Prof.LouisH. Feldmanreceivedhis Ph.D.in ClassicalPhilologyfrom HarvardUniversityin 1951He has taughtat TrinityCollege,Hobart College,and (since1955)at YeshivaUniversityDr.Feldmanis the authoror editorof nine books,includingJosephus andModern in the (1937-1980) (de Gruyter, 1984)and JewandGentile Scholmship AncientWorld(PrincetonUniversityPress,1993).
Snodgrass,A. M. 1971 TheDarkAgeofGreece: AnArchaeological tothe Surveyof theElehz'nth BC Edinburgh:UniversityPress. EighthCenturies H.T. Wade-Gery, 1952 ThePoetof theIliad.Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress.
Subscribeto
Walcot, 1966 P. HesiodandtheNearEastCardiff:Universityof WalesPress. 1970 TheComparativeStudyof Ugariticand GreekLiterature. UgaritForschungen 2:273-75.
West,M.L. 1966 HesiodTheogony. Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress. 1988 The Riseof the GreekEpic.Journal Studies108:151-72. ofHellenic
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BiblicalArchaeologist 59:1(1996)
21
A Professor
"Mediterranean Synthesis" Cyrus
H.
Gordon's
to the Contributions
By HowardMarblestone
T
HE LATE G. S. CRAWFORD,EDITOR OF ONCE ANTIQUITY, O.
remarked,"ProfessorGordon is a brilliantlinguist,but he has gone farbeyond that."If CyrusH. Gordon' astonishing prowess in languages, ancient and modern, written and spoken,scratched,inscribed,and recordedin varied scripts upon diverse media, has any equal, it is his vision of cultural synthesis. This vision consists in his perception of patterns and paradigms within the welter of linguistic and cultural artifacts,his establishment of significantinterconnectionsamong diverse cultures, and, above all, his reasoned "multiculturalism."Gordon demonstrated that ancient cultures matured and attained their distinctivecharacter,in relationto,and not in romantic isolation from, each other.These achievements, it is reasonable to predict, will form Cyrus Gordonsmost emblematicand enduring intellectual legacy. Twovisions of culturalsynthesis have long animated Gordon'sscholarship. The first encompasses the Sumerian commercial and cultural orderthatbecame in turn a "cultural symbiosis of Sumerians and Semiin tes" (Gordon1982:156-60) a foundation Mesopotamia during the third millennium BCE, culture of far-reachingsignificancefor the entire ancient Near East. To this day Gordon is working on the Sumerian and Semiticcuneiformtabletsfrom ancientEbla,now TellMardikh, Syria, which increasingly support his conception of the cultural synthesis of the two groups. The second envisions "the Mediterranean as a Human Unit" (in the formulation of Fernand Braudel 1972:276):the East Mediterranean axis of Syria-Palestine, the delta of Egypt, and Minoan Crete, itself the culturalheir of the Mesopotamian order,which in the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600-1200BCE)became the multiplex foundation of Greek and Hebrew civilizations. Braudel'sseminal et le Mondemtditerraneen and influential work LaMIditerranee t lI'poquedePhilippe II,published in French (1946)and in English (1972) demonstrates "the unity and coherence of the Mediterranean 1972:14)fromthe eraof Odysseus region"(Braudel to that of Philip II of Spain in the late sixteenth century.Gordon'sformulation,equally brilliant and bold, and provocative because it transcends sacred academic specialties, has been
Classics
resonating for a biblicalforty years both in ancient Near Eastern and Classical Studies. Recent scholarship fully vindicates its theses and conclusions. Moreover,as Gordon suggested, the culturalsynthesis of the EastMediterraneanembracesnot only Greece,but also Italy.
HellenicandHebraicCivilizations The late David S. Wiesen, an eminent Latinist, friend, and colleague of Gordon at Brandeis University in the 1960s, relatedthe followinganecdote,which some of Wiesen?studentsand friends suggested that he himself,a first-rate raconteur, had devised and circulated:
Gordon'svisionof cultural synthesiswas a durable and creativeprocess working in that region from the earlythird millenniumBCEright through to ImperialRome.
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59:1(1996) Biblical Archaeologist
ProfessorGordon had been delivering a popular lecture on "The Common Backgroundof Greek and Hebrew Civilizations,"particularly about the Heroic Age both in Late Bronze Age Greece and in premonarchic Israel.Citing the Iliadof Homer and the biblicalbook Samuel, he pointed out that the heroes David and Achilles performed essentially the same warlike exploits in search of imperishable glory,the only bulwark against oblivion. The milieux of Achilles and of David were therefore closer to one another than was that of Achilles to Classical Greece or that of David to the Age of the Prophets in Israel. Following the lecture, a little old lady, wide-eyed with astonishmentand admiration,made her way up to the distinguished lecturerand asked,"Does that mean, Professor Gordon, that Achilles was Jewish?"
In the late eighteenthand nineteenth centuriesthe Romantics had worked out the notion of the virtually autochthonous "purity" of Hellenism. As Martin Bernal has remarked in his extraordinarystudy of the sociology of knowledge, Black Athena(Bernal19871:206-9): According to the new Romantic and progressive views, peoples now had to be seen in their geographicaland historical contexts.The racial[my emphasis] genius or spirit belonging to the land and its people changed its forms according to the spirit of the age, or to use a term develbut a people always retained oped in the 1780's,the Zeitgeist;
its immutable essence.... Romantics longed for small, virtuous, and 'pure' communities in remote and cold places.... In many ways the destruction of the Ancient Model [of the origins of Greek civilization in Egypt and the Levant, according to Bernal] and the establishment of the Aryan one can best be seen as attempts to impose these Romantic ideals of remoteness, cold, and purity on this most unsuitable candidate. Moreover,Romantic notions of cultural and racial purity had combined with ingrainedEuropeanracismand anti-Semitism to make of Hellenic civilization the "pure childhood" (Bernal1987I1:2)of European culture, untainted by the influence of older cultures,alwayspresumed to have been debased. However,by the middle of the twentieth century Gordon'stwo seminal works Homerand Bible(Gordon 1955)and Beforethe Bible(second edition: The Common of Greekand HebrewCiviBackground lizations;Gordon 1965),asserted with stunning clarity his fundamental notion of "theEastMediterraneanas a cultural whole" (Bernal1987I:xiv). Gordon'spoint of departure,the very notion that early Hellenic civilization, the cradle of European culture, could have anythingin common with 'Asiatic,""Semitic,""Levantine,"or "Hebraic"cultures, much less have formed part of a cultural synthesis with them, was abhorrent to traditional Hellenists and remains so to some, in its seeming denial of the uniqueness of the Classicalheritage. To assert, even upon detailed and compelling evidence, that "Greekand Hebrew civilizations [are]parallelstructuresbuilt upon the same East Mediterranean foundation" (Gordon 1955:72),or to speak of "the international culture of a Near East of which the Greeks were a component part" (Gordon 1965:55),has proved to be academic,if not intellectual, heresy of the first order.What Martin L.West observed in his comin 1966(West1996:30-31; Feldman mentaryon Hesiod'sTheogony 1996:18),was as rare as it was perceptive:
associationwith Philistines,whose originslay acrossthe Aegean Sea) was a Late Bronze Age Greek, or anything of the sort. Quite to the contrary:given his storied prowess in the most diverse languages,from ancient Sumerianto modem Swedish, Gordon has closely and keenly observed the genius (as the Romans would have put it),the proprietary,tutelary distinction of each culture in its own environment. Grounded in classical Greek literature from his university years, he would surely agree with Plato'sdictum: "Whatever Greeks take over from barbarians, in the end they make over into something better" (Epinomis987D). For all of his affecting humanity, Gilgamesh must yield to Achilles as the paradigmatic tragic hero in the western canon; notwithstanding his struggles and the drama of his nostos,Sinuhe cannot match Odysseus as the "enduringand emerginghero"(Finley1978:26) of the middle passage.In western civilization,Greekliterature, forall of its originsin the EastMediterranean welter of cultures, remains unique and unsurpassed in beauty, form, and content. The brillianceof Gordon'svision of culturalsynthesis transcendsmere a term that the late "parallelomania," Professor Samuel Sandmel coined in a differentcontext.Rather,Gordon has shown that the Greeks were not g#fedwith,but attained preternaturally theirgeniuswithin the East Mediterranean context of "Fusion and Diffusion," the compound notion that Moses Hadas appliedto the Hellenistic World.Hadas' formulation, which cites RuthBenedict'simage of the arc, itself based in a linguistic metaphor,may clarify the underpinnings of Gordon'soutlook:
Greekand Hebrew civilizations[are]parallel structuresbuilt upon the same EastMediterranean foundation (Gordon1955:72).
What most strikes the modem travellerto Greece is that the country belongs not to Europe,but to Asia. The most palpable signs of this are,of course, the legacy of the Turkish occupation.And yet, in a certainmeasure,it has always been so. "The land divides, the sea unites"...the great civilizations lay in the East, and from the first,Greece'sface was turned towardsthe Sun.Greeceis a part of Asia;Greek literatureis a Near Eastern literature. Notwithstanding the suggestive rhetoricof West'sremark, Gordon, for all of his farsighted vision of an East Mediterraneansynthesis of cultures,has neither asserted,nor implied, that Achilles was Jewish,or that David (despite his quondam
We must imagine a great arcon which are rangedthe possible interests provided either by the human age-cycle or by the environment or by man'svarious activities.A culture that capitalized even a considerable proportion of these would be as unintelligible as a language that used all the clicks, all the glottal stops, all the labials, dentals, sibilants and gutturals from voiceless to voiced, and from oralto nasal.Its identity as a culture depends upon a selection of some segments of this arc. Every human society everywhere has made such a selection in its cultural institutions [Benedict]. It is possible to differ by as much as 180 degrees without gettingout of the arc....Communityof some degreebetween the Aegean civilization and the east in high antiquity is an important factorfor understanding subsequent interaction. In certain basic outlooks and practices,traditions deriving from a common source survived, sometimes in a subliterary existence, among both groups, so that their eventual encounter was rather in the nature of a recognition than of a new experience....Weshall not then have Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
23
to debatewhether certainbasic ideas traveledin one direction or the other or wonder at the susceptibility of one people or another to what has been regarded as an alien importation (Hadas 1959:6-8).
parallels. Duport, professor at Cambridge,published a GnomologiaHomeriaccompanied by scriptural parallels (Spiegel 1990:575-86). Culturalsynthesis remained productivethroughthe emergence of Greek culture, especially in the eighth century BCE, the so-called Orientalizing Period. ProfessorOswyn Murray of Oxfordin his importantwork EarlyGreece(1980)stimulated researchin this areaby applying a concept taken from art history to society as a whole (Murray1993:2,326).In the second edition of this work Professor Murray,a sober historian not given to effusive pronouncement, remarked:
The very process of cultural symbiosis, then, first exemplified among Sumerians and Semites in Mesopotamia of the third millennium BCE, is the model for the East Mediterranean in the following two. Not "parallels," "borrowings," or "influences"in one direction or the other,but cultural interactionbecomes the foundationof distinctivegrowthin multiple spheres. Recent scholarship, following the path laid down ...like the DarkAge, the orientalizingperiod virtually disby Gordon, has elaborated even further on the conditions work Feldman such (Penglase 1994:7ff; whereby processes appearedfromsight,to be rediscoveredby modem research. it is in this brief century of creative adaptation that Yet 1996:13-14). Most of Gordon'swork on the East Mediterranean synbegan many of the mostdistinctive[my emphasis] aspects thesis has focussed on the axis comprisingPalestineand Syria, of Greek culture, and so of western civilization (Murray in the and delta of Minoan Crete the 1993:101). especially Ugarit, Egypt, Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600-1200BCE).In all of these centers, Northwest Semites were fabricatorsor mediators of culture. Among modem classicalscholarsthe thesis of the late Milman Parry,that Homeric poetry is aufond-from bottom Most significant for Gordon, and indeed for subsequent researchersfollowing his lead (with and without due acknowl- up-the creation of an illiterate bardic tradition of epic edgment),arethe remarkableparallelsbetween Homericpoetry, verse, has been an article of faith. Support for the thesis has which drew, at leastin part,from a Mycenaean epic tradition come from the supposition, well nigh universal until recently, and the rich corpus that the Phoenician alphabet, which the Greeks borrowed (Kirk 1962:105-25;1985:42-51;1985b:7-10), of Ugariticepics (ca.1400-1200BCE), of most which drew,in part, wholesale, did not reach Greece until the second half of the butonlyin part,upon ancient Near Easternmotifs. Gordon has eighth century BCE(Murray1993:95;Feldman1996:15-16). Conin it for could not serve to the their record ultimate, argued,furthermore, "two-wayparallels"(Gordon1965:132) sequently, epics between Homer, the earliest Greek literature,and the Bible, monumental stage. Professor Geoffrey S. Kirk, a prominent which derived in part from the Ugariticliterarymilieu. He has exponent of this notion (though not of some of the excesses decidedly not favoreda "pan-Semitism,"typologically like the to which doctrinaireoralistshave subjected it) has formulated that erupted in the late nineteenth cen- it thus: "Pan-Babylonianism" the tury following deciphermentof Akkadian cuneiformtexts. Several critical motifs of the Ugaritic epics most likely The truth is that ancient Greece acquired a fully practiderive from an Aegean, rather than any pure ancient Near cablewriting system...unusuallylate in its generalcultural these tradition. are Kret's loss Eastern, poetic Among King development.....Inmany respects this strangeGreekbackof his destined wife to abductors, which is essentially the wardness over writing...must have had disadvantages.In "Helen of Troy Motif"; and the image of the Caphtorian, respect of poetry,however, it had some paradoxicalmerthat is, Cretan,artisan god of compound name, Kothar-andits. For the oral tradition,whichwouldhavebeenkilledoffby Hasis (Gordon 1962:194-6),whose closest analogue is surely any immediateand seriousextensionof literacy[my emphain Iliad the of Homer. literature of is, course, sis], continued and expanded in the Greek world of the Hephaistos Ugaritic the literarybackdrop of the biblical.The presence of Achaean -late Bronze and early Iron Age.... Two or three whole centuries of further development in a modestly expan(or "Mycenaean") merchants and craftsmen at Ugarit, sionist environment, and before any intervention from amply attested in the commercial tablets,provides a concrete contextfor the transmissionof culturalmotifs,which often folliteracy,may well have broughtenormous advances in forlows in the wake of commercial contacts. mular and thematic resources,so as to carry the standard Gordon based his interrelation of Homer and Bible of Homer'smore immediate predecessorsfarbeyond those of ordinary oral singers...the creationof the monumental upon solid philology, Greek and Semitic, and upon critical method. But about a century before the European Enlightpoem...was now [the eighth century BCE]made possienment, two English savants, Zacharias Bogan and James ble...by a prevailing spirit of experiment and expansion that was still, within this particular field of culture, comDuport, already saw "surprisingunanimity between Homer and the Scriptures,"as the late Professor Nathan Spiegel of pelled to operatewithin the limits of orality.In an important In his Homerus sense, therefore,the alphabetand Homer are likely to have Jerusalemhas shown (Spiegel1990:455). Hebraizon, called "a Homer been not so much cause and effect as parallel developBogan supreme genius in whose works the divine spirit found expression no less than in the Scripture." ments of the new expansionism(Kirk1985a:45-7; 1985b:14-16). His book comprises a large collection of Homeric biblical 24
Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
However,recent scholarship,ably summarized by Professor Louis H. Feldman in his article in this issue, now suggests that the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet by ca.1100BCE, as ProfessorJosephNaveh of Jerusalemhas long argued.Moreover, the notion of Homer as an oralpoet,which is perhapsan unconscious survival of the Romanticand naive view of Greek culture,may no longer be verifiable.The late Alfred Heubeck, one of the most eminent modem Homerists, wrote:
Homericpoetry, surelyone of the most distinctiveaspectsof Greekculture,has much more in common with the literate epic traditions of the ancient Near East than Homeristsever
Not only were the Iliadand the Odyssey productsof long and careful planning and polishing; they could not have been created at all without the aid of writing.The new concept of epic poetry,destined to create out of traditional methods and possibilities something that would both continue the traditionand yet surpassit,could only be realized by using the art of writing, which the Greeks had learnt at the beginning of the eighthcenturyBC fromtheirPhoenician trading partners and adapted to their own needs. In short, the poet of the Iliad, I believe, took the decisive step away from oral poetry to written expression,a step of epoch-making importance that cannot be overestimated (Heubeck, West,and Hainsworth 1988:12).
supposed.
Scholars may never be able to determine once and for all exactly when the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet; the scholarshipon this subjectin articles,books, and symposia remains lively in the diversity of views. But the powerful significanceof an earlieradaptation,no later,in any event,than ca.800 BCE, is that Homeric poetry,surely one of "themost distinctive aspects"(Murray1993:101)of Greekculture,has much more in common with the literate epic traditionsof the ancient Near East than Homerists ever supposed under the charm of the oral theory.ProfessorWalterBurkertof Ziirich has noted impressive correspondences between the traditionalepithets of Homer, heretofore assumed to be oral, and those of Mesopotamian epic, a demonstrably literatetradition (Burkert 1992:115-16; Feldman 1996:16).Not only did the existence of literacy apparently not "kill off" any oral tradition, it now appears that literacy was a precondition to the formation of complex,monumental Greek epic. Both ancient Near Eastern and Homeric poetry, then, may well have been ranged across the "greatarc"that Ruth Benedict envisioned. The theory of Homeric literacyis but one significantexamof ple the interactionof Greekand ancientNear Easterncultures powerfully evidenced during the eighth century BCE.Moreover,there is virtually universal consensus that key theogonic and cosmogonic motifs in Hesiod's Theogonyand Worksand
DaysareancientNear Easternin character,as ProfessorLouis H. Feldman has most recentlydemonstrated(Feldman 1996:18-19). Professor Burkert's TheOrientalizing recent work, superb Revolution:Near EasternInfluenceon GreekCulturein the EarlyArchaicAge (1992),is an authoritative and magisterial account of the state of the question in general, with much detaileddocumentation.It is no exaggerationto say thatlittle,if any,of this scholarship would be in evidence were it not for the pioneering vision of cultural synthesis that Gordon worked out in the 1950s and 1960s, often in the face of derision (Bemal 1987I:45-19). Todayit is difficultindeed to imagine the heresy in what Gordon wrote in 1955:
[there is an]...East Mediterranean with roots tradition, epic deep in the second millennium, and underlyingHomer and Bible....Boldspiritshave intermittentlymaintained the kinship of early Greece and the Near East.Now Ugaritat last provides the literarylink connectingIsraeland Hellas (Gordon1955:photomechanical reprint 1967:7,72).
Hellenization? The achievementof culturalsynthesis in the Mediterranean of the Late BronzeAge and in the Orientalizing Period seems all the more remarkable, paradoxically, in the reflection of the Hellenistic Period as recent scholarship reveals it. "It was in the hellenistic age...that disparate cultural traditions interactedupon one another to fix the permanent contours of Europeancivilization,"remarksHadas (1959:v).Then, if at any time, Hellenic culture could repay its debt to the East,albeit late. Hellenization, "the diffusion of Greek language and culture that has been defined...as the essence of Hellenistic will have been the engine of this civilization"(Green1990:312), But the process. prevailing modality was cultural clash and conflict. Professor FrankWalbankremarks: The term 'hellenistic'...carries a connotation...of a hellenism extended to non-Greeks,with the clash of cultures which that inevitablyimplies...within the kingdoms established by Alexander'ssuccessorsin Egyptand Asia...Greeks and Macedonians occupied positions of dominance over Egyptians,Persians,Babylonians,and the diverse peoples of Anatolia.... From the outset there were tensions...Greeks influenced barbarians and barbarians Greeks. It is indeed in this clash and coming together of cultures that one of the main interests of the period lies (1993:14-15). Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
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Glen W.Bowersock and PeterGreen have recently challenged this concept of a mutually beneficial Kulturkampfin the HellenisticAge.The formereven suggests (Bowersock1990:6-7)that the term Hellenizationis functionally useless in view of the strong persistence of local culturaltraditionsand patternsof urbanization in the cities of WesternAsia,Asia Minor,and Egypt.In his magisterialwork AlexandertoActium:TheHistoricalEvolutionof theHellenistic Age(1990),PeterGreen achieves a brilliant, often muckraking, revision of the traditional view of Hellenization. His major contention is that when the "barbarians" were not implacahostile Greek to culture, an attitude bly that increased generally the more one travelledeastward,they espoused it primarily out of "a steely determination to get on in the world" (1990:324),rather like"Indiansunderthe BritishRajangling for the entrdeto European club membership" (1990:316). Green observes tellingly:
has probablybeen exaggerated" (1990:318).
Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean One of the majorfactorsin the "homegrown intellectualtradition"of Italy,now increasinglyrecognized because of Gordon~scholarship, is the EastMediterranean basis of its culture.A selective survey of relevant data begins with archaeology, which has revealed manifold connections between Italy and the eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age. A remarkablereality of earlyItalyis that the early Romans achieved Romanitas, the sum of qualitiesthatdistinguishthem from all other Mediterranean peoples, under the influence of two EastMediterranean cultures, Etruscan and Phoenician-Punic.That Rome was, in its earliestand formativestages,an Etruscan city, has been amply demonstrated by ancient historians. The question of Etruscan origins remains vexed, poised between proponents of an eastern origin and those of the "indigenisttheory" (Heurgon 1973:233-9).But the eminent Etruscologist Massimo Pallottino has that ultipointedly observed (1975:78-81) mately not origin per se, but formation on the soil of Italy in the welter of ethnic,linguistic,and culturalelements will accountfor the phenomenon of Etruscan culture. As Heurgon remarks (1973:41):
Itinerant sophists might peddle the latest philosophical cliches of Academy or Stoa at streetcorners,and the The Pyrgiinscriptionsrepresentan Etruscanwith his Greek- Phoenicianbilingualtext and dedicate a local-boy-made-good, would have a stock sacredareato AMtart. Dated to ca. 500 BCE, style education, of well-wornquotationsfromHomer, the famous inscriptionssuggest a cultural relationshipin the earlyfifth century,borne Euripides,and Menander at his disIt does not add to of the Etruscan-Carthaginian commercial posal. up very much....Thosewho wore Greekdress and militaryaxis.The gold sheets (ca. 19 x 9 It was on Italian soil, in touch with (and removed it in the gymnasium), cm)were evidentlytacked to another object who aped Greek accents, attended as the holes aroundthe edges show. Italian realities,assimilating the ways of Greekplays and dropped theirpinch thought of Greece and the orient, but of incense on Greek altars,had good and sufficient reawithout losing its unquenchable originality,that Etruscan sons for their behavior, in which aesthetic or moral civilization arose...the first greatnative civilizationof Italy. considerations seldom entered. Genuine cultural conversions did undoubtedly take place; but they seem to An Etruscan-Carthaginiancommercial and military axis have been very much in the minority (1990:316-324). is clearly in evidence during the sixth century. The famous Etruscan-Phoenician bilingual inscription found at Pyrgi For Green "the one shining exception to all these pre(modern Santa Severa) ca. thirty miles northwest of Rome, if conclusions" about in which the magistrate of Etruscan Caere expresses a vow to dictable, depressing, Hellenization, (1990:318) from the Alexandrian Feldman 1993:51-56 for the Phoenician goddess AMtart,suggests the cultural relaJews (see apart a fine new survey) is the Romans,who both "swallowedGreek tionship in the early fifth century. culture whole" and worried over the decline of Hellenic stanExtremeshave dominated scholarshipon the Phoenicians. dardsof taste"perhapsbecausethey were so morbidlyconscious "Phoenicomania"in the nineteenth century inflated the role of being cultural parvenus themselves" (1990:318).Nonetheof the Phoenicians in the Aegean and the WestMediterranean, Green the essential and "Phoenicophobia" (Heurgon 1973:59)in the twentieth, less, acknowledges that,notwithstanding truth of Horace'sremark,"Graeciacaptaferumvictoremcepitet reduced it to a late and marginal element. Of late,Phoenician artisintulitagrestiLatio."[Greece,though captive,captivatedher influence in Italy has come under more precise and reasoned fierce captor and introduced the arts to rustic Latium.] (Epis- scrutiny.Recent research (Heurgon 1973:72-5;M. G. Amadasi tulae 111:156-7), "thelack of a homegrown intellectualtradition Guzzo 1995:663-73)indicates an enduring and significant 26
Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
for Troicamust have evoked such efforts: presence of western Phoenicians, chiefly Carthaginians, in in in as Gordon the centuries, Italy ensuing suggested by late sixties (Gordon1968:285-9).A plausible hypothesis for the HaecigiturcumNeroaccepissetadvertissetque Punicasesselitthat of the to it harum ad se Phoenician cum teras, evocavit, venissent, peritos qui spread alphabet Italysuggests may interpretati have taken place in Etruria under Phoenician influence sunt omnia.cumqueNerocognossetantiquiviri,quiapudIlium iussit in Graecumsermonemista fuerat,haecesse monumenta, (Bundgard 1965:11-78). Further evidence for the role of Punic culture in Italy is e Tviani innotui...annales bellizior textuscwuctis tinsfert quibus the famous Punic monologue of Hanno in Plautus' Poenulus, veronomineDictysinscriptos in Graecambibliothecam recepit When Nero had received this document and noticed that produced at Rome soon after the Second Punic War (218-201 the letters were Punic, he convoked experts therein.They with its portrait of a Carthaginian devoted to his gods BCE), and without the usual negative stereotypesof the Punic mouncame and rendered the whole thing. When Nero recogtebank.Some veteransof the protractedstrugglewith Hannibal nized that these were the memoirs of an ancient man who had been at Troy,he ordered them translated into Greek. up and down Italyand of the defeat of Carthagesurely understood the language of their late enemies. That some of the They have now made available to all a more reliable text audience understood the monologue recited by a Romanactor of the TrojanWar...Nero had the annals, duly recorded is remarkable enough. Verbaljesting in which an actor burunder the authentic name Dictys, placed in his Greek Punic if words as Latin were further validates lesques they library. the accuracy of the readings. Additional evidence of the currency of Punic language Modem scholars have never taken seriously Dictys' claim and culture in Republican Italy is the remark of Pliny: to composition in Phoenician or Punic (Mazza 1991:155-60). The Greek text, fragments of which have turned up among cui tantum honorem senatus noster habuit Magq quidem Carthagine the Tebtunis and Oxyrhynchus papyri, has 66 CEas terminus cum unius eius duode- postquem.As Merklenotes (1994:189), one may assess the charut, donaret, bibliothecas capta regulisAfricae volumina in Latinam censeret cum acter of the work in more the Greek linguamtransferenda, triginta easily fragments than in Punicae full the Latin which is iamM. Catopraecepta translation, condidisset, peritisque linguae heavily layered with bordandum in omnes vir Latin from late a authors. As [my emphasis] negotium, quopraecessit rowings pseudepigraphon,Dictys strives for credibility (Merkle 1994:189)with the well-worn clarissimaefamiliae D. Silanus. Mago,to whom our Senate extended so singular an honor devices, especially the discovery in a tomb (Speyer 1970:43that at the capture of Carthage [146 BCE],when the Sen124).As is not generallyrecognized, however,Dictys' narrative ate was granting [Punic] libraries to African kinglets, it preserves as well the qualities of a Northwest Semitic pseudedecreed that his twenty-eight volumes [on agriculture] pigraphon(Marblestone1970:395-401; Gordon1982:136-7) similar alone were to be translated into Latin, although Cato in some respects to pseudepigraphic texts preserved in the had already established the principles.The task was to be Roman Catholic canon. Finally,the sum of other referencesto Phoenicians in Dictys, and even the very notion of Phoenigiven to expertsin Punic,and herein excelled a man of most illustrious family,Decius Silanus (NaturalisHistoriaXVIII cian composition,may well presupposean Eteocretan[pre-Greek 22). Cretan]Sitzim Leben,the Northwest Semitic language of which Gordon has elucidated (Gordon 1966:8-25;1982:133-40). The Punic treatise of Mago on agriculturewas later transWhateverits origin,the Greektextwas translatedinto Latin lated three times by Greek scholars,no less, as late as the era in the fourth century CE,though some have recently argued of Julius Caesar (Bardon1952:83).Of this Mago Varrowrote: for a date in the early third century CE(Bowersock 1994:23). Under the title Ephemeris BelliTroiani it became indeed the verior Phoenica textus on the Tale of for the Latin Middle Ages. [Graecos]...Mago Carthaginiensis praeteriit, linguaqui Troy resdispersascomprehendit." The mordant Tacitusrelates this tale: The CarthaginianMago surpassed [the Greeks] in that he wrote in Punic a coherent account of widely diverse matA certain Caesellius Bassus of Carthage [originePoenus],a ters (De Re RusticaI:1,20). man mentally unbalanced [menteturbida], came to Nero to tell of the dream in which he had discovered on his estate In the first century CE,the lure of Punic culture (Krings a vast subterraneancaverncontaining enormous amounts which reputedly held hoary antiquities or storied of gold bullion, the treasure left by Dido as she fled Tyre 1995:31-8), wealth, underlay two famous incidents in the rule of Nero. lest, as Bassus explained, her new nation be too tempted The pseudepigraphic Daybookof the TrojanWarby Dictys of by the wealth to strive for material gain. Nero promptly Crete, composed, according to its prologue, "Phoeniceis litaccepted the story and on the basis of the wealth that he teris," miraculously erupted from that ancient worthy's expected soon to obtain, he headed into new excesses of tomb at Knossos during an earthquake in Nero's thirteenth largesse, as Bassus and his crew searched to no avail for the ancient hoard (AnnalesXVI:1-3). year (66 CE:Marblestone 1970:56-60;Merkle 1989,1994;Bowersock 1994:23).The text finally reached Nero, whose passion Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
27
Otherputativeevidences for Romanconnectionto Phoenician culture include Josephus' claim (ca.100 CEin Rome; Ag. Ap.:108-12)to mediate records of Jewish history recorded in "Phoenician chronicles" preserved by the Tyrians and mediated to him in Greek by certain generally obscure Hellenistic historians. One of these, Menander of Ephesus, says Josephus (Ant.VIII 144),"translatedthe Tyrianrecords from the Phoenician language into Greek speech." Finally,in the early thirdcentury,the sophisticwriterPhilostratus (author of Livesof the Sophists),who worked under the patronageof JuliaDomna,wife of Septimius Severus,offers in his Heroikosa dialogue between a storm-stayedPhoenician traveller and a vine dresser in the Troad.There the ghost of Protesilaos, the first Greek to have fallen at Troy,relates the "real"version of that ancient war, including many sophistic corrections of Homer as well as a sly gibe at Dictys' credibility (Mantero 1966:198-200).Philostratus archly turns the tableson the clich6of the Phoenicianas bearerof ancient truth and hence on the veracity of Dictys, for it is the Phoenician travelerwho learns from the vine dresser. Evidence for other Northwest Semitic presence in Rome in the latter first century CEcomes from the satirist Juvenal (ca. 67-127CE),who railed against foreign,particularlyGreek, "dregs"at Rome : nonpossumferre,Quirites, Graecamurbem.quamvisquotaportiofaecisAchaei? iampridemSyrusin Tiberim defluxitOrontes et linguamet moreset cumtibicinechordas obliquas... My countrymen, I cannot endure a city turned Greek.And yet the dregs are only in part Achaeans. Long since has Syrian Orontes flowed down to the Tiber bringing its language, customs, harps and pipers (III60-3). Juvenal'srage at the Syrians is precious, if mordant, testimony for the incursion not only of their (to him) reprehensible customs and music, but of their language.Friedlander (1895) has collected a full set of references on the question of Syrians at Rome. Towhat extentdid classicalRomanwriters engage Phoenician culture,in particular,and ancientNear Easternin general? Of ancient writers and in their wake Vergil,Macrobius had written:
predecessorsin epic-Homeric, posthomeric,and earlyLatinbut upon a "Mediterraneansynthesis" (Gordon1969:270)that included the culture of Northwest Semites resident in Italy, both Phoenician-Punic and Jewish, the latter well attested (Stern1974;Leon 1960:244-50;Grant1973:62-5). Hadas had earlier suggested the influence of the Jewish SibyllineOracleson Vergil'smessianic outlook: Where parallelsare so strikingand where antecedent classical literatureprovides none so apt it is naturalto assume that Vergildid draw on the Sibylline Oracles....Theimportanceof his doingso goes farbeyondthe [Fourth,"Messianic"] Eclogue.That piece, it has aptly and correctlybeen said, is a blueprintforthe Aeneid. The solemnityand otherworldliness which made the Aeneid sympathetic to Christians and a forcein shaping Europeanideas may well derive from Isaiah [upon whom the JewishSibyllineOraclesare manifestly based] (1959:241). In the manner of his Homerand Bible,Gordon cites many "Mediterranean Concepts" (1969:278-81)in Vergil'spoems, chiefly the Aeneid.He focusses on the primary motif of "Messianic History" (1969:271-7)told in the Aeneid,a theme that connects Vergil to "the Jewish epic of nationhood" and the "biblicalepic of kingship": Just as Aeneas is told to leave his native land to seek out the promised land, so is Abraham.Moreover,it is foretold to Abraham that through the child that Sarah bore him will springa line of kings...even as throughAscanius/Iulus (born to Aeneas by Creusa) will spring the royal line culminating in Augustus.The wanderingspriorto the conquest of the promised land,and the accountof the conquest itself constitute major parts of the Vergilian and biblical epics of the nation.All of the earlierhistoryin both accounts looks forwardto Messianic kingship:under the houses of David and Augustus respectively (1969:272-3).
Both traditions included wanderings as "predicted prelude to the conquest of the land" (1969:273).In this context Vergil in the Aeneidtransfigures the nostos(homecoming), a theme applied to the solitary hero in earlier epic (Sinuhe to Egypt,Odysseus to Ithacainteralia),into the emblem of national restorationin the ancestral promised land. In so doing, Gordon suggests (1969:273,278) Vergilengages the biblical-Jewish tradition:"Asfar as we know, the biblical epic of kingship is the prototypeparexcellenceof theAeneid in this (1969:273). nrgan" The Mediterranean elements in the work of Vergil, the PunicisOscisque verbisusisuntveteresquorumimitatione Vegilius verbanon respuit. greatest Roman poet, demonstrate that Cyrus H. Gordon's peregrina Ancient writers had used Punic and Oscan words. In imi- vision of culturalsynthesis was a durableand creativeprocess tationof them Vergildid not rejectforeignwords (Saturnalia working in that region from the early third millennium BCE VI:4,3). right through to Imperial Rome.Gordon'spersistent effortsto follow the evidence wherever it leads, and thereby to tranIn a pioneering study (Gordon 1969)and a sequel (Gor- scend academicparochialismin the Classics,have led to insights of permanent value to classical scholarship. don 1971),Gordon assayed ancient Near Eastern influences on his drew not The learned only poet upon Vergil(70-19BCE).
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59:1(1996) Biblical Archaeologist
Sea
MediterraneBlack
Ebi 0
Trit E
Knossos
Mediterranean
0
Sea
"Tyre
Sea
400 mi
References Amadasi Guzzo, M. G. 1995 Mondes Etrusque et Italique. Pp. 663-73 in La Civilizationphenicienne & punique.Manuel de recherche,edited by Veronique Krings. Handbuch der Orientalistik I 20. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Bardon, H. latineinconnue. TomeI L'Epoque Paris:Libraire 1952 LaLitterature republicaine. C. Klincksieck. Bernal, M. Vol. I, The 1987 BlackAthena.TheAfroasiasticRootsof ClassicalCivilization. Fabricationof Ancient Greece.New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Bowersock, G. W. 1990 Hellenismin LateAntiquityAnn Arbor:University of Michigan Press. 1994 Fictionas History.NerotoJulian.Sather Classical Lectures 58. Berkeley: University of California Press. Braudel, E Worldin theAge of PhilipII. and theMediterranean 1972 The Mediterranean 2 vols. Translated by Sian Reynolds. New York:Harper and Row.
Burkert,W Revolution:NearEasternInfluenceon GreekCulturein 1992 TheOrientalizing the EarlyArchaicAge. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Feldman, L. H. 1993 Jew and Gentilein theAncient World.Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1996 Homer and the Near East: The Rise of the Greek Genius. Biblical Archaeologist59:13-21. Finley,J. H. 1978 HomerbOdyssey.Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Friedlrinder,L. 1895 IuvenalisSatirae.Leipzig. Gordon, C. H. 1967 Homer and Bible:The Origin and Characterof East Mediterranean Literature.HebrewUnionCollegeAnnual26:43-108;reprint 1955.Ventnor, NJ: Ventnor Publishers. 1962 TheCommonBackground New York: of GreekandHebrewCivilizations. The Norton Library. 1966 Evidencefor theMinoanLanguage.Ventnor,NJ: Ventnor Publishers. 1969 Vergil and the Near East. Ugaritica6:267-87 1971 Vergil and the Bible World. Pp. 111-45in The GratzCollegeAnniversary Volume.Philadelphia: Gratz College 1982 ForgottenScripts:TheirOngoingDiscoveryand Decipherment.2d ed.
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New York:Basic Books. Grant,M. 1973 TheJewsin theRomanWorld.New York:Charles Scribner's Sons. Green, P 1990 FromAlexandertoActium:TheHistoricalEvolutionof theHellenisticAge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hadas, M. 1959 HellenisticCulture:Fusionand Diffusion.New York:Columbia University Press. Heubeck, A., West, S.,and Hainsworth, J. B. on HomerbOdyssey.Vol.I, Introduction andBooksI-VIII. 1988 A Commentary Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heurgon, J. 1973 The Rise of Rometo 264 B.C.Translated by James Willis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kirk, G. S. 1962 The Songsof HomerCambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985a Homer. Pp. 42-91 in The CambridgeHistory of ClassicalLiterature. Vol. I, GreekLiterature,edited by P. E. Easterling and B. M. W. Knox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vol. I, Books1-4. Cambridge: Cambridge 1985b The Iliad.A Commentary. University Press.
Penglase, C. 1994 GreekMyths and Mesopotamia:Parallelsand Influencesin the Homeric Hymnsand Hesiod.London: Routledge. Spiegel, N. 1989 Homer.Jerusalem: The Magnes Press (Hebrew). Speyer,W 1970 Biicherfundein der Glaubenswerbung der Antike.Hypomnemata 24. G6ttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht. Stern, M. 1974 Greekand LatinAuthorson Jews and Judaism.Vol 2. Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Walbank, E W 1993 TheHellenisticWorld.Revised Edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. West, M. L. 1966 Hesiod.Theogony.EditedWithProlegomenaand Commentary.Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Krings,V Handbuch 1995 La Civilizationphenicienne& punique:Manuelde recherche. der Orientalistik I 20. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Leon, H. J. 1960 TheJewsofAncientRome.Philadelphia:The Jewish Publication Society. Mantero,T 1966 Richerchesull'Heroikos di Filostrato. Universith di Genova. Facolth di Lettere. Genova: Istituto di Filologia classica e medioevale. Marblestone, H. 1970 Dictys Cretensis: The EphemerisBelliTroianias a Cretan Pseudepigraphon. Ph.D. diss. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. Mazza, E 1991 Dictys di Creta e i 'libri fenici' Pp. 155-60 in Atti del II Congresso Internazionaledi Studi Fenicie Punici.Roma 9-14 novembre 1987 IIII. Roma: Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche. Merkle, S. 1989 Die EphemerisbelliTroianides Diktysvon Kreta.Frankfort,New York, Paris: P Lang. 1994 Telling the True Story of the Trojan War: The Eyewitness Account of Dictys of Crete. Pp. 183-96 in The Searchfor theAncient Novel, edited by J.Tatum. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Murray,O. 1993 EarlyGreece.2d ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pallottino, M. 1975 The Etruscans.Revised and Enlarged. Translated by J. Cremona. Edited by David Ridgway.Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Dr.HowardMarblestonereceivedhis A. B.in Greekand Latinfrom CornellUniversityin 1964and his M.A. (1966)and Ph.D.(1970)in Mediterranean StudiesfromBrandeisUniversity.He taughtat the Universityof Illinoisand City Universityof New Yorkbeforearriving at LafayetteCollegein 1974,wherehe now servesas Head of the Professor Departmentof ForeignLanguagesand Literatures. Marblestoneteachesa varietyof ancientlanguagesas well as classicaland biblicalliteratureand history. His publicationsrangeoverClassicaland NorthWestSemitic Philologyand includeas well some studiesin laterGreekliterature and in the influenceof classicalliteratureupon the languageand culturalformationof Israel.
A
Continuing
Adventure: and
Mesopotamia
By Martha A. Morrison
C
GORDON COMES FROM THE GENERATION OFSCHOLARS who, YRUS like Gilgamesh, "experiencedall,...considered all, saw the hidden and laid bare the undisclosed."(Epic I, i:2-5)Versed in what was known of of Gilgamesh the languages and history of all of the cultures of the ancient world, these "heroes"of ancient Near Easternstudies ranged across the broad panorama of antiquity and presided over the discovery of hitherto unknown civilizations. They created new and often separate disciplines focusing on individual geographical,linguistic, or technical areasof study, and led "the way at the foremost," (Epicof GilgameshI, 1:30) paving the way for those who have followed them. CyrusGordon is especially distinguished among his peers because he has made fundamental contributions to a number of specialized areas of research.At the same time, he has produced broad and compelling analysesof the interrelationshipsamong the diverse cultures of antiquity. Because of his pioneering work, his name is linked primarily with the western Semitic world and its connections with the Aegean. From the beginning of his career,however,Mesopotamia figures prominently in his teaching,field work, and research.This area of the Near East became one of the foundations upon which he built his understandingof antiquityand is the base to which he returns in much of his scholarly work. After a year of teaching Hebrew and Assyriology at the University of Pennsylvania, Cyrus Gordon became a Fellow of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem and Baghdad.Workingas a field archaeologistand epigrapher from 1931-35,he participatedin excavationsatTepeGawra,Tell Billa, Ur, Beth Zur, Tell Beit Mirsim, Ader, Tell el-Amarna, and in the survey of Moab, Edom, and Sinai. During his military service in the Army Signal Corps and the Persian Gulf Command, he continued his close connections with the
Gordonspent the early 30s working as a field archaeologist throughout the NearEast,from excavationsat Urto surveyin Moab, Edom,and Sinai.Along with his wartime servicewith the Persian GulfCommand,these extensive contacts gave Gordonfirst-hand knowledge of the peoples and lifewaysof the region. In 1931 Gordonposed between two Yezidiworkersengaged with the excavationprojectat TellBillain IraqiKurdistan.Photograph courtesyof the Gordonfamily.
Near East, especially Mesopotamia. All of these first-hand experiences equipped him with the disciplines of field archaeology and, most important,exposed him to the age-old culture of the Near East. In Iraq,especially, he lived among villagerswho perpetuatedthe ways of antiquity,and he gained insight into the concerns, attitudes, and world views of the descendants of the very people whose cultural remains he studied. His Adventuresin theNearestEast (1957),in which he relates many of his extraordinaryexperiences and integrates them into his discussions of the ancient world, reveals immediately his engagement with the continuity of human life in the Near East.O.G. S.Crawforddescribes CyrusGordon'sspecial perspectiveas stemming from "awell stockedmind which sees the past in the present and viceversaand can make illuminating comparisons between them"(1957:5).This vision helped to shape his scholarlyendeavorsfrom the 1930'onward. At the same time as he was excavating in Mesopotamia, Cyrus Gordon turned his attention to the recently excavated site of Nuzi in northernIraq.Workingclosely with E.R. Lacheman, who was publishing the tablets from Nuzi, he produced his first major body of scholarship between 1934 and 1938:a series of articles and monographs dealing with both philological and culturalissues in the Nuzi tablets (1934a,b, c;1935c, d, e; 1936a, b, c;1937a, b; 1938b,c; Gordon and Lacheman1938). His work on the language, grammar, and vocabulary of the Nuzi materialsbecame the foundation for translatingthe Nuzi Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
31
texts.Its value has only increasedwith the discovery and study of otherculturesinfluencedby the Hurriansin both Mesopotamia and the western Semitic world, i.e. areas of "peripheral"Akkadian from northern Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia and both the Akkadian and Ugaritic materials from Ras Shamra. Beyond Akkadian studies, his work on Nuzi Akkadian lay the groundwork for Hurrian studies, insofar as the initial clues to the nature of the Hurrian language were found in its effect on other languages.As testimony to the scope and soundness of his work, it would take nearly forty years, the publication of many more materials,and the development of a deeper knowledge of Hurrian for another comprehensive study of Nuzi Akkadian to be undertaken (Wilhelm 1970). Gordon also produced, during approximately the same period, a series of articles relatingeither to Nuzi customs and society or to Nuzi and the Bible (1940a,b). In these, he discussed such topicsas theft (1936c),women (1935c),brotherhood, governmentand the mayor(1935a),family law,and social organization (1935d;1937a,b). From these studies, his observations concerning women and the parallels he drew between Nuzi and the Old Testamentwere to resonate through succeeding generations of scholarship. Womenat Nuzi In his study of women, he traced the broad picture of women's rights at Nuzi (1935c).Women were entitled to own and dispose of property (including real estate), to enter into contracts,and to go to court to protect their proprietaryrights. Women could become heirs and executors of estates, exercise controlling authority in their families,sell themselves or their children into servitude, and even decline marriage arrangements. For all intents and purposes, women and men were able to participate equally in the social and economic life of the community.Only in the area of marriagedid women seem to need an agent-a father,mother,brother,or guardian-to make the arrangements for them. This need for a guardian appeared to give rise to the "daughtership"and "sistership" texts,whereby a woman was either given or gives herself to a guardian, who usually agreed to arrange for her marriage. On the basis of this evidence, Hurrian women appeared to have enjoyed a social and economic position that was different from that of women in what were considered the more "traditional"cultures of the Near East. It became customary to refer to the superior rights of women in the Hurrian world and this, in turn, affected the interpretationof such farflung issues as the roles of the Hittite and Ugariticqueens and the matriarchsof the Bible. Subsequent generationsof scholars approachedthe entire Nuzi corpus with new perspectives and questions. Archival analyses, especially of the ration texts,offered whole households of male and female dependents who could be studied as a group.Highlighting the existence and productivity of the female population at Nuzi, these materials made the women more visible and encouraged comparison with their male counterparts in the texts.A cursory examination of the names showed that quite a few of the men, but only a minuscule number of the women, mentioned in the rationtextscould 32
59:1(1996) Biblical Archaeologist
The Nuzitablets providedthe focal point for Gordon'sfirst substantialscholarly publishing.Thisinscribedclay bulla from Nuzicontained a contract between a herderand a livestockowner. Harvard SemiticMuseum.
be found in the contracts of Nuzi. Questionsnaturally arose as to what else all these women did and why they were so absent in the rest of the material,even though their rights were equal, as Cyrus Gordon had shown indisputably. Studying the texts in theirarchivesalso shed light on the various types of guardianshiptextsinvolvingmarriageclauses.Because it was possible to tracethe relationshipsamong the parties to many of these contracts before the transactiontookplace,it becameclearthatsucharrangementswereoftenmadeby and forwomen with moreprosperous relatives or people already well known to the families.As the economic advantageto the guardianwas minimal or non-existent,these arrangementsappearto have been socialratherthan economic transactionswhereby the woman involved bettered her position in the community by acquiring a "godfather" or "godmother,"whose prestige and status would help her make a good match (Grosz 1987).These texts, then, do not always point out the need for a guardian, but rather the desirability of having a representative of means in the marriage business. Moreover,they underscore the responsibility undertaken by the guardian as matchmaker.We find some figures at Nuzi who assume many such responsibilities on behalf of their extended families and households. New studies relatingto the natureand function of the texts showed that the contracts and other non-ration texts served to document changes of one sort or another in property ownership (acquisition,disposition or legal proceedings) or in the circumstances of individuals (adoption, marriage,indenture, slavery and the like).These texts were the deeds and signed contracts needed by the parties involved to prove that such changes had occurred. This proof was needed because the changes involved deviations from the normal and expected patterns of ownership and life in the community. Thus, those texts referringto inheritance,marriage,and other family law were writtenbecause they recordunusualcircumstances. For example, a person would actually write a will to divide
the estate if the division departed from the normal patterns of inheritance. A marriageagreement would be signed and sealed if property or unusual side agreements were involved (Maidman 1976;1979;Morrison:1983; 1987). new These showed approaches that the majorityof women were mute or unrecognizedin the textual material because they
operated mostly within the unchanging partof the societywhich did not need records.Thiswas, of course,fairlystandard for most ancient and many later cultures. Most of the tablets relating to real estateand otherpropertyinvolved men.While women'srightsmay have been the same as mens, there were few who could or did compete in the predominantly male world of business. As for the social and law texts,the very reason that these documents refered family so often to women was that they describe unusual situations. Finally, to learn more about the reality of women's lives at Nuzi, one has to look at what wasn't written down or, at best, what was implied in the texts. The current view of women at Nuzi is that most of them were contained within theirfamilies,on which they were dependent for support and protection, and in which they worked to contribute to their family's social and economic integrity.The women who were active in the textsare widows, women who were named in their husband'swills as heads of families,or heiresses.These women who "madeit"were independent because they were empowered by their father's, husband's, or son's absence, recognition, and/or resources. Those who were improvingtheirchances did so throughthose already in power.Women had the rights and the capability to perform,but needed the freedom and the means to do so.That freedom was based essentially on fate,the will of their male relatives,or the kindly intervention of others. Cyrus Gordon's contribution to the study of women at Nuzi, then, was two-fold. First,he was correct in identifying the women in the texts that he studied as unusual, but they were unusual in two ways. Because of the rights they enjoyed, they were unusual in the ancient Near East;because they were able to take advantage of those rights, they were unusual in their own society.Second, when Gordon documented the status of women at Nuzi, he provided the stimulus for an inquiry
that continues today. Nuzi and the PatriarchalNarratives The Nuzi parallels to the Old Testament that Cyrus Gordon documented were centralto discussions of the patriarchal narratives from the 1930s on. They were used both to elucidate the text and to propose a mid-second millennium BCE Hurriancultural milieu forthe age of the patriarchs.As is well known, the chronologicalframeworkbased on the Nuzi materialsbecame the subjectof heateddebatein the field,as scholars dealt with issues relating to the time of the originlsof the stoof the stories.Some reduced ries and to the time of the recording the date of the patriarchalnarratives to the first millennium. Others questioned the value of such historical parallels altogether and turned to literary and anthropological analyses. Chronologicaland stylistic questions aside,however,the Nuzi materials remain the largest and best body of evidence for common ancient Near Easternsocial,legal,and economic customs. They have broad explanatory value for the fabric of ancient Near Easternsociety and help to reconstructthe contextof the literaturethat is one reflectionof that society.These materialscontinue to inform the stories' portrayalof the complex and lively relationships among the characters of the textand lay the foundation for literaryanalyses and other discussions (Morrison 1983).Cyrus Gordon'swork on Nuzi has augmented our knowledge of that world and has helped to shape our perspectives. OtherNuzi Studies Evenaftermoving west to Ugariticand otherfields of scholarlyconquest,CyrusGordon' involvementwith Nuzi continued with work on the glyptic art of the site (1948)and regular reference in his broader historical studies to the site's place in Near Eastern studies. Of special importance, he invited his Nuzi colleague, Ernest Lacheman,to teach in his Department of Mediterranean Studies at Brandeis.These two Nuzi pioneers guided graduate students who produced a veritable libraryof Nuzi dissertations covering every conceivable topic of study. Many of these became "firsts" in the field and some are still standard references.
Conclusion Cyrus Gordon's interest in Mesopotamia was not limdealtwith theAkkadian ited to Nuzi. He publishedtablets(1952), materials from sites such as Amarna (1947) and Ugarit (1956)and discussedothertopicssuch as belt-wrestling(1950/51), social stratification in the Old Babylonian Period (1953)and Aramaic incantation in cuneiform (1938;1940c).These supplementedthe largeoverviewsof Mesopotamiathathe included in his broad histories of the ancient Near East and the interrelationships among the cultures of the Near East and the Aegean. Such works as TlheAlncientNear East (1965a) and Tlhe and (1965b) CivZilizationllS Conuno1nBackgrouid of GreeL'L'kHeIbr'ew'
included chapters in which he provided his own account of the history of Mesopotamia and traced its role as one of the foundation civilizations of the ancient world.At every turn in his studies of other Near Easterncultures, he acknowledges the debt owed to the cuneiform world by its neighbors. BiblicalArchaeologist 59:1(1996)
33
Citing loan words, literary parallels, religious influences, or grammaticalformations,he documented repeatedlythe influence of Mesopotamia and at the same time demonstratedhis mastery of its languages, culture, and civilization. Just as Gilgamesh returned to Uruk afterhis adventures, Cyrus Gordon has returned to his beginnings in his most recent scholarlypursuits-the field of Ebla studies (1987;1990; 1991a,b; 1992a,b, c).Reading the cuneiform signs (much as he did at Ur with Sir LeonardWoolley)and teasing out the meanings of a new language written in an old script (as he did with the Nuzi materials),he continues his own scholarly adventures. In this newest endeavor,he continues his tradition of contributingto a distinct culture while placing it in its broader Near Easterncontext.While drawing on his own foundations which are "firmly established like heaven and earth,"(Code Column ia:22-25)he is helping to lay the founof Hammurabi, dation for the generationsthat will follow him. May his name and fame long.endure!
Bibliography Gordon, C. H. 1934a Numerals in the Nuzi Tablets.Revued'Assyriologieet d'Archdologie orientale31:53-60. 1934b Points of the Compass in the Nuzi Tablets.Revued'Assyriologieet orientale31:101-8. d'Archeologie 1934c The Pronoun in the Nuzi Tablets.AmericanJournalof SemiticLan51:1-21. guagesand Literatures 1935a 'lhimin its Reputed Meaning of Rulers,Judges.Journalof BiblicalLiterature54:139-44. 1935b Fratriarchyin the Old Testament.Journalof BiblicalLiterature 54:22331. 1935c Nuzi TabletsRelating to Women. Musion 48:113-32. 1935d Paralleles nouziens aux lois et coutumes de l'Ancien Testament. Revue biblique44:34-41. 1935e The Names of the Months in the Nuzi Calendar. Rivista degli studiorientali15:253-7 1936a Nouns in the Nuzi Tablets.Babyloniaca16:146-69. 1936b Evidence for the Horite Language from Nuzi. Bulletin of the AmericanSchoolsof OrientalResearch64:23-8. 1936c Nuzi TabletsRelating to Theft. Orientalia5:305-30. 1936d An Akkadian Parallel to Deuteronomy 21:1ff.Revued'Assyriologie et d'Archdologie orientale33:1-6. 1937a The Story of Jacob and Laban in the Light of the Nuzi Tablets.Bulletinof theAmericanSchoolsof OrientalResearch66:25-7 1937b The Nuzi Tablets and the Old Testament. SBLEAMProc.72.1936. 56: XIII-XIV Journalof BiblicalLiterature 1938a The Aramaic Incantation in Cuneiform. Archivfiir Orientforschung12:105-17 1938b The Dialectof the Nuzu Tablets.Baltimore, MD (= Orientalia7:32-63, 215-32). 1940a The Nuzu Tabletsand the Bible. Bitzaron3:162-71. 1940b Biblical Customs and the Nuzu Tablets.BiblicalArchaeologist 3:1-12. 1940c The Aramaic Incantation in Cuneiform. Orientalia9:29-38. 1941 The People Versus the Mayor.SmithAlumaeQuarterlyAug.:227 1947 The New Amarna Tablets.Orientalia16:1-21. 1948 The Glyptic Art of Nuzu. Journalof NearEasternStudies7:261-6. 1950/51 Belt-Wrestling in the Bible World. Hebrew Union CollegeAnnual 23/1:131-6. 110 CuneiformTextsSelectedfrom the CollegeCol1952 SmithCollegeTablets:
34
BiblicalArchaeologist 59:1 (1996)
Women's rightsat Nuzi became a significantavenue of exploration subsequent to Gordon'sanalysisof their status, unusualas they appeared on the broadercanvasof the ancient Near East.Here, nineteenth-centuryartistGustavDore depicts Racheland Jacobat the well. Thoughthe debate about the chronologicalframeworkof the patriarchsand matriarchsremainsunresolved,the Nuzi materials offer the best and most comprehensiveguide to the fabricof ancient Near Easternsociety and its role in shaping the society'sliterature. lection.Northhampton, MA. 1953 Stratification of Society in Hammurapi's Code. Pp. 17-28 in The JoshuaStarrMemorialVolume:Studiesin History and Philology.New York:Conference on Jewish Relations. 1954 The Patriarchal Narratives. Journalof Near EasternStudies13:56-59. 1956 Observations on the Akkadian Tabletsfrom Ugarit. Revued'Assyriorientale50:127-33. ologieet d'Archdologie 1957 Adventuresin theNearestEast,New Jersey: Essential Books. 1965a TheAncientNearEast,New York:The Norton Library. 1965b The CommonBackground New York: of Greekand HebrewCivilization. The Norton Library. 1987 WM - "and"in Eblaite and Hebrew. Eblaitica.1:29-30. 1990 Eblaite and Northwest Semitic. Eblaitica.2:127-39. 1991a Eblaite. Pp. 550-57 in LeslavFestschrift, edited by A. S. Kage. Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz. 1991b The Ebla Incantations and their Affinities with Northwest Semitic Magic. Maarav7:117-29. 1992a The Ebla Exorcisms. Eblaitica3:127-37 1992b The Eblaite Language. Pp. 101-7in ContactsBetweenCultures. Vol. 1,
edited by A. Harrak. Lewinston: Mellen Press. 1992c The Geographical Horizons of Ebla. Bibliotheca Mesoptamica25:638. Gordon, C. H. and Lacheman, E. R. 1938 The Nuzu Menology. Archivorientilni10:51-64. Grosz, K. 1987 On Some Aspects of the Adoption of Women at Nuzi. Pp. 131-52
andCultureofNuziandtheHurrians in Studieson the Civilization II,
edited by M. A. Morrison and D. I. Owen. Winona Lake,IN: Eisenbrauns. Maidman, M. 1976 A Socio-Economic Analysis of a Nuzi Family Archive. Ph.D. diss. University of Pennsylvania. 1979 A Nuzi Private Archive: Morphological Considerations. As'ur 1/9:179-86. Morrison, M. A. 1983 The Jacob and Laban Narrative in Light of Near Eastern Sources.
Biblical 46:155-164. Archaeologist 1987 The Southwest Archives at Nuzi. Pp. 167-202 in Studies on the
andCultureofNuziandtheHurrians Civilization II,edited by M.A. Morrison and D. I. Owen. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. 1993 The Eastern Archives of Nuzi. Pp. 3-130 in Studieson the Civiliza-
tionandCulture ofNuziandtheHurrians III,editedby M.A. Morrison
and D. I. Owen. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Wilhelm, G.
vonNuzi AlterOrientund 1970 Untersuchungen zumHurro-Akkadischen Altes Testament 9 Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag.
OLD WORLD ARCHAEOLOGY NEWSLETTER The Europeanand Mediterraneanworld claim our attention as much for its past as for currentaffairs. From the origins of agricultureto the rise of state societies, archaeology contributesto our understandingof the past and thus informs the present in which we live. Old World Archaeology Newsletter publishes field reportsof recentresearch, provides news aboutconferencesand exhibitions,and lists announcements,grants,and recentpublications.OWAN is published 3 times each year by the Departmentof Classical Studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown. It is available to those with Internet access to a World Wide Web client(http://www.wesleyan.edu /classics/OWAN.html). Recent articles include: Fishing at FranchthiCave, Greece: Changing Environments and Patternsof Exploitation The YasminaNecropolis of Ancient Carthage,the 1994 Season The RomanVilla at Sidi Ghrib,Tunisia Human Skeletal Remains from a Medieval Contextat San Foca (Puglia), Italy:ByzantineTombs of the 12th Century To subscribe:one year subscriptionsis US & CanadaFirst Class $10.00;Overseas Airmail $15.00;Overseas Surface $11.00.OWAN,Departmentof ClassicalStudies,Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06459-0146; E-mail: (860)685-2070.
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Biblical Arc haeologist Martha A. Morrison received her A.B. from Wellesley College and M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of Mediterranean Studies at Brandeis University,where she studied with Cyrus Gordon. Her interest in the ancient Near East grew out of her early studies of the Classics and Bible. Following in her mentor's footsteps, she has dug in Israel,traveled widely, and has published a number of articles on Nuzi and other Near Eastern topics. She teaches in the Department of Theology at Boston College.
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BiblicalArchaeologist59:1(1996)
35
Will
"Someone
Cyrus
H.
Succeed
Gordon
in
and
By Gary A. Rendsburg
A
EARLIEST PUBLISHED WORK LTHOUGH CYRUSH. GORDON'S ON Minoan appeared.in 1957,his rumination on the problem began as early as 1931.In June of that year the young Gordonwas sailing to the Near East for his first visit. His own words tell the story:
One Junenight as we were sailing along the coast of Crete, I was sitting with a group of companions on deck, and I was impelled to express my thoughts somewhat as follows: "The Minoan inscriptions from this island are the main challenge to the decipherers of tomorrow. Someone with the necessary knowledge will succeed, through hard and honest work, in deciphering Minoan."In retrospect,I realizethatis no way to talkto travellingcompanions on a moonlit night in the Mediterranean,but I was shamed and silenced by a middle-aged businessman named Mr Davis,who looked at me with disgust and said,"Yousound like a high school valedictorian."I mention the incident only to bring out the fact that my active concern with the problem twenty-five years laterhad a quartercentury of brooding (much of it subconscious) behind it (Gordon 1971:154-5).1 36
59:1(1996) Biblical Archaeologist
Minoan" Deciphering
Minoan
Linear
A
The excavations of HagiaTriadaproducedabout 170 Minoantexts. The abbreviationHTbefore cited texts refersto this corpus.(Photo courtesy DavidI.Owen.)
Fastforwardto the year 1956.In the intervening years Gordon had produced three editions of his standard works on the Ugaritic language (Gordon 1940;1947;1955c),as well as a standard translationof the Ugaritic myths and epics (Gordon 1949).As is well known, Gordon's work on Ugaritic did not end with his contributionson the language and the literature. Gordon saw that Ugarit was much more than a major source of Canaanite literatureproviding invaluable material for the background of the Hebrew Bible.For Gordon,Ugaritic was a bridge which spanned the worlds of the Hebrews and the Greeks. Thus, during this same period Gordon produced his seminal works on the common background of the two cultures (see most importantly Gordon 1955a).Moreover,it became clear to Gordon that the hub which connected these worlds was Crete (kptris the home of Kothar-wa-Hasis, the Ugaritic god of arts and crafts;his correspondent in the Greekpantheon is Hephaistos, whose home is also Crete;the Philistines of the Bible emigrated to Canaan from Caphtor; and so on). Others in this special issue are discussing Gordon's work on Ugaritic and on the common background of
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Greekand Hebrew civilizations,so there is no need for me to say more on these subjects. Still, it is worth pointing out the obvious, that no portion of Gordon's world is unconnected from the other portions.This singular scholar'swork on Minoan did not surface ex nihilo;it can only be understood in light of his work on Ugariticand Aegean interconnections. In 1956 Michael Ventris and John Chadwick published their important book Documents in MycenaeanGreek(Ventris and Chadwick 1956). A bit of background is necessary to bring us to this important event in modem archaeologicaland philologicalresearch.Starting in 1893 and for several decades thereafter,SirArthurEvansexcavatedatvarious sites on Crete and there discovered the great BronzeAge civilization of ancient Crete which he called Minoan after the legendary king Minos (Evans 192136 is his most comprehensive work). Among his important finds were severalhundred day tabletsbearingwriting in two different,yet very similar,scripts. Evans called the older of the two scripts Linear A and the more recent one Linear B.2Due to the number of signs,it was assumed by all scholarsthatboth scripts were syllabaries (i.e.,non-alphabetic). A half-century after Evans's excavations, these scripts remained undeciphered.It was the young and brilliant Ventris who changed the picture. He was an architectby training, but he had studied classical languages. Ventris made it his life goal to decipher the Cretan script; he succeeded in the 1950s by solving the Linear B variety and he then was joined in his enterprise by Chadwick, a professional philologian. Ventris and Chadwick concluded that the language of the Linear B material was Greek,not the classicalGreekof the Iron Age, but an earlier form from the LateBronzeAge which they called Mycenaean Greek.Theirwork was welcomed enthusiastically, and it opened major new vistas in the study of the ancient Greek language and culture. Tragically, the young Ventrisdied in an automobile accidentin 1956,but he had accomplished his life goal.Accordingly,the appearance of Documentsin MycenaeanGreekin 1956, with a full and detailed analysis of the Biblical Archaeologist 59:1(1996)
37
A Thisinscriptioncomes from a magic bowl found at Knossos
4
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Al fl A
decipherment, was truly a major event. Gordon obtained his copy of the Ventris-Chadwick book in December 1956 and immediately set sight on decipheringthe LinearA material.In otherwords,at the culmination of a decade of researchon the interconnectionsbetween Greece, Ugarit,and Israel,with Crete as the hub, it was Gordon'sgood fortune now to be stimulated onward by the work of Ventris and Chadwick.Gordon'smethod,like thatof everyoneinvolved in Minoan studies, was to apply the values of the Linear B scriptto the LinearA material.As noted above,since the scripts are very similar,the values of the former,i.e.,the known, could be utilized to elucidate the latter,i.e., the unknown. Actually, already Ventris and Chadwick realized this was the case. Indeed they had begun to read some words in LinearA, thoughthey realizedthatthese words were not Greek as in LinearB,but belonged to some other language.Forexample, Ventrisand Chadwick noted that five words for different kinds of vessels in LinearA were su-po,ka-ro-pa, pa-pa,su-pa-ra, and pa-ta-qe,all of which are accompaniedby pot pictograms.3 They also realized that the word for "total"in Linear A was ku-ro,a fact forthcoming from the repeated use of this word at the end of administrative tablets. Forsomeone familiarwith the Semiticlanguages,and especially for someone who had worked intensively on Ugaritic for twenty years,the identificationof four of these words came rathernaturally.Thus it is hardly surprising that Gordon saw in three of the vessel names the equivalents to Ugariticsp,krpn, and spl,and in ku-rothe equivalent to Semitic kull"all,total" (note that r and I are not distinguished in the Linear A and B scripts, as is also the case to some extent in Egyptian and Eblaite).It was these four words which formed the basis for Gordon'sclaim that the language of the LinearA tablets was Semitic. The result was a short article in the journal Antiquity (Gordon 1957b),hailed by its editor O. G. S. Crawford as "'hot news' of a startlingnew discovery"(Crawford1957:123). Moreover,to move beyond the pure linguistic issue, Gordon's work in identifyingLinearA as Semiticmeant thatthe Minoans, the creatorsof the high civilizationof ancient Crete,must have been Semites. 38
Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
(Gordon1966:PlateIX).The firstthree signs are a-ga-nu (or a-ka-nu) correspondingto Hebrewand Aramaic'aggan "bowl,"used in the Aramaicmagic bowls of the first millenniumCE. < Linedrawing of an Eteocretanunilingualtext from Praisos (Gordon1966:PlateIII),written in boustrophedonformat. At the end of line 4 are the lettersKAEXY EX(both sigma'sare partially broken)correspondingto the Hebrewidiom kol -^ wa-1f"every man."Worddividersare used very inconsistentlyin the text.
Gordon continued his work on Minoan and soon identified two more words: ga-ba"all"and a-ga-nu"bowl."Because these two words were known from Akkadian,Gordonarrived at the more specific conclusion that Minoan was East Semitic (Gordon 1957a).Just as Akkadian texts were found far afield in Anatolia,Ugarit,Egypt,and so on, so could "Akkadian" texts be found on Crete, albeit written in a different script, namely that of LinearA. In the meantime,other scholarsbegan to contribute details that Gordon incorporated into his picture.Thus it became clearthat ku-ni-su,written with the wheat determinative,was the same as the Akkadian word kunnisu, and that the word for "and"was u, also known from Akkadian. Gordon continued along the East Semitic path for several years,until he received copies of two books published in 1961:W C. Brice'sInscriptions in theMinoanLinearScriptof Class A (1961)and Sidney Davis'ThePhaistosDisk and theEteocretan Inscriptions fromPsychroandPraisos(1961).The first of these volumes was especially important. Until this time Gordon and others had worked from Evans's original publications of Linear A. Brice'swork was a great improvement, because it included not only photographs but clear line drawings and valuable indices. In Gordon'swords: "The very appearanceof More imporBrice'scopies was enlivening" (Gordon1971:163). tantly,Brice'svolume allowed Gordonto read more of the texts than had been possible previously.Among the new words that Gordon identified were ki-re-ya-tu"city"and re (i.e., le) "to." In addition, he noticed that a pithos from Knossos bore the inscription ya-ne,no doubt the word for its contents "wine." It was these words, and others like them, that led Gordon to realize that he had been off course for the past few years. For these words do not appear in Akkadian, they are strictly West Semitic.Gordon'snext importantarticleincluded all this information and argued strongly for the West Semitic identificationof Minoan (Gordon1962b).Fromthatpoint on Gordon continued to produce a stream of articleson the subject,arguing persuasively that the language of Minoan Linear A was a West Semitic dialect. Davis'book sent Gordon in a differentdirection.Although
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One of the first Minoanwords to be read was the word ku-ni-su "emmerwheat," correspondingto the Akkadianword kunnisu.It appearstwice, for example, in HagiaTriada(HT)86 (Gordon 1966:PlateVIIl).The firstthree signs (read left-to-right)are the syllablesku, ni, and su;they are followed by the wheat determinative and an undeterminedsign. V Appearingon a wine pithos from Knossosis an inscriptionwhich includesthe two-syllableword ya-ne (note the word dividerson either side), correspondingto Hebrewyayin and Ugariticyn. The discoveryof this word and other strictlyWest Semiticwords led Gordonto realizethat the language was not, as he first had thought, Akkadian.Gordonbegan to assertthe West Semiticidentificationof Minoan(Gordon1966:PlateX).
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The large, labyrinthinepalace at Knossosincludedmagazineslined with huge, elaboratelydecorated pithoi. Photographfrom the Beegle Collection.
Davis argued that Minoan was Hittite, and thus disagreed with Gordon'sconclusion, he made an important contribution. Davis wished to see one continuum for a whole series of inscriptional material found on Crete. He believed that the Linear A tablets, the Phaistos Disk (a unique text), and the much later Eteocretan material all represented the same language. For Davis this language was Hittite, which Gordon could not accept.But Davis' approachled Gordonto tackle the Eteocretan texts.These texts required no decipherment per se, for they are written in the Greek alphabet,although the language is not Greek.Moreover,two of the Eteocretantexts are bilinguals, with the Greek supplied alongside the Eteocretan.Armed with his renewedunderstandingthatthe Minoan
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A Linedrawings of the two bilingualEteocretan-Greekinscriptions from Dreros(Gordon1966:PlateII).Inthe first inscription,the first two lines are the Eteocretanversion runningright-to-leftand written with word dividers;the lastthree lines are the Greekversionwritten boustrophedon (startingright-to-left)and without word dividers.In the second inscription,the first line (except for the last three letters) preservesthe end of the Eteocretanversion runningright-to-left; then the Greekversionfollows with the three letters at the end of the first line and continuing in boustrophedonstyle over the next two lines. Onlyone word divideris used, after the first legible letter (sigma)in the Eteocretantext.
texts represented a West Semitic language, Gordon began to make sense of the Eteocretan texts as West Semitic as well (Gordon 1962a).The Eteocretan texts, in fact, are not unlike Phoenician and Punic texts written in Greek and Latin letters (see Gordon 1968). Gordon synthesized his work on Minoan and Eteocretan in a comprehensive work entitled Evidence for theMinoan about or so words are identified (1966).Together, Language fifty in these texts, not including various personal names well known fromUgariticand Hebrew.Moresignificantly,as demonstrated already in some of the earlier articles, entire phrases in Minoan now could be read, and in the case of the Eteocretan texts,entire texts could be read. Gordon,of course, never views language as a means unto itself, but sees it as the key to understanding culture and to realizing "the big picture" (Gordon 1955b).For him, the evidence of languagefromCretepointed to the presenceof Semites on the island throughout antiquity. The Minoans were Semites who had migrated from the mainland of the Near East (perhaps from the Levant, perhaps from the Egyptian Delta) sometime during the Bronze Age. As the Bronze Age came to a close, they were pushed out of Creteby the increasing presence and power of the Mycenaean Greeks. The descendantsof the people who wrote the LinearA tabletswere part of the Sea Peoples movement (Philistines and others) who returnedto the mainland,first attemptingto attackEgypt, Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
39
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I.-_ ?:Jt;,:-" i-?.!: .?'. .... .-.!. .,1:; , .!" ..-..'::ill:?; -_,.:;'?'.i;: -?::. :?,,:V.?'i'?i??`,; i??:??i;?r .:.... ;;:? ': '.:!. ..? -;,;?, :.?.:.7:.;: .:;.: -? ".)?e,.!:;a; . ? ;?i-` , : .. .:. . : _` ? . m:_.::m1?--ir:-, . . ??:,!::i., . .:?,: lt?i?? _,,?.:i : . ,.? ? : .,; .,?-,:, . _ . ;??:-::: . '. ; 1: ! M.. :-; -::,..-:-`::!.,i... .. -qt. ;, ': " -,.-;,_ ,?.i..-...!.. .,:7 ? K . . --,-.. ..'Ilq: -_ ,,?" . ...--..... I ?? ;., ..;_t4. :. .;; .?, :.. -i ?:::: ?: .-... . ? : 7:1.1!:-1;. . ?: .M.1. ... ...... ....... I %I4. 't;? ...... -...-;..... ;::: .! . ..t-?.:.;. m " I .;:. : .:. ? q i. :,?, :W ::;!,l.??: i??;??;lii'??-i;!. ... . ?: -? ?.. . ?.: .. -:.::. ,:.;-? :1..1.._:.1 :-lrl,?.-' q:d. 1? .. t;;i ? .. 1.? 1?1.. I. ? -A _3.., .. ? . :-I1:, . _. . t:, .??. , ?. .. ? ? I ... -?Ii?::.: I .. . ..'-. )? . _ ?. i? ??:" . ..:.. '-:i,: -;.... ? o. . :;.4 '. ,,ii:;i!:.. i.z -I : ...... ".. ; :q. . 4:.?.... :'? e , I.I.: ?': . . ??-,.. ... .. .. .: . :-;:l. . :-i-,?-mm!7?-_,::i:?i7:'?!?-.i:-. ; 7 :.::.:: .... " -,: ? ...... ; :: --I -: ?. ?. :j..I'.,:.;;..:,? 16 : I ., -. ; .1 ,?I.-... .. ? ',?. ?.'. .. . ?., ?:::?:!;;, ,%: I... . ..... .: : :. .!:' ,,, .: -,? t , ..::::-, :_ = " ,?? : . ! 1" :?i -!! " ` : :? ,_, ::! ? "; -- t-?-.li; ;? ?....,.; .. ,-.ij--.!7 )L ...- ;)., ?C -... ` ?? ... .-,.-;...?:.-, :-.' . .?.......: --.. -:...1. ... ...% ?-.?..:O_:?!??. p.;` ?-.;. .;?. . -? .:;?: ...... -"* ....... ?-.;??_. --?-'..::1i?'. ;.., -p'-1. t;;- ...tim!::;-;V?.?i:! ...I......... ..-. ..-.;-:_ ;?;!-?. `% .:.:. q_ ,:...;. ._:-'-:,'.I, .:.` .:,), -. .. "., .. ":":. -,?l...,.. %:;:?i, :?::: -,-. -.-?,:: ......-?--; .;,..,.. .. .It_ ':.?.
,.
A map of Cretewith the location of the varioussites at which were found either Minoanor Eteocretantexts.
then settling on the Levantine coast. But other "latter-day European, especially Hittite and other Anatolian languages, Minoans"remainedon Creteand continuedto use theirSemitic for the interpretationof Linear A. But others simply rejected the notion that Minoan was Semitic on the grounds that it language into late antiquity. The Eteocretan tablets date from ca. 500 BCEto ca. 300 BCE,and there is evidence from simply could not be so. Many of these were the same indiNero's time concerning the Semitic language of Crete as viduals who rejected Gordon'scontributions to the Homer well (Gordon 1981). and Biblequestion,so it was hardlysurprisingthatthey rejected As the reader is no doubt aware,Gordon'sdecipherment the idea that the pre-Greek language of Crete was Semitic. of Minoan as Semiticcreateda majorcontroversy.Some schol- Throughoutall of this,however,it is importantto keep in mind a crucial point. Those who rejected Gordon'sposition typiars were willing to accept the view that Minoan was Semitic.A good example is Armas Salonen (1966),who incor- cally were scholars in the field of classics, with no training porated the Minoan evidence into his important book Die whatsoever in Semitic or other Near Eastern languages. The and classified Minoan as a fact is that the averageclassicist knows Greek and Latin,but HausgeriitederaltenMesopotamier Semitic language in the index. Another example is Frederik does not know any Semitic or other Near Eastern lanE. L. ten Haaf (1975),who proposed reading Hagia Traida guages; whereas the averageSemitist knows not only various text11bas a recordof commodity distributionsto officialswith Semiticlanguages,but also Greekand perhapsother languages titles such as "r "chief,ruler"and rozmn "prince,ruler"(to give such as Latin, Hittite, Sumerian, Egyptian, and so on. Thus, the classicists, and they typically were the ones rejecting the the more familiar Hebrew forms). view that Minoan is Semitic,were in no position even to judge Tobe perfectly honest, however,most of the scholars who supported the position that Minoan is Semitic were Gordon's the matter. The following story related by George Bass is illustraown students (M. C. Astour, D. Neiman, G. A. Rendsburg, R. R. R. E. tive: and for M. Yamauchi; Richard, J. Sasson, Stieglitz, partialbibliographysee Gordon1971:168n. 32).Loyaltyto one's The hostility goes deeper. I'm going to talk about this mentor no doubt played a role here,but an equally important because we'retoo polite as scholars.I get very angry.Twenty factoris the trainingthat Gordon'sdisciples received.Gordon's years ago I sat next to a scholar who is an extremely unique view of the ancient world, with sightlines recogniztime and well-known classicalarchaeologist-one of the best in the of both over swaths interconnections place, large ing world-whose knowledge of Greek and German and any was transmitted to his students in the classroom. Thus, other language is pathetic.Although he is a good archaewhen they became scholars in their own right, they were in a unique position both to understand Gordon'sapproachand ologist,he can barelyread any languageother than English. He was sitting next to me at a lecture by Cyrus Gordon, to accept his conclusions. Otherscholarswere less than accepting.4Some researchers snickering all the way through.Of course he didn'tunderstand it. But he'd been taught to snicker. It angered me at least offered alternative views, looking typically to Indo40
Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
III/
?IUY/)
I
i
Iy
The second half of HT88, depicted here (Gordon1966:PlateVIII),is a list of six individualitems which then are totaled at the end. Note the six single strokes indicatingthe numeral"one" in lines 3-5 of this text. The sixth "one" is followed by the signs ku-ro,correspondingto Hebrewkol "all,total," and the six strokesgrouped together to indicate "six."Parallelsto this accountingsystem occurin the Bible; see especiallythe list of defeated kings in Joshua 12:1-24.
twenty years ago; it angers me today (Bass 1989:112). I continue with another story to demonstrate the point. Recently there was an exchange on one of the computer networks about the whole question of LinearA. A leading scholar of Aegean archaeology and epigraphy was among the participants in the exchange. He not only was quoted by others as a great authorityon the subject,he clearlypresented himself as such as well. In a private e-mail message to him, I asked him whether or not he knew any Hebrew or other Semitic language in order to judge the matter objectively.He replied to me that he did not. To be fair,it is important to note that some scholars who do know Semitic, including some leading researchers in the field, also rejected Gordon'sposition. Their objection was that in Gordon'swork on LinearA, some elements of Minoan link up with Canaanite (Ugaritic,Phoenician, Hebrew,etc.),some with Aramaic,some with Akkadian, and so on. Thus,Minoan could not be identified with any Semitic language,and therefore Gordon's interpretation was deemed a failure. The close-mindedness of this approach is readily apparent.This
view was not a misrepresentationof the facts;it was perfectly correct that Minoan displayed isoglosses connecting it with different Semitic languages (see my earlier remarks on how Gordonhimself had looked first at WestSemitic,then at Akkadian, and then back to WestSemitic).However,the truthis that any given Semitic language has isoglosses going in different directions connecting it to all other Semitic languages. It is helpful to compare the approach taken by scholars regarding Eblaite.When this Semitic language first came to light in the 1970s,it was clear from the start that certain features of Eblaite showed an affinity with Akkadian, while at the same time other features of the language showed a close relationship with West Semitic. Scholars debated-and continue to debate--the position of Eblaitewithin Semitic,but no one denies that Eblaite is Semitic because it cannot be fitted neatly into our preexisting notions about the subdivisions of the language family.One hardly needed the discovery of Eblaite to demonstrate the weakness of the aforementioned argument regarding Minoan, but now that we have Eblaite before us, the contrast is bright. Indeed, my colleague David I.Owen saw immediately that the discoveryof Eblaitecould influence the way people viewed the Minoan problem. In a letter to Gordon dated December 12,1976,Owen wrote, Eblaitehas those numerous intra-Semiticfeatures that so often confuse us in Linear A. There is a regular r/l interchange! No need to look to Egyptian. There are both East and WestSemitic features in the verbal system.In fact many of the criticisms of your decipherment by Semitists no longer will hold water in view of the Eblaitetexts (Gordon 1980:209n. 20). The greatestpraiseforGordon' work on Minoanwas forthcoming in a ratherbizarre way. In 1972Jan Best wrote of his acceptanceof Gordon'sdecipherment of Minoan, calling Gordon "the first and most ardent advocate" of the Semitic identification of the language (Best 1972:13).But in the years to follow Best produced a series of works in which he presented himself as the decipherer of Minoan as Semitic, with no reference whatsoever to Gordon'sprior work (Best 1982). Such academic dishonesty required a strong reproach,and I was happy to comply with a detailed review article of Best's monograph (Rendsburg 1982).Gordon wrote a shorter piece (Gordon 1984).I repeat here a sampling of what I wrote: the material presented is virtually the same as that published by Gordon, and yet Gordon'sMinoan studies go uncited... [Best] repeats without acknowledgement material published by Gordon more than two decades ago...Clearly,Best'sactions cannot be tolerated,least of all in the scholarlycommunity which has broughtto the modem world a better understanding of our classical,biblical, and Near Easternheritages (Rendsburg1982:79,86, 87). My denunciation of Best was an absolute necessity, and 59:1(1996) Biblical Archaeologist
41
I am glad that I took the initiative to pen it. Yet while his dishonesty needed to be denounced, Best's appropriationof Gordon'swork represented praise of the highest type, albeit in a strange and of course most unprofessional manner. The applicationof Minoan and Eteocretanto biblicalstudies merits our final attention. Obviously, as the least known of the Semiticlanguages,Minoan/Eteocretancannotbe expected to shed majorlighton problemsconfrontingthe biblicalscholar. And yet occasionally small rays of light nevertheless shine forth. I include here a small sampling. Gordon (1966:27)noted that the use of ku-ro"all,total"at the end of Minoan administrativetextsis paralleledby the use of k81or hakk0l"all,total" at the end of several biblical lists (Joshua 12:24,Ezra 2:42). R. R. Stieglitz (1971)noted several other examples of the phenomenon (Genesis 46:26, 2 Samuel 23:39).What has not been pointed out yet, as far as I know,is the overall structuralsimilarity between the Minoan and biblicallists.Most striking is the parallelbetween the second half of Hagia Triadatext88 and the list of conqueredkings in Joshua 12:1-24.Both texts present lists of individual items followed by the notationfor"one";at the end of the list appears the word for"all,total"and the total number of items.Remarkably,most biblicalscholars assume that the Joshualist is a late addition to an earlier version of the conquest narrative and thus assign the list to either so-called Dtr2 or so-called P (see Boling and Wright 1982:322).But the Minoan parallel argues for the antiquity of the Joshua list. Not only is it integral to the book of Joshua, it should be considered an early source.Note furtherthat the expressionkolmalkim (v.24)lacks the expected definite article, another linguistic point in favor of the list's antiquity. Dealing with LateBiblicalHebrew,I was able to cite Eteocretan evidence as tangentialsupport for a point regardingthe history of the Hebrew language. Avi Hurvitz earlier demonstrated that the kol X we-X syntagma was a feature of Late Biblical Hebrew (Hurvitz 1972:70-73).In my discussion of the evidence,I put forwardthe phrase KAEuY Eu(=kol ? wiFT) attested in an Eteocretan inscription from ca. 500 BCEas an additional example of this usage (Rendsburg1980:69;for the text see Gordon 1966:10). As a third example,I cite anotherof Gordon'sobservations. In the above cited Eteocretan phrase, the word for "man"is written EZ,as opposed to the expected i (compare ir "city"). Here then we have a parallelto the initial element in the name )e1bacal"Eshbaal"(1 Chronicles 8:33,9:39),literally "Man-ofBaal,"correspondingto the more familiar ibolet "Ishbosheth" (2 Samuel2:8etc.),literally"Man-of-Shame"(Gordon1992:193).5 In the years following 1966,Gordon'swork on Minoan and Eteocretanlessened. The major contributionhad been made in the period 1957-66.However, I know from personal experience that his interestin the subjectnever waned. During my years as a graduatestudent with Gordon in the 1970s,his seminars were peppered with information about the Semitic language of Crete. And from recent discussion and correspondence with my mentor,I know that he remains an active participant in developments. In 1991he visited Oslo to meet 42
Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
personally with Kjell Aartun and Rudolf Macuch, two leading European Semitists engaged in the study of Minoan. The former'srecent book (Aartun1992)is another example of a scholar's acceptance of Gordon's basic understanding of Minoan as Semitic. Finally, as I write these words I am in contact with Gordon about his most recent horizon in the field of Minoan studies. Gordon informs me that he accepts the view of Harold Haarmann (1990)and Marija Gimbutas (1991:30821) that the Minoan Linear A script derives from the Old European script of the Danube valley of the Neolithic and Chalcolithicages.The following scenario thus results.The Old European/Linear A script developed in southeasternEurope in the NeolithicAge and remainedin use in the region through the LateBronzeAge (in its LinearB form).Semiteswho arrived on Crete earlier in the Bronze Age (Early Bronze? Middle Bronze?)utilized this script for writing their Semiticlanguage. It is obvious that almost forty years after his initial steps in Minoan studies, Gordon continues to view the field as fertile ground for future discovery. There is much more to be done on the Linear A texts, the Phaistos Disk awaits interpretation(thoughsee now Aartun1992),and the newly posited connection with the Old European script opens still further avenues. Sixty-fiveyears afterGordon sailed past Creteon his firstvisit to the Near East,the inscriptionsfrom the island continue to allure.
Notes 1This passage appears within an autobiographicalsection of Gordon'sbook ForgottenScripts(Gordon 1971),roughly pp. 144-68.My treatment herein is greatly indebted to these pages. However, this material was not included in the revised version of the book (Gordon 1982). 2The Cretan site that yielded the largest number of Linear A tablets (about 170 in total) was Hagia Triada. 3Pictograms are special signs used to identify the class of words that a particular word belongs to. Students of Egyptian will be familiar with this system, for pictograms or determinatives are used widely in this language. Students of cuneiform will be familiar with the basic system too, though determinatives are used in a more limited way in Akkadian, Eblaite,and other languages. 4 In what follows I desist from mentioning the names of individual scholars who opposed Gordon'sview. 5The name is attested in Ugaritic too as i'bcl (Gordon 1965/ 67:367).The spelling with ' indicates that the first element in the name Eshbaal cannot be equated with it, the particle of existence in Ugaritic, as often is suggested by scholars.
Bibliography Aartun, K. 1992 Die MinoischeSchrift:SpracheundTexte,Vol.I. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Bass, G. E 1989 Responses. Arethusa,Special Issue. Fall:11l-13.
Best,J.
A. AmsterRemarks on theDecipherment 1972 SomePreliminary ofLinear
Hurvitz, A. 1972 Beyn Lashonle-Lashon.Jerusalem: Bialik.
dam: Adolf M. Hakkert.
andHistorical 1982 Talanta: Society. Rendsburg, G. A. of theDutchArchaeological Proceedings Mediterraneum. Middelie:Studio Vol.13:Supplementum 1980 Late Biblical Hebrew and the Date of 'P' Journalof theAncientNear Epigraphicum Pieter Mulier. Eastern Society12:65-80. 1982 On Jan Best's "Decipherment" of Minoan Linear A. Journalof the Boling, R. G. and Wright,G. E. 1982 Joshua.Anchor Bible. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Brice,W. C.
1961 Inscriptionsin theMinoanLinearScriptof ClassA. New York:
AncientNearEastern 14:79-87 Society.
Salonen, A. 1966 Die HausgeritederaltenMesopotamier. 3 vols. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Sciences.
Oxford University Press. Crawford, O. G. S. 1957 Editorial Notes. Antiquity31:121-3. Davis, S.
andPraisos. DiskandtheEteocretan 1961 ThePhaistos Inscriptions fromPsychro
Stieglitz, R. R. 1971 Minoan and Biblical Totals. StudiMicenied Egeo-Anatolici 14:217-18. Ventris, M. and Chadwick, J. 1956 Documentsin MycenaeanGreek.London: Cambridge University Press.
Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Evans, A. 1921-36ThePalaceof Minos at Knossos.4 vols. London: Macmillan. Gimbutas, M. 1991 The Civilizationof the Goddess.San Francisco: Harper. Gordon, C. H. 1940 UgariticGrammar.Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute. 1947 UgariticHandbook.Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute.
Translation Literature: A Comprehensive 1949 Ugaritic of thePoeticandProse
Texts.Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute. 1955a Homer and the Bible. HebrewUnionCollegeAnnual26:43-108. 1955b Language as a Means to an End. Antiquity29:147-9 1955c UgariticManual.Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute. 1957a Akkadian Tabletsin Minoan Dress. Antiquity31:237-40. 1957b Notes on Linear A. Antiquity31:124-30. 1962a Eteocretan.Journalof Near EasternStudies21:211-14. 1962b Minoaca. Journalof Near EasternStudies21:207-10. Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute. 1965/67 UgariticTextbook. 1966 Evidencefor theMinoanLanguage.Ventnor,NJ: Ventnor Publishers. 1968 Northwest Semitic Texts in Latin and Greek Letters. Journalof the
Oriental American Society88:285-9 Harmondsworth: TheStoryof theirDecipherment. 1971 Forgotten Scripts: 1980
Penguin. New Light on the Minoan Language. Pp. 205-9 in Proceedings of the
Vol.I.Athens. International Fourth Congress. Cretological 1981
The Semitic Language of Minoan Crete. Pp. 761-82 in Bono
HominiDonum:Essaysin HistoricalLinguisticsin MemoryofJ. AlexanderKerns,edited by Y. L. Arbeitman and A. R. Bomhard. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
New York: andDecipherment. TheirOngoing 1982 Forgotten Discovery Scripts: 1984 1992
Basic Books. Reflections on the Decipherment of Minoan. Orientalia53:453-5. The12th The MediterraneanSynthesis. Pp. 188-96in TheCrisisYears: CenturyB.C.,edited by W.A. Ward and M. S. Joukowsky.Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.
ten Haaf, E E. L. 1975 A Note on the Linear A TabletHT 11.Kadmos14:175-6. Haarmann, H. 1990 Writing from Old Europe to Ancient Crete-A Case of Cultural
Studies18:251-75. Continuity.Journal ofIndo-European
Gary A. Rendsburg is professor of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He is a specialist in the Northwest Semitic languages and associated literatures. Rendsburg earned his Ph.D. in 1980at New YorkUniversity, where his mentor was Cyrus H. Gordon. Dr. in Honor Rendsburg edited the 1980 Festschrift, TheBibleWorld:Essays of Cyrus-H.Gordon(KTAV).He is the author of three books, including
Evidence Psalms(Scholars OriginofSelected Linquistic fortheNorthern Press,1990),and dozens of articles covering a wide range of issues relevant to the study of the Hebrew Bible.
BiblicalArchaeologist 59:1 (1996)
43
The of Ugaritic Studies
By David Toshio Tsumura N THEHISTORYOF UGARITICSTUDY,THENAME
The main street of the city of Ugarit(RasShamra).At the right,the West Archivesof the
royalpalace,where archaeologistsunearthed manytablets, both in Ugariticand in Akkadian. Cyrus H. Gordon occupies a special place.His contributionsto this study Priorto the emergence of Israelin Canaan,Ugarit'sflourishingculturepossessedfully are enormous and inseparablefrom developed prose and poetry as well as such complextools as quadrilingualdictionaries. its development during the past sixtyPhotographscourtesyof the author. five years. He is certainly the "Father into his grammars. of Ugaritic Study" and has introduced many younger generations to the excitement of the study of the language and Comparedwith recentpublicationssuch as Canaanite Myths culture of ancient Ugarit through his lectures, supervisions, andLegends(Gibson1977)and A Cuneiform Anthologyof Religious TextsandGlossaries(de Moor and and writings. Following a pattern laid down long ago, Gor- Textsfrom Ugarit:Autographed don'sachievements fall into two groups of seven. Spronk 1987),Gordon avoided speculative reconstruction as much as possible. In a rapidly developing discipline, it was Gordon'sSeven Contributionsto Ugaritic Study certainly wise not to finalize judgment on obscure passages. 1) The Basic Toolsfor UgariticStudy UgariticTextbook provides a comprehensive vocabulary list, Gordon'sbiggest contributionto Ugariticstudy consists in which includes proper nouns, such as personal, geographic, the basic and up-to-date (at least up to 1967)tools he provided and divine names. The list gives a realistic view of the lanfor studying the language. His grammars have grown larger, guage and its users. Gordon often provides information from common Semitic languages,Egypto-Semitic(e.g.,d=hand) and following each stage of development of the discipline and incorporatingnewly discovered primary texts and contribu- even Minoan, manifesting the breadth of his academic was tions by other scholars. The first one, UgariticGrammar, expertise. By reading it carefully from cover to cover, the students published in 1940.It was revised and enlarged to the Ugaritic Handbook(1947),UgariticManual(1955),UgariticTextbook (1965), will learn from Gordon'sUgariticTextbook many important parto Ugaritic (UT),though ticulars,both of the language itself and of the literature and Textbook Textbook (1967).Ugaritic Supplement culture of ancient Ugarit. more than a quarter century old and in need of revision, is still the best textbook available,as well as a useful reference 2) Solid, Up-to-DateTranslationsof the Texts Gordon provided successively the comprehensive English work.Youngerscholars can tracethe development of Ugaritic translationsof Ugaritictexts:UgariticLiterature (1949),Ugaritand study over the past three decades by examining how and why Gordonchangedhis view on particularsubjectsin these books. MinoanCrete(1966a),and "Poetic Legends and Myths from Ugarit" (1977a:5-133). The first includes translations of Ugaritic Textbookconsists of "Grammar,""Texts" and poetic texts along with samples of semi-poetic and prose texts "Glossary" as well as useful indices. The "Grammar"section (Chs.1-15)has detaileddescriptionsof the Ugariticlanguage. including epistles (see the newest collection and FrenchtransOne should be aware that even within UT, "Glossary"(Part lationby Cunchillosin Caquot1989)and hippiatricprescriptions Gordonmade (Pardee 1985).More than one hundred pages of the second 3) reflectslaterstageof revisionthan "Grammar." book contain a revised translationof Ugaritic poetry. every possible effort to face the newly available data and in evidence, often provided personally by C. Virolleaud, as By comparing the last two works, one can see how Gor'Additions and Corrections"(Ch. 21),and to incorporatethem don has changed his views on particular points since the
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59:1(1996) Biblical Archaeologist
(1965;1967).In a discipline such publication of UgariticTextbook as Ugaritic study one needs to keep revising one'sposition in the light of new evidence and understanding. As Ginsberg aptly said forty-fiveyears ago,"theonly people who have never made mistakes in Ugariticphilology are those who have never engaged in it" (1950). The situation remains the same, though it has become more complicated since more scholars are engaged in it (some without proper trainingin Semitic linguistics!). Translationsfrom Ugaritic still differ greatly in interpretation (cf. Caquot et al. 1974;Gibson 1977; del Olmo Lete 1981;de Moor 1987).In such a situation, Gordon's1977 translation,"PoeticLegendsand Myths from Ugarit,"has been most helpful. As a whole, it has remained the best English translation, though naturally it needs revisions and additions after eighteen years. 3) Realistic Presentation of the Language A thoroughreading and understanding of Gordon'sphiloaffords logical arguments and presentation in UgariticTextbook view of the For a realistic one Ugariticlanguage. example,both the variety of availablelinguistic data (as of 1967)and the complexity of the linguistic situation of ancient city state Ugarit are evident. Tabletswritten using the alphabeticcuneiform,i.e. Ugaritic script, have been also found outside of the city itself (e.g. Soukas,Tanaach;also Ras Ibn Hani since 1977,see Caquot1989). While Ugaritic is usually written alphabetically,it can be also writtensyllabicallyusing the Akkadiansyllabary(e.g.quadrilinguals; see Huehnergard 1987).The alphabetic script is also used for writing Hurrian and Akkadian. This script is sometimes even mirror-writtenand used for "Canaanite"(texts from Mount Taborand Beth-Shemesh).Ch. 17,"The Classification of the UgariticTextsand their LiteraryAffinities,"of UT is very useful for grasping the breadth of literary activity in ancient Ugarit,though it needs to be supplemented with the information of recently published texts (Dietrich-Loretz-Sanmartin 1976;Cunchillos 1990). Through UT one can sense both the dialecticaldifferences within Ugariticitself and the foreigninfluences which are the result of language contact. These illustrate the international aspect of Ugarit,which is situated at the crossroadof cultures near the MediterraneanSea. ForGordon,language is not just a system or structure,but reflects the life and culture of its users. In this sense Segert's A BasicGrammarof the UgariticLanguage(1984) is more "linguistic" with a structuralist approach,but lacks the cultural aspect of Ugaritic language. The linguistic reality at ancient Ugarit was certainly more complex than that which Segert's Textbook is still the best tool for book presents.Gordon'sUgaritic studying Ugaritic language and culture, if the reader has the patience to study the entire book. 4) Brief but Original Suggestions OftenGordongives only a briefcomment on certainaspects of linguistic phenomena. Though short and concise, they have great importance for understanding Northwest Semitic and have been starting points for the work of other scholars.
Sandhi Gordon wrote only one sentence about "Loss of -a before in Sandhi" in UT ?5.38 (UT:34; also note a comment: "the absence of a in sandhi," UT:543;also 1966b:8,n.15).Following in his steps I was able to develop the theme further in "Vowel sandhi in Ugaritic" (Tsumura 1991; followed by Sivan1993:23)and "Vowelsandhi in BiblicalHebrew"(Tsumura n.d.). VowellessAleph (UT ?4.8) About the so-called "vowelless aleph,"Gordon concludes: "It is likely that vowelless aleph tends to be represented by the aleph-sign containing the vowel that precedes it.Thus syllables ending in a0 and iP tend to be written as a; in i, P, el and 0 as I;and in u , U^1 and iPas u"(UT:18).In UT:19,footnotes 1 and 3, he calls readers' attention to the sound shift rule: aI > e3(?5.16,?14.8;also UT:72,n.1).Thus in both the main text and the footnotes he holds the view that any vowel sign a,i or u, can represent the "vowelless aleph," though i appears often as the result of sound shift a3> e3(e.g. ri? :/re/ < */ra)g/). on the other hand, Tropper(1990a:364)and Sivan (1993:14), take the view that the i- sign can stand for syllable-closing aleph /P/ regardless of the preceding vowels. However, it is strange that the newly added alphabetical sign i should take the role of "universal"aleph sign instead of the original aleph sign a. Gordon's view makes the most sense, though his comments in the footnotes should have been incorporated into the main text in order to be properly noticed by other scholars. Vocalic R The "vocalic r " (UT:33,n.1; UT:84,n.1) is treated more in detail by Huehnergard (1987:284-5). Barth'sLaw Gordon often gives important information in an entirely unrelated section. For example,he deals with yuhbin the section on the "vowellessaleph"(UT:19, n.2) and also as an example of yuqtal-form(UT:71,n.1) in the section on Barth'slaw (?9.9). He applies this law to nouns (UT:147,n-1).In the light of these passages, the vocalization he seems to be suggesting would be yu hab.Tropper(1990b:394),on the other hand, posits the phonological shift: a0> ia> 6 and explains yuhb as ya hVb > yahVb > y6hVb. However, this and other examples can be explained with Gordon, without assuming the "Canaanite shift' as cases of Barth'slaw or of dissimilation. (5) ContextualInterpretationof the Texts It is almost habitual for the scholars who are engaged in in Semitic philology to interpret the so-called cruxinterpretlum the light of cognate languages.Historicallyit was Hebrew and Arabic that helped scholars to interpret Ugaritic texts in the formativeperiod of the discipline. However,afterseveral generations,the fact that a particularpassage or term was initially elucidated with assistance of Hebrew or Arabic has been forgotten.The subsequent generationsof Hebrew students try to explain a certain Old Testament passage in the light of the same Ugaritic term or passage by re-importing the original information. Gordon emphasized that one must not depend on Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
45
cognate information too heavily when interpreting Ugaritic texts,though his students wrote theses on Ugaritic-Arabicand Ugaritic-Ethiopic comparative lexicography. He urged students to interpretcontextually as much as possible, for he knew that "contextual evidence is more reliable than cognate usage"(UT:2).If a suggested interpretationdid not make sense contextually,or if he could not suggest a plain meaning of the text, or if the text was not intelligible because of the obscure condition of the tablets,he left a passage untranslated rather than reconstruct a possible text or speculate on the meaning based on some religious phenomena or social systems from other cultures. Since the majority of Ugaritic texts are poetic, Gordon emphasizes that "aninternal basis for interpretingthe texts is the parallelistic structure of the poetry" (UT:2). Hence, in the section "Syntax and Poetic Structure" (Ch. 13),Gordon gives concrete examples of ellipsis (?13.105),ballast variant Oftenby studying Ugariticpoetry and chiasm (?13.117). (?13.116), the present generationof Old Testamentscholars (e.g.Watson 1984; Pardee 1988) has been trained to scan Hebrew poetic texts properly Dahood is the foremost biblical scholar who has applied the Ugaritic evidence rigorously to Psalms study (Dahood 1966;1968;1970),although he often misapplied the basic principles to the biblical texts.Trainingin poetic parallelism also helps scholars to detect the poetic nature of narrativeprose in the ancient Near East (e.g.,Tsumura1993). 6) A Total View of Ancient Ugarit Gordon'sinterest is not simply in linguistics and philology, but also in history, archaeology, and the socio-religious traditionsin the biblicalworld. He used both archaeologyand epigraphy to draw conclusions (1981a:186).He saw alphabets and dictionaries as clues to the educational system and welcomed Akkadian texts from Ugarit for their aid in understanding comprehensively the society and culture of this city state. Therefore,Gordon'sinterests were not limited in the literary or religious texts from Ugarit.He handled the total corpus of Ugaritic literature,which include administrative texts,letters, lists of personnel or goods, business records, as well as literaryand religious texts.Often Old Testamentscholars who are interested in the religious background of ancient Canaan limit themselves to studying literary materials and lack the concrete knowledge of the people and society. But Gordon's interest is broad enough to include such matters as medical practices (UT text 2050) in ancient Ugarit (1981a:185). 7) Placement of Ugaritin the East Mediterranean Continuum Gordon'scontributions to a better understanding of East Mediterraneancultural contacts during LateBronzeAge have been enormous.While most scholars are interestedin Ugarit's northeasternor southern contacts,Gordon directed scholars' attention to the westward relationships of ancient Ugarit. In fact,one of the first discoveries in Ugarit was a Mycenaean tomb, and Kothar-wa-Hasis, a god of art, technology and wisdom in the Baal myth, is said to be based in Crete, or at least in Caphtor.These data tied in with his academic interest in Minoan problems. Thus, Gordon viewed Ugarit 46
59:1(1996) Biblical Archaeologist
Baal,the storm god, together with his consortAnath is the majorfertilitydeity of Ugarit, though Elholds the place of highest authorityin the pantheon. On this statue from the Templeof Baalhe is depicted with sword and thunderbolt. Inthe Baal-Anath cycle, Baaldefeats his enemy Yammu("Sea")but, after receivinga palace, is defeated in turn by Motu ("Death").In the end, Baalis resurrectedby Anath and takes up his role as fructifierof the earth.
as the "link between Canaan and the Aegean" in the East Mediterraneancontinuum (1965b:Ch.5).Located in the crossroad of the ancient Near East,Ugarit certainly held "contacts in every directions" (1981a:189). Two of his doctoral students specifically worked on the maritimeactivitiesof the ancient city state Ugarit.He has been interested in the Philistines (1956b) in ancient Canaan and, later,the Phoenicians (1966c)in the Mediterranean.
to OldTestament Gordon'sSevenContributions Study
1) The Entire Ancient Near East as the Worldof Old Testament The range of Gordon'sacademic interests is much broader than Ugaritic study: it covers the whole ancient Near East, including Minoan Crete.The titles of two Festschrifts dedicated to him, Orientand Occident(Hoffner 1973)and TheBible World(Rendsburg 1980),well express the scope of Gordon's concern.As the Bible was part of the ancient Near East,everything in this culturalcontinuum has something to do with the Bible and its culture. Therefore,it is important for the biblical scholars to know the ancient Near East as it was, even though it seems that particularitems have nothing to do with Old Testament,at least on the surface. The excavations at Ugarit and the nearby Ras Ibn Hani revealed a flourishing materialand literaryculture in ancient Canaan prior to the emergence of the Hebrews. Prose and poetry were already fully developed. Many different genres of literaturehave been unearthed.The educational system was so advanced that quadrilingual dictionaries in which individual words were listed in theirSumerian,Akkadian,Hurrian, and Ugariticequivalents were compiled for the use of scribes. At Ebla, a thousand years earlier,the more than 200,000 people who lived in and around the city enjoyed a highly lit-
The cuneiformtablet ' rfI
'~-~
r
* r rrit
431>
I, P
7?r,
,?
r
'
r
at
4?
1
containing the text UT 52 (CTA23 = KTU1.23), a unique text dealing with the myth and ritualof the fertility gods sired by the god El.My Brandeis dissertation,The UgariticDramaof the Good Gods:A PhilologicalStudy (1973), supervisedby Gordon,focused on this mythologicaltext. Also known as "TheBirthof Shaharand Shalim," the short text details the birthof Dawn and Duskand the seven good gods of fertility.
erate urban life. Considering Ebla'swide cultural and commercial relationships with the entire ancient Near East, the beginnings of Israelare sure to be rooted in a long-developed international culture in ancient Canaan. Gordon holds that the notion that early Israelite religion and society were primitive is completely false. However,Gordon is concerned with a proper relationship between the Bible and archaeology.He says: "The historian does not use inscriptions and archaeology to 'prove' (or 'disprove') the Bible,but ratherdoes he use the Bibleto illuminate the antiquity in which our cultural heritage is rooted." (1940)Certainly,to ignore the Biblewhen studying the ancient Near East would be a great loss. At the same time, to ignore the ancient Near East when studying the Bible is unrealistic. Gordonallowedno separationof Old Testamentand ancient Near Eastern studies. Not only for Ugaritic and Akkadian classes but also for Minoan and Mycenaean studies, Gordon required the students to bring a Hebrew Bible and check the given themes in their biblicalcontexts.Tohim the study of the Nuzi tablets,Minoan culture,or Eblaitedocuments (1982a) is not unrelatedto the study of the Old Testament,even though they are located east of the Tigris,on MediterraneanCrete,and in pre-Abrahamic Syria. Yet these seem to most traditional Old Testamentcritics to hold only a vague and indirect relationship to the biblical history and culture. 2) Use of Ancient Near Eastern Materials to Illuminate the Bible Nuzi was Gordon's first Assyriological theme, and he engaged in careful studies of the primary sources in his twenties (esp. 1934-38).In 1938he published his detailed linguistic analysis, "The Dialect of the Nuzu Tablets" (1938),and in 1940"Biblical Customs and the Nuzu Tablets"appeared. In it he showed that "the Nuzians were Hurrians,the long lost
Horites of the Old Testament,"and "the archives of the Horite city of Nuzu reflect ways of living that are relatively close in time and place to those of the Patriarchs"(1940:2).Thanks to the Nuzi texts,Gordon holds, we may feel confident that the social institutions have come down to us authenticallvy While his most important work with respect to the Old Testamentstudy was his Ugariticwork (described above),Ebla has been Gordon'smost recent interest. He initiated a Center forEblaResearchat New YorkUniversityand has published three volumes of Eblaitica:1 (1987),2 (1990),3 (1992).Gordon always made some significant suggestions about the Old Testament in his very technical articles on Ebla and Eblaite.For example, in his study of Eblaite proper names (1988), he dealt with names such as t-bil = Abel(hebelin Hebrew). Gordon suggested that w-im in Ruth 4:5 could be explained as "but" in the light of Eblaite (1982a:171;1987).Most recently (1992)he has been engaged in the study of Eblaiteincantation texts (Archivirealidi Ebla,Testi5 ) and detected a demon'sname Hifbiin Isa 26:20. Gordon'sstrong interest in incantationswas ignited by his teacherJ.A. Montgomery (1968:139;see also the article in this issue by Yamauchi).He studied and taught Aramaic magic bowls from the earliest moment in his academic life (1933). Gordonand his doctoralstudents have contributedmanifoldly to this branch of ancient Near Easternstudies. When we note that available documents from ancient Near East are usually from official archives (e.g., Ugarit, Ebla, and Mari), the materialssuch as magic bowls are significantforunderstanding popular religious life in the ancient world. 3) Integrationof the Materialsfrom Bible Worldinto a Synthesis Gordon made every effort to integrate various data from the biblicalworld into a synthesis on ancient life. He attempted a synthesis in the successive revisions of his book which first appeared as TheWorldof theOld Testament (1953),then as to OldTestamient Ihiroduction Tines(1958),and finally as TheAincient NearEast(1965).He also integrated archaeological materials such as thirty-two cylinder seals, Ugaritic and Nuzi tablets, Lachish letters, Dead Sea Scrolls, Coptic texts, and Aramaic incantation into a well written book, Adventuresin theNearest East(1957a),based on his own archaeologicalexpeditions. His little booklet, Hammnurapi Code:Quaintor Forward-Looking? (1957b),is a useful introduction to that document. Besides these he wrote many basic and significant articles,some of which are often unnoticed by the biblicalscholars, such as "The Role of the Philistines" (1956b),"Hebrew Language"(1962),"TheWorldof the Phoenicians"(1966c),"Religion in the Worldof the Old Testament"(1971),"Near EasternReligions, Ancient" (1974a),"Reflections on Hebrew Origins" (1977b),and "AncientIsraeland Egypt" (1981b). In another synthesis, ThieCommonBackground of Greekand ons (1965),which is a revised edition of Before HebrewCivilizati theBible(1963),Gordon presented the thesis that "Greekand Hebrew civilizations are parallel structures built upon the same East Mediterraneanfoundation"(1965:9).This is the culmination of his earlier research,"Homer and Bible"(1955). Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
47
4)The Importanceof Fact, Rather Than of Theory Gordon insisted on taking ancient documents on their own terms instead of forcingthem into an alien system (1969). It is of utmost importance for us to take the Bible on its own terms and against its own authentic background. Gordon's position is well illustratedby his criticismof JEDP(Yahwhistic, Elohistic, Deuteronomic, Priestly) source theory in "Higher Critics and Forbidden Fruit"(1959). In recentyears it has almost become the fashionto say that the JEDP theory is just one of a number of theories which explain the prehistoryof the biblicaldocuments, albeit a major one. However, in 1959the so-called documentary hypothesis had been considered established fact among biblicalscholars for two hundred years. Gordon was one of the first modem scholars to reject the JEDPtheory in the light of ancient Near Easternliteraryevidence. According to him, "higher Criticism is a legacy from a period before the age of archeological and epigraphical dis"Therewas a time when the label'conservative' covery"(1955:49). meant the rejection of that higher criticism, but now the conservative mind often latches onto higher criticism even though archaeology has rendered it untenable" (1959:3).It is noteworthy that since the 1970sthe JEDP theory has lost its impact among the new generation of biblical scholars. Some of the main points of Gordon'scriticism follow. The "P"stratum of the Pentateuchis generallyascribed to the period of the Second Temple. However, newly discovered textsshow that much of the materialascribed to P is very early,even pre-Mosaic (1955:50).The pre-Abrahamic Genesis traditions(such as the Deluge) are not late P products;they are essentially pre-Mosaic,and it is not easy to single out even details thatare late (1959).The criterionof variantnames (specifically for God) as an indication for differences of authorship must be drasticallydiscounted in the light of Ugaritic(1949:6). Another exaggeratedcriterionof divergentauthorshipis style. Any one authorwill employ differentstyles for differenttypes of subject matter (1949:6;1959). The old genealogies,which are usually detachedand attributed to P of the fifth century BCE,should not be detached from the narrative.This is indicatedby Homeric epic, where the two are combined so artistically that no one should ever think of rending them asunder (1965b:284).Repetitionwith variants cannot be the grounds for positing differences of authorship, as such repetitions are typical of ancient Near Eastern literature:Babylonian,Ugaritic,and even Greek (1959:4). JEDP are artificial sources. On the other hand, there are real sources such as "the book of the Wars of Jehovah" (Num 21:14)and "the book of Jashar"(Josh10:13,2 Sam 1:18). The latter was a national epic, commemorating the heroic course of Hebrew history from at least the conquest under Joshua to the foundation of the Davidic dynasty (1959). 5) A ComparativeApproach to Ancient Near Eastern Literature When two cultures or literatures are similar, it is either because the two items came from common background or because there were cultural contacts sometime in their 48
59:1(1996) Biblical Archaeologist
Dr.Gordonis an honorarymember of the Societyfor Near Eastern Studiesin Japan.Duringhis 1989 visitto Japan,he met with PrinceT. Mikasa(at the head of the table), who is the HonoraryPresidentof the society.
history.A third possibility is that the similarities are simply a universal phenomenon in the human life. However, we are concerned with comparisons narrower than this last. In "Homer and Bible,"Gordon compared Homer and Old Testamentand discussed the origin and characterof eastern Mediterraneanliterature.He concludedthat"Greekand Hebrew civilizations are parallel structures built upon the same East Mediterraneanfoundation"(1955:108). This thesis was further in his The of Greekand Hebrew developed Backgroaund Coimmon Here Ugaritic literature plays an important role. Civilizations. Ugaritictabletsbridge"the gap between the oldest Greek and Hebrew compositions" (1965b:33).Thus, the patriarchalnarratives are a Hebrew royal epic, like Ugaritic Keretand Aqhat epics,and Homer.These epics are placed in the easternMediterranean continuum of the Amarna Age. Two literaturesare often alike because they have common background and share a common literaryheritage.In ancient Canaan,poetry,with its literary technique of parallelism,was such a case. For example, like many other psalms ascribed to David,Ps 68,far frombeing late,is full of pre-Davidicexpressions, some of which were not even understood before the discovery of the Ugariticpoems (1959).There are a great number of word pairs common to Ugariticand Hebrew (1965c:145). Biblical poetry inherited common "Canaanite"literary tra-
Biblical poetry inherited common "Canaanite"literary traditions, though its content is new and unique. Gordon notes that the a-b-a pattern is often used throughoutthe ancient Near East. For example, the Book of Job is a consciously constructed single composition with a structure of a-b-a pattern,i.e. "Prose-poetry-prose."Hammurabi's Code has the structure of "poetry-prose-poetry," and Daniel, "Hebrew-Aramaic-Hebrew." 6) Clarificationof Social Customsand Literary Style in the Ancient Near East Gordon is very much interested in the ordinary life of ancient people and, with his wide knowledge of the socio-religious culture of the ancient Near East,he has clarified some seemingly strangesocial customs and literary styles. As mentioned above with regard to his studies of the Nuzi tablets, he showed that many of the social customs of the Bible which seem strange to us were common throughout the ancient Near East.Some of them are fratriarchy (1935),levirate marriage,non-real adoption, the institution of release (1940),guild system (1956a),practicesof bestiality and dissimulation,the sabbaticalcycle and the jubilee year (1965a), dyarchy, the Millet system (1965b),marriage customs, and the redemption of estate (as in Ruth;1982a:170-71). Also, from his excellent command of Hebrew language and splendid knowledge of the content of the entire Old Testament,Gordon contributed to identification of some literary practices such as "Janus parallelism" (Gordon 1978a; 1982b;see Watson 1984:159),"ballast variant" (1965c:135-37), and "build-up and climax" (1978b). 7) The Meaning of Simhat Torah Gordon is not only an original scholar;he is a stimulating teacher. His teaching emphasized the importance of primary sources, as well as a basic knowledge of the structureof language, such as sound laws and morphology. He required his students not to depend on certain hypotheses, such as the JEDPtheory,but to delve among the primarysources and look for the evidence which would guide them to sound conclusions. He suggested that a student should "gowherever the evidence leads him" (1959:3). Like his own teacher, Max Margolis (Gordon 1968:141-43),Gordon required his students to memorize and identify any Scripture verses which he used in the class. Gordon taught us what simhat torah,"the delight in studying Scripture," means. He says: "I am familiar with this delight and I like to see others have the opportunity of experiencing it" (1959:6).Dr.Gordon has been a source of academic challenge to me, and I had the great honor to have him in Japan twice to deliver special lectures, "Ugarit and Its
Significance" (1974b) and "Ebla, Ugarit and the Old Testament" (1989). I am doubtful whether I have adequately presented Gordon's seven plus seven contributions to Ugaritic and Biblical studies. Though it is a quarter-centurysince I began studying under him, I wonder if I have understood him sufficiently.With great respect to my teacher Dr.C. H. Gordon, I dedicate this small tribute.
Bibliography Caquot, A. et al. 1974 TextesOugaritiques.Tome 1, Mytheset Ligendes.Paris: Editions du Cerf. 1989 TextesOugaritiques Tome 2, Textesreligieuxet rituels,Correspondance. Paris: Editions du Cerf. Cunchillos, J. -L. Ras Sliamra1990 La Trouvaillepigraphiqueie l'Ougarit2: Bibliographie, OugaritV. Paris: tditions Recherche sur les Civilizations. Dahood, M. 1966 PsalmsL Anchor Bible 16.Garden City: Doubleday. 1968 PsalmsII.Anchor Bible 17 Garden City: Doubleday. 1970 PsalmsIII.Anchor Bible 17A. Garden City: Doubleday. de Moor,J. C. 1987 An Anthologyof RehgiousTextsfrom Ugarit.Leiden: E.J.Brill. de Moor,J. C. and Spronk, K. Texts 1987 A ClneiformAnthologyof ReligiousTextsfrom Ugarit:Autographed and GlossariesLeiden: E.J.Brill. de Moor, J. C. and Watson, W.G. E. 1993 Versein AncientNearEasternProseAlter Orient und Altes Testament 42. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener. del Olmo Lete, G. 1981 Mitosy Leyendasde Canaan.Madrid: Ediciones Cristiandad. Dietrich, M., Loretz, 0. and Sanmartin, J. 1976 Die keilalphabetischen Texteasu UgaritAlter Orient und Altes Testament 24/1. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener. Gibson, J. C. L. 1977 CanaaniteMythsand Legends2nd ed. Edinburgh: T & T.Clark. Ginsberg, H. L. 1950 InterpretingUgariticTexts.JournalofAmericanOrientalSociety70:15660. Gordon, C. H. 1933 An Aramaic Incantation. Bulletinof theAmericanSchoolsof Oriental Research14:141-4. 1935 Fratriarchyin the Old Testament.Journalof BiblicalLiterature 54:22331. 1938 The Dialect of the Nuzu Tablets.Orientalia7:32-63,215-32. 1940 Biblical Customs and the Nuzu Tablets.BiblicalArchaeologist 3:1-12. A Comprehensive 1949 UgariticLiterature: Translation of the Poeticand Prose TextsRoma: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum. 1955 Homer and Bible:The Origin and Characterof East Mediterranean Literature.HebrewUnionCollegeAnnual26:43-108. 1956a Ugaritic Guilds and Homeric DHMIOERGOI. Pp. 136-43 in The AeLeanand the Near East:StudiesPresentedto Hetty Goldmanon the edited by S. S.Weinberg.Locust Occasionofher Senrnty-Fifth Birthdaiy, Valley: Augustin. 1956b The Role of the Philistines. Antiquity30:22-26. in thile NearestEast.London: Phoenix House. 1957a AdventurTes Code:Quaintor Forward-Lookilng? Source Problems in 1957b Hammunrapi
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World Civilization. New York:Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1959 Higher Critics and Forbidden Fruit. ChristianityToday 4 (Nov. 23):131-4.Reprinted in A Christianity TodayReaderNew York:Meredith Press, 1966:67-73. 1962 Hebrew Language.Pp. 392-4 in TheInterpreters Dictionaiyof theBible. Supplementary vol. New York:Abingdon. 1965a TheAncientNearEast.New York:W.W.Norton.
andHebrew New York: 1965b TheConmmon Background ofGreek Civilizations. 1965c 1966a 1966b 1966c 1967
rx~
W.W. Norton. Roma: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum. UgariticTextbook. Ugaritand MinoanCrete.New York:W.W. Norton. Evidencefor theMinoanLanguage.Ventnor,NJ: Ventnor. The World of the Phoenicians. NaturalHistory75:14-23. Roma: Pontificium Institutum BibSupplement to UgariticTextbook. licum.
r-, Yr
T.. e
andTheirImpact on ConHowTheyWereDeciphered 1968 Forgotten Scripts: New York:Basic Books. temporaryCulturae 1971 Religion in the World of the Old Testament. Pp. 673-98 in President Shazar Jerusalem: World Jewish Bible Society. Festschrift. 15th 1974a S.xvNear Eastern Religions, Ancient. Encyclopaedia Britannica,
ed. 1974b Ugarit and Its Significance. OrientoThe Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan 17:1-12.(Japanese). 1977a Poetic Legends and Myths from Ugarit. Berytus25:5-133. 1977b Reflections on Hebrew Origins. Midstream23(October):41-6. 15:59-65. 1978a New Directions. BulletinofAmericanSocietyof Papyrologists 1978b Build-up and Climax. Pp. 29-34 in Studiesin Bibleand theAncient
on His Seventieth NearEastPresentedto SamuelE.Loewenstamm
edited by Y Avishur and J.Blau.Jerusalem:E. Rubinstein's. Birthday, 1981a Ugarit in Retrospect and Prospect. Pp. 183-200 in Ugaritin Retrospect:FiftyYearsof Ugaritand Ugaritic,edited by G. D.Young.Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. 1981b Ancient Israel and Egypt. New YorkUniversityEducationQuarterly XII/4:9-13.
TheirOngoing Revised 1982a Forgotten and,Decipherment. Scripts: Discovery and enlarged edition. New York:Basic Books. 1982b Asymmetric Janus Parallelism. EretzIsrael16:80*"-81*. 1987 WM- "and"in Eblaite and Hebrew. Eblaitica1:29-30. 1988 Notes on Proper Names in the Ebla Tablets.Pp. 153-8in EblaitePer-
edited by A. Archi.Roma: sonalNamesandSemiticNamne-Giving,
Missione Archeologica Italiana in Siria. 1989 Ebla, Ugarit and the Old Testament. Orient.The Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan. 25:134-68. 1992 The Ebla Exorcisms. Eblaitica3:127-37 Hoffner, H. A., Jr.,ed.
1973 OrientandOccident:EssaysPresentedto CyrusH. Gordonon the Occasionof His Sixty-fifthBirthday.Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener. Huehnergard, J.
David Toshio Tsumura is Professor of Old Testament at Japan Bible Seminary in Hamura Cit, Tokyo. From 1975 to 1990 he also taught Semitic linguistics at the Institute of Literatureand Linguistics of the University of Tsukuba in Ibaragi. He studied under Dr. Gordon at. Brandeis University and received his Ph.D in 1973in Ugaritic. Dr. Tsumura is the author of many articles on Ugaritic and Hebrew and
of TheEarthandtheWaters in Genesis bIrestigation I and2:A Linguistic
AcademicPNess,1989).He recently joined with Richard S. Hess (ShLffield
to produce"IStudied AncientNear Inscriptions fromBefore tie Flood"': andLinguistic toGenesis 1-11(Eisenbrauns, Eastern, Litermy, Approaches
1994). He is the editor of Eiegetica (a Japanese journal for Old Testament exegesis) and has translated several books--e.g., Gordon's ForgottenScipts-into Japanese. Dr.Tsumura is also a member of a group planning a museum of biblical archaeology in Tokyo.
Tropper,J. 1990a Silbenschlieftendes Aleph im Ugaritischen: Ein neuer Versuch. 22:359-69. UgaritForschungen 1990b Die ugaritischen Verben tertiaeund ihre Modi. UgaritForschungen 22:383-96. Tsumura, D. T. 1991 Vowel sandhi in Ugaritic. Pp. 427-35 in Near EasternStudiesDedi-
catedtoH.I.H.Prince Takahito Mikasa ontheOccasion ofHisSeventy-Fifth
Birthday.BMECCJ5. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrasowitz. 1993 Poetic Nature of the Hebrew Narrative Prose in I Samuel 2:12-
in Syllabic HarvardSemiticStudies 1987 Ugaritic Transcription. Vocabulary
17Pp.293-304inVerseinAncientNearEastern Prose,edited by J.C.
32. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Pardee, D. 1985 Les TextesHippiatriques.Ras Shamra-Ougarit II. Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilizations.
A TrialCut.Supplementsto andHebrewPoeticParallelism: 1988 Ugaritic Vetus Testamentum 39.Leiden: E. J. Brill. Rendsburg, G., et al., eds.
New York:KTAV 1980 TheBibleWorld: EssaysinHonorofCy•rsH.Gordon. Segert, S. 1984 A BasicGrammar of theUgariticLmanguage Berkeley:University of California Press. Sivan, D. 1993 UgariticGranmar: Jerusalem: Bialiq Foundation. (Hebrew).
50
BiblicalArchaeologist59:1 (1996)
n.d.
De Moor and W. G. E. Watson. Alter Orient und Altes Testament 42. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener. Vowel sandhi in Biblical Hebrew. Zeitschriftfiirdie alttestamentliche In preparation. Wissenschaft.
UT (Ugaritic Textbook) See under Gordon 1965c. Watson,W. G. E.
Hebrew 1984 Classical A GuidetoItsTechniques Poetry: JournalfortheStudy of the Old Testament Supplement Series 26. Sheffield: JSOTPress.
Magic Bowls: Gordon and the in the Ubiquity of Magic Pre-Modern World
Cyrus
H.
By EdwinM. Yamauchi
T
EXCAVATION INTHENEAREASTWASTHE HEFIRST AMERICAN
expedition of the University of Pennsylvania,between 1889and 1900,at the key site of Nippur, which yielded a library of Sumerian literary texts (Yamauchi1983a). At the pre-Islamic Sasanian level about 600 CE,the excavators found some large inscribed terra cotta bowls, many of them placed upside down. These bowls were inscribed in a variety of scripts, indicating that they came from different religious communities: those in Aramaic from the Jews,those in Syriac from the Christians, and those in Mandaic from a Gnostic community known as the Mandaeans (Yamauchi 1966; 1970).Such bowls, which have been found elsewhere in Iraq and also in Iran, are now displayed in many American and European museums.1
CyrusGordonandthe PennTradition
Thoughtherehad been earlierpublications,ProfessorJames A. Montgomery of the University of Pennsylvania published the definitive work on the Aramaic bowls in 1913. Montgomery was one of the most important teachers of the precocious Cyrus H. Gordon, who entered Penn in 1924 as an undergraduate at the age of sixteen, enrolled in graduate school at the age of nineteen, and completed a Ph.D.at the age of twenty-two in 1930.2 Montgomery did not teach courses or conduct dissertations on the subject of a book he had published. Gordon recounts: "In accord with this custom, he never taught me to read bowl texts,but he did suggest, before I sailed in 1931 for a prolonged stay in the Near East,that I look into the Nippur bowls keptby the sultanforhis collectionin Constantinople" (1986:20).At Nippur as at other Near Easternsites under the Ottomans,it was customary to divide the artifactsunearthed by the excavation. Half went to the University Museum in Philadelphiaand half to the IstanbulMuseum. As Penn'sgreat Sumerologist, Samuel Noah Kramer,was to discover, parts of the same text were often found thousands of miles apartin these two museums.
Gordon'sPublicationsof MagicBowls Gordon spent September 1931copying the Nippur bowls in Istanbulfor publication.3Thus he began the study of magic bowls, which for over fifty years was an important aspect of his many faceted scholarlycareer.An impressive series of arti-
CyrusGordonexamining a magic bowl in 1931. Gordonbegan studying magic bowls in 1931 by copyingthe bowls from the Nippur excavationsthat were housed in the IstanbulMuseum.
cles on the magic bowl texts was published by Gordon over the decades (1933-4;1934;1937;1941;1951).4As recently as 1978, Gordon published the text of two new magic bowls in a Festschriftfor his student,William SanfordLaSor,a professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary (1978),and in 1984he authored an articleon two Aramaic bowls from the Moriah Collection (Gordon 1984). In 1952a young English architect offered a brilliant and convincing decipherment of Linear B,a syllabic script found on clay tablets on Crete and Greece,as a dialect of Mycenaean Greek (Chadwick 1958).Gordon became interested in a similar but earlier syllabic script found on Crete called Linear A (Gordon 1965:206-18).His first article on Linear A, suggesting its decipherment as a Semitic language, appeared in 1957(1957;1968:150). Among the most interesting Linear A inscriptions examined by Gordon are two bowls inscribed spirally in ink (Brice 1961:pl.XXIIA and XXII).sGordon identified the opening word in one of the LinearA bowl texts,a-ka-nu,as the Semitic word 3agganu"bowl" (Gordon 1963:296),which confirmed his belief that this was a predecessor of the Aramaic Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
51
magic bowls (Gordon 1993).6
Gordon'sStudents Among the scores of doctoraldissertations which Gordon directed, quite a number dealt directly or indirectly with the magic bowl texts, creating an impressive trove of scholarly knowledge. The first of these dissertationswas completed as 'A Grammar of the Dialects of the Aramaic IncantationTexts"in 1949 by William H. Rossell, who later served as Professor of Old Testament at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft.Worth,Texas.His dissertationwas published as A Handbook ofAramaicMagicalTexts(Rossell 1953).In 1956Wilber B.Wallis, who taught the New Testamentat CovenantTheological Seminary in St. Louis, wrote a dissertation titled 'Aramaic and Mandean Magic and Their Demonology." My own dissertation was written in 1964 on "Mandaean IncantationTexts,"which was laterpublished in the American Oriental Society series (1967a).I published an Aramaic magic bowl at the Harvard Semitic Museum (1965)and a Mandaic Apart magic bowl from the YaleBabylonianCollection (1967b).7 from magical texts on lead strips (Macuch 1967;1968;Caquot 1972;Naveh 1975),which may date from as early as the third century CE,the magic bowls are our earliest Mandaic texts. The later Mandaic scrolls were published early in the twentieth centuryby MarkLidzbarski(1915;1925).In the 1940s,1950s, and 1960s,furtherMandaictextswere published by the remarkThe textspublished ableEthelStefanaDrower(Gordon1986:25-6). by Lidzbarskiwere used by Rudolf Bultmann to establish his influential theory of a pre-Christian Gnosticism, which now appears to have been a dubious construct (Yamauchi 1981; 1983b). In 1970BaruchA. Levine,a student of Gordon's,who taught at Brandeis and then at New YorkUniversity, published an important study, "The Language of the Magical Bowls" as an appendix to a historical study of the Jews in Babyloniaby Jacob Neusner (Levine 1970).In 1971Victor P.Hamilton, who teaches the Old Testamentat Asbury College, Wilmore, Kentucky,wrote a dissertation on the Syriac Incantation Bowls. Charles D.Isbell,who taughtat the Nazarene Seminary in Kansas City,Missouri, completed a dissertation in 1973,which was published two years later(1975).He collected all seventytwo Aramaicmagic bowl textsthat had been published before by otherscholars,includingGordon(twenty-five),IsakJeruzalmi (thirteen),Montgomery (thirty),D.W Myrhman (one),Julian Obermann (two), and Yamauchi (one), together with a comprehensive glossary.Isbell wrote on cryptograms in the bowl texts (1974),published two new Aramaic magic bowls (1976), and also offered a general introduction to the subject in this journal (1978).8 Also in 1973Markham Geller,who teaches at the University Collegein London,utilized the bowl textsin his dissertation, "Joshuabar Perahiaand Jesusof Nazareth:TwoRabbinicMagicians." Geller shared his conclusions in an article, "Jesus' Theurgic Powers: Parallels in the Talmud and Incantation Bowls"(1977),arguing that the exorcismsdescribed in the New 52
Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
An Aramaicmagic bowl. James Montgomery,one of Gordon's esteemed teachers at the Universityof Pennsylvania, wrote his definitivework on these bowls in 1913. Gordonand his students have kept up the tradition,amassinga prodigiousscholarly tradition.Besides shedding light on the migrationof culture, these bowls
offer insight into the everydayhopes and anxietiesthat animatedthe livesof our forebears.
4
theTalmud, Testament, and the Aramaicincantation bowls represent the same tradition.Geller has also published fourAramaic bowls in a Festschriftfor Professor Gordon (1980)as well as eightadditionalAramaicand Syriac bowl texts (1986). Gordon believes that the earliest form of bowl magic may be found in the Egyptian Lettersto the Dead, which were sometimes written on In 1989he directed the dissertationof Sharon bowls (1978:245). Ruth Keller on such texts (Keller1991).Keller,who teaches at BaruchCollege in New YorkCity,discusses two examples,the Cairo Bowl and the Berlin Bowl, in a chapter she contributed to the Hugh W Nibley Festschrift (1990).9 Though other scholars(McCullough1967;Harviainen1978; 1981;Naveh and Shaked 1987)have also published magic bowl texts, it is above all Cyrus H. Gordon and his students who have offered sustained and comprehensive studies of these important texts.
TheValueof the MagicBowlTexts In addition to matters of purely lexical and linguistic significance,these texts illustratethe transmissionof elements from one culture to another, for example, the appearance of the Iranian demon Bagdanain Mesopotamian texts (Shaked 1985). The magic bowls are also an important link in the continuity between the ancient Mesopotamian traditionsand later Medieval practices.Thus, the female night demon Lilith, who has an ancient Sumerian and Akkadian pedigree (Fauth 1986),figures prominently in these bowl texts which ask for protection against her. She was feared as a succubus,or night demon who had intercourse with men and then attacked human babies.Jewish traditiontransformedher into the jeal-
ous first wife of Adam (Trachten- 2Gordon'sdissertationwas on "RabbinicExegesisin the Vulgateof Proverbs." For a fascinating account of Gordon's acquisition of a variety of lanberg 1961:36-7),who was still guages, beginning with Hebrew at the age of five, to the study of many other feared in the Middle Ages. languages as a high school, undergraduate, and graduate student, see GorIt is not widely known don 1968:136-44. thatbeforethe discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls 3 For Gordon'sdescription of this time in Turkey,see Gordon 1948:121-7 .. in 1947-apart from 4An annotated bibliography of Gordon's publications up to 1962is found the fragmentary a tribute from students in the Mediterranean Departin StudiaMediterranea, Nash Papyrus ment at Brandeis University. For a later comprehensive bibliography, see our earliesttextsof the HebrewScrip- Rendsburg 1980:293-312. tures were 5The fact that Linear A was written in ink along with the evidence of in bullae (clay stamp impressions), which indicate that papyri were used on cited excerpts theAramaicbowl Crete, is evidence that the apparent lack of writing in the Greek Dark Ages be due to the loss of perishable texts. texts,threeto four may hundred years 6 For a detailed study of these bowls, see Raison 1963. before the great Aleppo and Len- 7A corrected translation of this bowl will be offered by Miiller-Kessler. ingrad Masoretic 8sFor a different view see Yamauchi 1986. manuscripts. the Among Scriptureswhichwerecited Bibliography are: Num 6:24-6;9:23; Deut 6:4; Isa 6:3; 44:25; Brice,W C., ed. in theMinoanLinear 1961 Inscriptions Scriptof ClassA. Oxford:The SociAmos 5:26;Ps 91:7,10; 121:7; ety of Antiquaries. 125:2;and Cant 3:7The most popular text,which is cited in Caquot, A. five bowl inscriptions is Zech 3:2, 1972 Un phylactere mand6en en plomb. Semitica22:67-87 "The Lord said to Satan,'The Lord rebuke you Satan!'" Chadwick, J. 1958 The Decipherment of LinearB. New York:Random House. These texts shed invaluable light on the concerns of ordinary people, including fears about Fauth,W. infant mortality and sickness, jealousies and hatreds. They 1986 Lilits und Astarten. Die Weltdes Orient17:66-94. remind us how omnipresent magic was in the ancient world and indeed in much of the world today (Yamauchi Geller, M. J. 1977 Jesus' Theurgic Powers. Journalof JewishStudies28:141-55. 1983c).They prove to be valuable comparative material for 1980 Four Incantation Bowls. Pp. 47-60 in The BibleWorld,edited by G. Semitic magical texts from the era of the Dead Sea Scrolls Rendsburg et al. New York:KTAV of and to the medieval texts Wise 1994) (Puech 1992;Penney 1986 Eight Incantation Bowls. OrientaliaLovaniensisPeriodica17:101-17 the Genizah of the Cairo synagogue (Schiffman and Swartz 1992). Gordon, C. H. Cyrus H. Gordon'swork on the magic bowls and his inspi1933-34 An Aramaic Incantation. Annualof theAmericanSchoolsof Oriental ration to other scholars are important legacies in but one of Research14:141-4. 1934 Aramaic Magical Bowls in the Istanbul and Baghdad Museums. the extraordinaryrange of fields to which he has contributed. ArchivOrientdlni6:319-34. Cadme-ahve'asrim(on to 120)!
Acknowledgements I am indebted to Edward M. Cook of the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon project at Hebrew Union College for looking up some references for me.
1937 Aramaic and Mandaic Magical Bowls. ArchivOrientdlni9:84-95 1941 Aramaic Incantation Bowls. Orientalia10:116-41, 272-6, 278-89,33960. 1948 Landsof the Crossand Crescent.Ventnor,NJ: Ventnor Publishers. 1951 Two Magic Bowls in Teheran.Orientalia20:306-15 1957a Notes on Minoan Linear A. Antiquity31:124-30. 1957b Adventuresin the NearestEast.London: Phoenix House.
Notes
1962 BeforetheBible:TheCommon of GreekandHebrewCiviBackground
IThere are large collections of unpublished bowls at the British Museum and the Oriental Institute Museum in Chicago. H. V. Hilprecht of the original Pennsylvania excavations at Nippur wrote of finding two hundred clay bowls. More recently Robert Adams of Chicago picked up from the surface of the ground at Nippur twenty bowls. See Hamilton 1971:6.
1963 1966 1968 1978
lizations.London: Collins. Toward a Grammar of Minoan. Orientalia32:292-7. Evidencefor theMinoanLanguage.Ventnor,NJ: Ventnor Publishers. ForgottenScripts.New York:Basic Books. Two Aramaic Incantations. Pp. 231-44 in Biblicaland Near Eastern Studies,edited by G. A. Tuttle.Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
59:1 (1996) BiblicalArchaeologist
53
r
??:
~aQ
I'jTt~4 ~yCd rl: :~d?z~r? "4~?-lt'h~ i 5 cT:o ryc?r, ,? i ;u~~?d '3':~r;~CZD1?p.~:ifc: L~LI~1 ... L.~e?1~6;ig" j.~arcL-~ C~ s z. cl ?t i~?) 0? ?I `rr; i. ??~ vrri ~C$ ,?o:~Vr i D .~(i TI, 'L) k ??L~~ .Y ? ~n t.lXt,~o. 1~JI~, IL~c~~f 1 , o r
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A Mandaicmagic bowl found at Nippurand originatingamong the gnostic Mandaeans. Mandaicbowls contain the earliest known Mandaictexts. PhotographcourtesyYaleUniversity. [> One of two LinearA bowls examined by Gordonin 1961. Inscribedspirallyin ink, one of the bowls offered the first word a-kanu, which Gordonwas able to recognize as the Semiticword )agganu, "bowl." Photographfrom W.Brice,ed. 1961:pl.XXlla. Courtesyof the Societyof Antiquariesof London. 1984 Magic Bowls in the Moriah Collection. Orientalia n.s. 53:220-41. 1986 The PennsylvaniaTradition of Semitics.Society of Biblical Literature Centennial Publications. Atlanta: Scholars Press. 1993 The Aramaic Incantation Bowls in Historic Perspective. Pp. 1426 in Minhahle-Nahum[Nahum Sarna Festschrift], edited by M. Brettlerand M. Fishbane. JSOTSupplement Series 154.Sheffield: JSOTPress. Greenfield, J.C. 1973 Notes on Some Aramaic and Mandaic Magic Bowls. Journalof
theAncientNearEastSociety5:149-56. Hamilton, V.P. 1971 SyriacIncantationBowls.Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. Harviainen, T 1978 A Syriac Incantation Bowl in the Finnish National Museum.
,e.,•,
~
" ?r
,-, ,
.
1978 Story of the Aramaic Magical Incantation Bowls. BiblicalArchaeologist41:5-16. Jeruzalmi, I.
Paris:TheSorbonne. deMesopotamie. 1964 LesCoupes Magiques Arameenes Keller,S. R. 1990 Two Letters to the Dead. Pp. 118-43in By StudyandAlso by Faith.Vol. 1,edited by J.M. Lundquist and S. D. Ricks.Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company.
andOther totheOldTestament Letters to theDeadin Relation 1991 Egyptian Near EasternSourcesAnn Arbor: University Microfilms.
StudiaOrientalia 51.1:3-29 1981 An Aramaic Incantation Bowl from Borsippa. Studia Orientalia 51.14:3-28. Isbell, C. D. 1974 Some Cryptograms in the Aramaic Incantation Bowls. Journalof
NearEastern Studies33:405-7
1975 Corpusof theAramaicIncantationBowls.SBL Dissertation Series 17 Atlanta: Scholars Press. 1976 Two New Aramaic IncantationBowls. Bulletinof theAmericanSchools
Research 223:15-23. of Oriental
54
59:1 (1996) BiblicalArchaeologist
Levine, B.A. 1970 The Language of the Magical Bowls. Pp. 343-75 in Historyof theJews in BabyloniaV,edited by J. Neusner. Leiden: Brill. Lidzbarski, M. derMandaierGeissen. Reprint Berlin, 1965. 1915 Das Johannesbuch
derManddier oderdasgrosseBucher Schatz 1925 Ginzai:Der QuellenderReligionsgeschichte 13.GCttingen:Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht.Reprint, 1979.
McCullough, W S.
Incantation Bowlsin theRoyalOntario 1967 JewishandMandaean Museum. Toronto:University of Toronto Press.
Montgomery, J.A. 1913 AramaicIncantationTextsfrom Nippur. Philadelphia: University Museum. Miiller-Kessler,C. n.d. The Story of Bguzan-Lilit, Daughter of Zanay-Lilit. Journalof the
American Oriental In press. Society.
Myhrman, D. W. 1909 An Aramaic Incantation Text.Pp. 342-51 in the HilprechtAnniversary Volume,edited by H. Vollrat.Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs. Naveh, J. 1975 Another Mandaic Lead Roll. IsraelOrientalStudies5:47-53. Naveh, J. and Shaked, S.
Incantations andMagicBowls:Aramaic 1987 Amulets Rev. ofLateAntiquity.
1966 The Present Status of Mandaean Studies. Journalof Near Eastern Studies25:77-96. 1967a MandaicIncantation Texts.American Oriental Series 49.New Haven: American Oriental Society. 1967b A Mandaic Magic Bowl from the YaleBabylonian Collection. Berytus 17:49-63. 1970 GnosticEthicsand MandaeanOrigins.Harvard Theological Studies 24. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1981 Jewish Gnosticism? The Prologue of John, Mandaean Parallels, and the Trimorphic Protennoia. Pp. 467-97 in Studiesin Gnosticism and HellenisticReligions[Gilles Quispel Festschrift], edited by R. Van Den Broek and M. J.Vermaseren. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
1983a Nippur.Pp.339-41in TheNewInternational ArchaeDictionary ofBzblical
ology,edited by E. M. Blaiklock and R. K. Harrison. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. 1983b Pre-Christian Gnosticism. 2d ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House. 1983c Magic in the Biblical World. TyndaleBulletin34:169-200. 1986 Magic or Miracle? Demons, Diseases and Exorcisms.Pp. 89-183in TheMiraclesofJesus,edited by D.Wenham and C. Blomberg. Gospel Perspectives VI. Sheffield: JSOTPress.
ed. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. Obermann, J.
1940 TwoMagicBowls.American andLiteraJournal of SemiticLanguages tures57:1-31. Penney, D. L. and Wise, M. O. 1994 By the Power of Beelzebub:An Aramaic IncantationFormula from 113:627-50. Qumran (4Q560).Journalof BiblicalLiterature Puech, E. 1992 Les deux derniers psaumes davidiques du rituel d'exorcisme, 11QPsApaIV 4-V 14.Pp. 64-89 in The Dead Sea Scrolls:FortyYearsof Research,edited by D. Dimant and U. Rappaport. Leiden: E. J.Brill. Raison, J. 1963 Les coupes de Cnossos avec inscriptions en Lineaire A. Kadmos 2:17-26. Rendsburg, G, Adler, R.,Arfa, M. and Winter,N. H, eds.
1980 TheBibleWorld: New York:KTAV EssaysinHonorofCyrusH Gordon.
Rossell, W H. 1953 A Handbookof Aramaic Magical Texts. Shelton Semitic Series. Wilmington, DE: Bible Presbyterian Publishers. Schiffman, L.H. and Swartz, M.D.
andAramaic Incantation Texts 1992 Hebrew Semitic fromtheCairoGenizah. Texts and Studies 1. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Shaked, S. 1985 Bagdana, King of the Demons and Other Iranian Terms in Babylonian Aramaic Magic. Pp. 511-25in Papersin Honourof Professor Mary Boyce.Hommages et Opera Minora X and XI. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Trachtenberg,J. 1961 JewishMagicand Superstition. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Yamauchi, E. M. 1965 Aramaic Magic Bowls.Journalof theAmericanOrientalSociety85:51123.
Professor Edwin M. Yamauchi received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1964.After teaching at Rutgers University for five years, he became a professor in the History Department at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio in 1969.He is the author of numerous books including Persiaand the Bible(Baker,1990),and recently co-edited with A. Hoerth and G. Mattingly Peoplesof the OldTestament World(Baker,
1994).
BiblicalArchaeologist 59:1 (1996)
55
of Applications Archaeological AdvancedImaging Techniques 30 25
20 Lu
x
e 15-
5 0-
0
50
100
150 DATANUMBER
200
250
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By GregoryH. Bearman and Sheila L Spiro
Histogramof partof an image of 4Q107 Cantbrepresentsthe numberof pixels(pictureelements) at each data numberof the 256 BEEN A RECORDING FOR greyscalerange. The shape of the distributionof pixelsfrom blackto HASLONG MEDIUM SHOTOGRAPHY archaeologicalobjects,not only on-sitebut also for schol- white offers clues as to how to adjustthe digital image to enhance its value. All graphs,illustrationsand diagramshave been provided arly use and publication. Color and black and white by the author. photography are used to document dig sites and
excavated objects. For some objects,photography provides a visual record but does not capture all the potential information. This is especially true for texts, whether on papyri, parchment, ostraca,or plaster. This article presents results of new approaches to imaging, specifically utilizing techniques developed by NASA for spacecraftmissions to other solar system bodies. Results from a month-long field projectin Jerusalemin June-July1994 demonstratethe usefulness of the new techniqueson inscribed soft media and ostraca.The imaging approachis effectiveand useful on frescoes, mosaics, ink inscriptions on plaster,colored textiles,and illuminatedmanuscripts.Most of the examples will be drawn from text material,as these are the objects we have had the greatest access to for this study,although we will present examples from some of the other areas as well.
The Problemof Reading Ancient Documents
One of the majorbarriersinhibiting researchinto the historical,religious, and cultural background of the Bible is the inabilityto retrievedatafrom ancientdocuments of the period. This is especially true of documents written on soft, perishable materials such as untreated animal skin, leather, vellum, and papyrus.Such documents are particularlyprone to deterioratewith a consequent degradation of data-more so than those written on hard media, such as clay tablets,stone, 56
BiblicalArchaeologist59:1 (1996)
and pottery sherds.The most famous soft media texts of the Second Temple period, the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), are a case in point. Not only are such documents typically fragmentary, but the carbon-black inks in which they are written are often faded beyond recognition or indistinguishablefromblackenedor darkbrown,aged writing surfaces. Thus a significantportion of the Dead Sea materialis unreadable in visible light.
InfraredPhotography-andits Limitations
From the first,scholars and technicians working with the DSS recognized that the problemscould be addressedby looking for information beyond the visible light spectrum (-700 nanometers [nm])-especially in the infra red (IR).Imaging DSS with photographic films sensitive to wavelengths in the IRspectrum yielded highly remarkable,even dramatic,results (Avigad and Yadin1956).Indeed in a number of cases only IR could uncover information from the scrolls. As a result, the vast majority of DSS photographic images available today were shot in large format using Kodak High Speed IR film. Similar success has also been achieved with other soft media texts, especially those written in carbon black inks (e.g., the Elephantine papyri from the fifth century BCE). Although the applicationof IR photographyhas been one
001 h3 X2
Thisdiagramillustratesthe approachto image acquisitionand analysis,showing four image slicesof the same scene, each at a differentwavelength. Inan actual analysis,the instrument may take a hundred such images over the visibleto near IR,ca. 400 to ca. 1000 nm (or 0.4 1.0 pm),the spectralrange spanned in this work. The visiblepartof the spectrumis ca. 0.40.75 pm, while the region out to 1pm is the infrared.The images are then stacked in a computer,from the lowest wavelength to the highest, to create an "imagecube." The spectrumof a selected pixel is obtained by skewering it in its third dimension,wavelength, as shown in the inset.
of the great success stories in ancient biblical manuscript research,this success has not been unmitigated. In numerous instances,(mostly unreadable)textbecomes discerniblewhen photographed in the IR, but additional readings seem just beyond the edge of legibility. Infrared film cuts off at 900 nm (0.9 ipm) and begins to lose sensitivity well before that point. Experiments by B. and K. Zuckerman have for some time hinted that considerableinformationlies beyond IRfilm's cut-off point (B. Zuckerman and K. Zuckerman, private communication).Workdone with G. Bearmanand otherphysicists at NASA'sJet Propulsion Laboratory has clarified the "whys"of IR photography,pointing the way to "pushing"IR film to even better results and developing completely new approaches to imaging (Bearman et al. 1993). The Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center (ABMC) sponsored a collaborationwith the JetPropulsion Laboratory(JPL) and West Semitic Research (WSR)to explore the application of multispectral imaging and associated image processing techniques to the DSS.Their work culminated in the summer 1994Jerusalem trip.
Scope of the Project
After consulting with E. Tov,Editor-in-Chief of the DSS Publication Project, the ABMC submitted to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) a list of Rockefeller Museum platesfromwhich the fragmentsto be imagedhad been selected.
Fragments were chosen as typifying a variety of common problems, such as flaking ink, severe fading of ink, darkening of the background, and colored inks. The ABMC field team consisted of Greg Bearman and Sheila Spiro, who acquired the digital images and image cubes, and Bruce and Ken Zuckerman, who did film photography. The IAA selected a dozen plates for examination as a "pilot project," and the ABMC field project team imaged the IAA documents. In addition, the entire Genesis Apocryphon was imaged at the Shrine of the Book under the supervision of M. Broshi.Z. Meshal arrangedfor sample imaging of ostraca and other materials from Kuntillet CAjrudat the IsraelMuseum. Other materialused for this research includes Roman frescoes from the Harvard Museums, several papyri from the School of Theology at Claremont, manuscripts from the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania,and ostracaand ceramics from private collections.
A Digital Image Primer
Several concepts of image processare to necessary clarify the approach to imaging adopted ing for this project. Digital images are mosaics of pixels(pictureelements),composed of dots,muchlikea newspaperhalftone,eachcorresponding to a sensor element (= pixel) on the charge coupled device (CCD) electronic camera used to take the images. Each pixel has an associated datanumber(DN).The most common image, 8-bit(28)or 256greyscale, rangesfrom 0-256:blackis represented and white shades of gray by intermediate DN by 0, by 256; values. The 8-bit greyscale is used by all monitors and video cards, primarily because the human eye cannot distinguish that many shades of gray.Greyscales largerthan 8-bits,which capture a larger dynamic range or range of pixel values, are, however, extremely useful in image analysis. The approach taken in this work captures and analyzes 16-bitimages. Image manipulationis done by performingarithmeticor logical operations on the image pixel by pixel; for example,the DNs of the corresponding pixels in the two images of the same fragment are subtracted,creating a pixel in the new image A powerful means for analyzing an image and making choices for manipulation is to examine its histogram. This is an XYplot of the number of pixels with each DN. This graphical representationof the image data provides significant clues as to image quality and how to enhance an image (Cutts 1984). Manipulating the histogram can improve the image, as will be demonstrated later. Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
57
The
Imaging
Spectrometer
H
1. Object 5
2. Illumination source
3. Liquid crystaltunable filter(LCTF) 4. Lens 5. Charged coupling device (CCD)camera 6. Computer and storage device. Macintosh-based system with
An imaging spectrometer after images are acquired. 2 consists of a device for This limitation can be over4 gigabyte capacity Digital come by using a CCDcamera spectral selection, imagAudio Tape (DAT)archive a and that ing optics, sensor, digitizesthe data stream a data acquisitionsystem. with a 12- or 16-bit digiThe major criterion for tizer immediatelybehindthe this projectwas to utilize signalelectronics.Sucha camthat era not only reduces noise only technologies could be reduced to a compact, A schematicdiagramof the imaging but also increasesthe dynamicrange and simple,table-top instrumentsuitspectrometerused during the field trip. gray scale of the image to 4096 (12 bit) able for field campaigns. Liquid or 65,535 (16 bit). Further,a digital camtunable filters were used for era is not limited to the typical frame grabber video screen (LCTF) wavelength crystal for an standard lenses and size of 540 x 480 selection; optics; photographic pixels, allowing use of much larger image astronomical slow-scan cooled silicon CCDcamera with formats for better spatial resolution. A thermoelectrically Macintosh-baseddata system for image acquisitionand storcooled 16-bit digital camera with a mechanical shutter was used for the work reported here.1 age. A LCTFis inserted into the optical path and tuned to provide Data acquisition was computerized and controlled by a Macintosh 840. Custom software for controlling the camera and images in any wavelength. Only recently available commernew this can be of as LCTF a variable was assembledwith LABVIEW, a software productdevelcially, technology thought filter that can be tuned waveto for instrument A graphicalcontrol panel control. band-pass electronically any oped generic its The filters over are and can was to allow the user to take either single, fixed length range. spectrallyagile designed be tuned to wavelengths in any order.Theycan be fabricated or to set and wavelength images up acquire image cubes. with bandwidthsfrom 1- 200 nm. Forthe work reported here, is to Preparation requiredprior acquisitionof an image cube, two filters were used: one that spanned 0.4-0.72 pm (visiin order to insure that acquired data is properly calibrated 0.6-1.05 one and and suitable for analysis. ble) pm (infrared). A siliconCCDcamera is sensitive out to 1.05 pm, well beyond the Illuminationwas providedby a standardphotoflood lamp, which has a color temperature -3000 K, so the peak of the specfailing sensitivityof IRfilm. Ingeneral, image signal intensity is insufficientto allow operation of a cameraat standardvideo tral output is -1 pm.2 It is criticalto know both illumination intensity as a function of framing rates (thirtyframes/second).This is particularlytrue when using a 5-10 nm bandwidth LCTF. Forthis work, expowavelength and spatial variation of illumination intensity suretimes rangedfrom one to tens of secondsoverthe spectral across the target. For example, the spectrum of the illumiof the 0.4-1.05 selected camera must have an nation sourceusedfor this work peaksat -1 pm and continually range pm. Thus, which be can in intensity towards the shorter (blue or visible) waveframe falls accomplishedby adjustableexposuretime, transfer or a mechanical shutter. As result of the long expolengths. An image cube acquiredwith the same exposuretime sure times, a cooled camera is needed. A CCDcamera, by its at each slice would seem to indicatethat the reflectancespectrum declines at shorter wavelengths. However, that is an nature, is always generating a signal even without illuminais the dark current that or dark Without artifact of reduced light available at those wavelengths. tion; image. the dark current would the data The correct reflectance spectrum is obtained by dividing the sensor, cooling quicklyswamp in It is a function temof signal any acquired image. strong image spectrum by the illumination spectrum obtained of and can be reduced orders from a reflectance target.3 perature by magnitudeby cooling. with video tests a camera and frame anagrabber(an Preliminary Spatialchanges in intensityare similarlycorrectedwith data from that an would a special uniformallyreflective target (made of Spectralon). all-digital system log system) suggested yield much better results. Video analog signals are noisy and The documents were usually illuminated from the side and there was a distribution in intensity from one edge to the yield only -5-6 bits after digitization with a frame grabber, in a of In 32-64. addition to other. Dividing the text image by that of Spectralon target resulting greyscale range only this limits the that be can done correctsthis problem. reducingcontrast, processing
58
BiblicalArchaeologist 59:1 (1996)
Invisible light, the fragments of Canticles(ROC1119;ed., E.Tov) clearlyshow the presenceof text. The early infraredphotographs (suchas E.Tovhas been using for his work) yield considerablymore informationthan is apparentthan visible light. The two illustrated scrollfragments demonstratethe resultsof using various enhancementtechniques on selected sections of the fragments. All photographs are courtesyof the authorsand are used in cooperation with and with the permissionof the Ancient Biblical ManuscriptCenter,the Jet PropulsionLaboratory,and the Israel AntiquitiesAuthority.
Multispectralimaging
Multi-spectral imaging (MSI) is a technique for image acquisition and analysis that relies upon the unique spectral signature of each target pixel (in the case of ancient scrolls, e.g.,the ink versus the writing surface).When the respective spectralsignatures of various parts of a given targetvary,MSI can be used to enhance this differenceby means of computer imaging and analysis techniques. Even reflective differences as small as two to three percent can be successfully exploited to increase greyscale differentiation and, hence, legibility. MSI is an accepted tool in such fields as geology, atmospheric studies, marine ecology, and pollution control.JPLhas long been a leader in applying this technology. Imaging and analysis technologies have developed steadily over the last twenty years, creating a mature technology with a considerable data base. Most research to date has been conducted by remote sensing aircraftor orbiting spacecraft.The LANDSAT Thematic Mapper,probably the most familiar to the public, registers images in six broad spectral channels in the visible and near infrared.The most advanced imaging spectrometer, the Airborne Visible and Infra Red Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS),was designed and built by JPL,which continues to operateit alongwith a dataanalysisfacilityemployingadvanced image processing techniques.
How MSI works An imaging spectrometer acquires images of the same scene simultaneously in many contiguous spectralbands over a given spectral range (one might think of this as equivalent to a contiguous set of multicolor images). By adding wavelength to the image as a third dimension, the spectrum of any pixel in the scene can be calculated. MSI allows the investigatorto isolate any part of the targetbased upon its reflectance spectral signature.(It is a reflectance signature because the sensors acquire the wave lengths, like color,that are reflected by an than rather Once absorbed.) object properly calibrated, these images can be used to obtain the reflectancespectrum for each image pixel, which can then be used to identify components in the target.Forthe geologist,MSIyields compositional maps of geologic sites,showing whichmineralsarewhere(Kruse 1990;Hook and Rast1990).For the ecologist studying the rain forest, MSI helps understand the large scale composition of the forest canopy (Johnson et al. 1992).For the biologist, MSI yields functional maps, showing which biological molecules are where within a structure. For the text scholar, MSI locates those image pixels that have ink, i.e., text,no matter how faint (Bearmanet al. 1993).The powerful combination of imaging and spectroscopy,easily visualized with software,is what makes MSI so useful. Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
59
This approach to image acquisition emitted radiation from objects.Perhaps and analysiscan be visualized as a numthe ink and parchment have the same ber of discrete image slices of the same average emissivity over this "thermal" scene,each at a differentwavelength (see wavelengthregion,i.e, they radiate(emit) figure at RIGHT).An actual instrument thermal energy equally, and there is no contrast.A second reason for the lack of may take a hundred such images over the visible to near IR,-400 to -1000 nm, success has been previouslydiscussed640 nm broadband imaging washes out narrow region. After calibration,the images are then spectral details. Even if there are specstacked by a computer,from the lowest tral regions where the emissivity of the ink and parchment differ, those wavelength to the highest, to create an differenceswould disappearwhen imag"imagecube."'The spectrumof a selected pixel is obtained by skewering it in its ing over the entire 8-14ipmregion. third dimension, wavelength. Spectral 680 nm Inks analysis can then be performed in any of several ways. One way is to identify The type of ink used in the text has the measured spectrum by comparing considerable impact on the imaging it with a library of known laboratory approach.Two types of inks were used in ancient texts.The earlier,carbonblack spectra. A variation is to conduct prinink, was superseded by iron gall ink cipal component analysis, i.e., model spectra from a variety of possible target beginning sometime around the third components to obtain a spectrum that century CE.Carbon black inks, used in 720 nmn matchesthe one measured.In eithercase, the Dead Sea Scrolls,areprimarilygraphite or soot particlessuspended in an organic spectral tagging is then applied: all pixels with one specificspectrumarelocated binder and applied with a stylus (Ginell and visualized in a false-color image. 1993;Plenderleith1950).The inks do not The key to successful use of MSI is penetrate or stain the parchment but to image in selected,narrow wavelength basically rest on top,which is why they bands. Broadband imagery loses speccan flake off in spots. Due to the par970 nm ticulate nature of the carbon, however, tralselectivityas smallspectraldifferences become mixed with those of neighborit adheres to the micro-structure of the ing wavelength and spectral features parchment (or papyrus reed or ostrabecome lost in the background.This may con). Iron gall inks, also known as be compared to trying to find a bluegallo-tannin inks, are more like what we think of as an ink. Preparedwith organic green jellybean among a million blue ones. By taking two images, one in the material that acts as dye, the ink more blue and one in the blue-green,and subdeeply penetratesthe substrateand dyes tractingtheblueimagefromtheblue-green A series of image slices of the raw data from it black,producing text.For some parchan infraredimage cube of 4Q365 RP'(ROC one, one is left with an image showing ments, though, iron gall inks may also be susceptible to flaking. Iron gall inks 800, eds., Tov,White). Exceptfor the last only the blue-greenjellybean.One needs both images; since blue-green contains image, they have not been enhanced, contain considerable amounts of iron some blue, the blue-green jelly bean and can be identifiedby elementalanalydemonstratingthat the text contrast would not stand out in a blue image. sis with x-ray fluorescence. improvesas the image wavelength moves As mentioned previously, infrared Continuing the analogy, a color photo- further into the infrared. The last image is an enhanced versionof the 970 nm image. film photographyhas been used forsome graph (broad-bandimaging) would not be helpful. time to improve legibility of carbon-ink documents. Iron gall inks (or the substrate) fluoresce under EarlierWorkon Texts UV illumination, so broadband color photography of the Priorto this project,IR camerasof various sorts have been fluorescencehas been used to improve legibility of documents used to investigate ancient soft media documents. The (Tholl 1967;Smith and Norman 1938).2 Getty Conservation Institute attempted unsuccessfully to recover legible text from DSS samples employing a broad- Image Analysis and Enhancement band camera that covered the 8-14pm "thermal"region (B. Image analysis for MSI is done in two stages. First, the raw Zuckerman,private communication).Their results indicated data aretaken and the images calibratedby correctingfor specno contrast between the ink and the parchment for several tral and spatial illumination effects. This step is required for possible reasons. A thermal camera works by detecting the meaningful comparison of the spectra of pixels at different 60
Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
locations in the image. The images are then interactivelyenhanced. MSI image cube data taken is, as described here, called "band sequential," and several available software packages can handle the spectral nature of the data. For single image slices, any popular image software,such as Adobe Photoshop,will allow most image enhancement operations. However, these latter software packages in general do not allow for the image calibrationsteps.The imaging data system stores the images in a custom 16bit file format, which requires preprocessingto make them availableto such software packages. The interactivenatureof dealingwith digitalimages is partof the power of this approach to imaging. Selected areas of the text can be enhanced or analyzed in differentways,dependingupon the nature of difficulty.Spectraltaggingcan be used to locate different parts of the image quickly;simply selecting a differentpixel to tag as the targetspectrumallows rapid changes in the analyzed image.
Imagesand Results
700 nm
900 nm
970 nm
merely imaging the scrollat 970nm produced images that contained all the data of the infraredimages of the early 1950s and also revealed new text [Greenfield and Qimron, private communication]. Furtherimage enhancement operations have yielded dramatic results, as displayed in the illustration to the RIGHT Six previously invisible lines of texthave appeared at the bottom of the column! Imaging beyond 1.05pm, the cut-off wavelength for a silicon CCD camera, also yields excellent results in some cases. For example, a small fragment of the Genesis Apocryphon has a parchment flap that adhered to it from the next, inner roll during unrolling. This flap covered a word that we were able to image with a camera sensitive in the 1-3 pm region (Bearmanet al. 1993).We used a simple photoflood for illumination, and the camera was an InSb infrared camera that operates in that spectral region. Cameras sensitive to that part of the spectrum require cryogenic cooling and presently have smaller detectors (256 x 256) than a silicon CCD camera.The hidden word was "Noah"and was clearly legible even with the reduced spatial resolution of the smaller format detector.Clearly,the flap is transparent at the longer wavelengths, and the camera was able to "see"through it to the text below: organic tissue, such as skin, becomes less opaque to light beginning in the near infrared (Elsner
Dead Sea Scrolls Analysts viewed the subject fragments on-screen and briefly evaluated them as they were acquired,using Adobe Photoshop and NIH Image software. NIH Image lets one look at individual enhanced 970 nm image slices from an image cube in 16-bitformat, although it neither uses 16 bits for Photographsof 4Q53 Samc(ROC406, ed., E. image processing nor allows one to do and calibrasome of the Ulrich)demonstrate how resultsdiffer,even 1995). pixel tagging without and similar enhancements,when a subjectis tion steps.Photoshop image OtherApplications software all use 8-bit images, although imaged at variouswavelengths. The first new versions will be able to read 16-bit image was taken at 700 nm, which is within Reading Ostraca the range of visible light;the second at 900 Ostracon files. KuntilletCAjrud IR the which film at stand Ostraca out among the many The real power of the approach nm, wavelength cuts the at and third 970 other areas where out; becomes apparentwhen the images are completely multispectral imagloaded into an interactiveimage proces- nm, judged optimalfor the projectat hand. ing or other applicationsof spectraldata sorand magnifiedseveraltimes Significant The third image was then enhanced and should be helpful in archaeology and enhancements of the DSS material are processed. related fields of study.Although ostraca are physically durable,the text on many displayed on this page. Images of Canticles (ROC 1119;ed., E. Tov),4Q365 RPc(ROC 800, eds., Tov, has faded. Since the earliest material is written with carbon ink or pigmented inks, MSI should be helpful in differentiWhite), and 4Q53 Samc (ROC 406, ed., E. Ulrich) demonstratehow representationsdiffer,even without enhancements, ating the ink from the background.Some material,such as the Kuntillet'Ajrudostraca,arewrittenin reddishinks,presumably when a subject is imaged at various wavelengths. from some sort of iron oxide pigment, on reddish-brown clay. Workwith the Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen)was even more revealing. Inexplicably,this scroll had suffered darken- An image cube was taken of a small ostracon from Kuntillet ing and deterioration unprecedented among the DSS. We 'Ajrud.Although no text is easily recognized, imaging clearly shows the spectral nature of the ink and demonstrates how electronically imaged the entire scroll. In this case as well, Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
61
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A considerablyenhanced electronicimage of the top of columnXV of the GenesisApocryphon(1QapGen).Usingunsharpmaskand histogramadjustmentson this excessivelydarkenedscrollreveals new text: the bottom 6 lineswere previouslyunknown.
improved contrast can be obtained by moving along narrow band wavelengths. In the red part of the spectrum, XA -600 nm, the ink begins to disappearsince its colornow approximatesthatof thebackground.It is in the blue-greenwavelengths that the maximum contrast appears. As can be inferred, in cases where parts of letters or patterns have been discerned, such improvements can prove invaluable,this sort of material shows very clear changes in contrast and legibility as a function of wavelength. In another example, from a far-off region, the distribution of iron oxide pigment (red) in an Ice Age painting was mapped with an edge filter (Asmus and Marshack1988). We suggest anotherapproachto imaging inscribed ostraca that also uses the principles of imaging spectroscopy.As mentioned before, the ink is primarily carbon, while the clay background consists of silicates and aluminates. If one had a molecule that would selectively bind to the carbonand also fluoresce, exposing the ostraca to it and then taking a fluorescence image would clearly reveal the text.This marker could be created in one of two ways. Since particulate carbon 62
BiblicalArchaeologist 59:1 (1996)
Beginningin the near infrared,animalskin,suchas a parchment scroll,becomes increasinglytransparent.Imagingbeyond 1.05 pm, the cutoff wavelength for a siliconCCDcamera,allowed investigatorsto "see through"a parchmentflap adheringto a smallfragment of the GenesisApocryphon.Infraredcameraselucidatedthe firstwords of the fragment:"andhe wrote the words of... (ktbmly...). A camera sensitivein the 1-3 pm region penetratedthe flap to revealthe next word: "Noah"(nh). Courtesythe Shrineof the Book.
adsorbs chemicals easily (the reason it is used for industrial filters and gas masks), the ink may simply adsorb enough of the markerto be useful. Alternatively,if a markeris designed that has a fluorescentmolecule on one end and a carbonophile on the other,one end will selectively bind to the carbonin the ink, ignoring the clay pottery,and will yield an image upon exposure to ultraviolet light. Experiments with both of these techniques are currently underway Sorting ostraca Spectral signatures may be useful in classifying ostraca, particularly in the near to middle infrared. Many slips and pottery colors that require differentiationand sorting are very close in color. Using point spectra rather than spectral imaging, may be helpful here. As the name suggests, a point spectrum is a measurement of the spectrum of a small, less than 1 mm2, area on a sample. Recently,small portable
soonm
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470nm
450n
510nm
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A small memberof the KuntilletCAjrud ostraca picturedat a varietyof wavelengths. The on of these rare potsherd inscriptionshas faded. MSIshould be helpful in writing many the reddish ink of this markingfrom the reddish-brownof the clay.Although differentiating this example does not offer any text, it clearlyshows the spectralnature of the ink and demonstrateshow improvedcontrastcan be obtained by moving along narrowband wavelengths.
point spectrometers that cover the 0.2-1 rn region (or 0.22.4 m) have become available--one version even plugs into a conventional PC slot. Although it is expected that the clay substrate always has basically the same spectrum, the use of coloring agents in the slip, decoration, or the body itself may provide a handle for spectroscopy In effect,this approach would act like a quantitative Munsell chart. For this application, work in the 1-5 pm part of the spectrum may also be useful, although it is more difficult to work in this region. ReconstructingFrescoes The faded paint on ancient frescoes can be "brightened"to reveal its original color and pattern. Subtracting slices taken at differentwavelengthsallows obscureddecorationto reemerge and can even "replace"elements where the paint has flaked off. Monitoringof Large Monuments In many areas, such as Mesoamerica and Asia, large scale archaeological sites are subject to damage from plant overgrowth. Biocides are used to control such growth, and continual monitoring and reapplicationis necessary.Imaging spectrometry can easily detect recurring plant and fungi
growth and is already being used for agriculturaland rain forest studies. MSI would detect chlorophyllfrom algaeand plants and reddish,black,or yellow pigments typical of fungi to provide quantitativedata for minimized biocide use. Location of Waterfor Preservation Purposes Water vapor is easy to detect with MSI due to some very strong absorption bands in the near infrared. Water is a major factor in damage to wall paints and monuments. MSI could map out water transportand concentrationsand help chart the hydrodynamics of a site. Painted Marbles Thereare many examples of painted Greek and Roman sculpture and marble objects on which the paint is now very faintand its decorativemotifsunclear or uncertain.MSI could help restorethe painted images by picking up traces of pigment and enhancing the contrast of what is there.The spectral nature of the data would allow restorationof the originalcoloring.A restoredimagewould help not only for interpretationbut also in reassembling a fragmented object. Papyri Some imaging experiments at JPL on Egyptianpapyriin Greekalso showed improved legibility when imaged in the infrared.A recent paper reported similar resultsimaging a first-secondcentury CEpapyrus (Androlini et al. 1993).
Conclusion Multispectral imaging is a useful tool for imaging twodimensional archaeological artifacts.It can improve contrast and legibility of ancient texts and ostraca and provide new approaches for other artifact and archaeological problems. Combined with powerful visualization software, the archaeologistcan use image cubes to analyze materialfor sorting, classifying, and aiding reassembly as well as to enhance images. For some applications, a full image cube is not necessary,especiallyafterone has takena full imagecube and knows where in the spectrumto work.Forexample,as we have learned, many texts can be imaged in the 970-1000 nm region, at a single wavelength, with excellent results. Equipped with this knowledge, one can reduce costs with a simplified system of a CCD camera and an appropriatefilter.Using what is known as a cut-on, edge, or longpass filter,will increase the image signal, thereby eliminating the need for a cooled CCD.7 Since CCDs are sensitive only to 1050 nm, a CCD camera Biblical 59:1(1996) Archaeologist
63
FRESCO SPECTRA absorption bands from atmospheric water vapor
1
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0
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950 1050 1150 1250 1350 1450 1550 1650 1750 WAVELENGTH (NANOMETERS)
A The processingof fresco images is based upon the spectralsignaturesof the fresco's differentlycolored areas.Typicalspectrafrom the fresco are presented;they clearlyshow how the image cube adds a third dimensionto the image data. > Analysisof an image cube of a Romanfresco opens with an image made by combining three separate slicesfrom the cube (450 nm, 540 nm and 650 nm).Thisoffers an idea of how the object would appearto the eye. The center image was made by subtractingslicestaken at different wavelengths, after normalizingthe data for the two images. Inthe first image, towards the center of the fresco,two green trianglesare visibleamong a lot of background. C Partof what may be a third green triangle has flaked off: the decoration'scolor and shape as well. The would be center are not clear.Based upon spacing,a fourth triangle anticipated image accentuatesthe green and the trianglesare veryclearlydelineated, confirmingthe third one (the outer edge of its boundaryis visible) and a renderingvisibleverysmall piece of a fourth at the top. The darkeningof the lower registeris an artifactof the processingalgorithm. Pixeltagging was used to create the lower image. The average spectrumof the stripeson either side of the triangle band (yellow in real life) was calculatedfrom the image cube and then used to find all other pixelswhose spectrummatched,within certainlimits. Those pixelswere then colored yellow in a false-colorimage.
combined with a 900 nm cut-on filterwould image over a narrow spectralrangeof 900-1050nm. This spectralrangecontains ten times more illumination than when a 10 nm band-pass LCTFis used for spectral selection, so much shorterexposure times are possible. An uncooled CCD camera is far less costly than a cooled one, and the cost of an LCTF is also eliminated from the system. A digital camera is preferable to an analog camera with a frame grabber.To avoid having to take a lot of images and then piece them together to obtain a full image, we suggest a larger array.Many CCD cameras have rather small arrays, - 700 x 500, but market forces are driving vendors towards largerdetectors,and 1024x 1024and 1500x 1000are now common. At present, the spatial resolution or "spot size" of film images is superior to that of CCD cameras,and high magnification images are best done with film. Soon affordableCCD camerasshould match film in this area.Enlarginga 1024x 1024 digital image too much can produce pixilation,where the discrete nature of the image pixels becomes visible. However, data from the field project gives clues as to the spatial resolution necessary for DSS, and by and large this complicationis not a concernfor the DSS and othertexts.The physical scale of half column images of the Genesis Apocryphon is 1 64
BiblicalArchaeologist59:1 (1996)
pm/7 pixels, or 142pm/pixel. At that scale, the text is -18 pixels tall and the letters range from -12-17 pixels wide. The text is clearly legible at this spatial resolution. Several advantages that electronic imaging has over film can be leveraged to advance scholarship, speed publication, and improve the quality of the published data. Electronic images are availableimmediately,in real-time,and the scholar can leave the imaging session with images in digital form, ready for further work. There is no time delay for chemical processing or subsequent refocusing. Ideally,the scholar can participatein imaging sessions to locate problematicareasand provide immediate feedback. If, for example, a close-up is needed, the imaging system can be adjusted on the spot to obtain the correct spatial detail. The scholar can perform, or ask that the imaging technicianperform,any number of image processing steps until the desired data is obtained. This precludes discovering problems after the shooting session has been completed, a characteristic disadvantage of film photography Digital imaging is suitable for routine production work.A considerable quantity of text (or objects) can be imaged, enhanced,and made availablefor scholarsin a short time. Providing the highest quality images in a timely manner for scholars will enhance and speed the publication process.
While in some cases IR film photography yields similar results, IR electronic imaging is sensitive much further into the infrared than film. Moreover,all indications are that the relative reflectance spectral differences and the text contrast continue to grow beyond the infrared film cutoff. As a result, electronic images at 1 pm have further improved contrast, especially after digital processing. If the effort is to be made to reimage selected documents, directly acquiring digital images provides the advantages described above.Further,in those cases where a full image cube is desirable,this can only be done electronically.
Acknowledgments
EricDoehne of the Getty ConservationInstitutesuggested some of the other applications for this technology. Special thanks to Henry Lie of the HarvardMuseums for the frescoes and the Center for Judaic Studies for the Cairo Genizah documents. Most importantly, Magen Broshi of the Shrine of the Book extended the original invitation to the ABMC to work on the Genesis Apocryphon, and Emmanuel Tov and Eugene Ulrich made many helpful suggestions on our proposal to the IAA. Ayala Sussman and Sara ben Arieh made arrangements for access to the documents at the Rockefeller Museum and provided extensivestaffsupportduring our visit to Jerusalem.All Dead Sea Scroll images are courtesy of the IsraelAntiquities Authority.
Notes 1Analysis of the image data shows that a 12- or 14-bit camera would also yield equivalent images.At the time the system was designed, camerachoices were between 8-bit and 16-bits,with nothing in-between. There is no disadvantage to a 16-bit camera, except perhaps cost. Aside from the dynamic range,another reason for a 12-14bit camera is to retain image shading. A coarser digitizing grid will lump together pixels that should actually be separate, reducing spatial details. Since the spectral output is that of a blackbody, the intensity is monotonically decreasing into the shorter,or visible part of the spectrum, but there is more than adequate light for imaging. Note that special "infrared"lamps are not necessary and, in fact, are useless in this context. Infrared lamps, designed to provide IR radiation in the -8-14 pm region, generate almost no radiation in the region covered by the imaging spectrometer.Additional images are required prior to acquisition of an image cube, in order to insure that the data is properly calibrated and suitable for analysis.
2
The calibrationdata needed to divide out the spectral illumination changes were obtained by acquiring an image cube of a reflectance target over the same spectral range as that of the text image cube. The target,made of a proprietary compressed plastic similar to Teflon (Spectralon), reflects all wavelength radiation equally over the visible and infrared range. Since the illumination light is reflected from the target equally for all wavelengths, the intensity of each image slice maps out the change in illumination with wavelength. 3
In anticipation of the results, presented later,it is important to note that a full image cube is not always necessary. In the case of texts,we discovered that single wavelength images at the appropriatewavelength can give excellent results.Tobe sure,there still is a need for at least one image cube, though, to locate that wavelength. Other objects require the full power of an image cube for analysis.
4
5There is
perhaps a better approach to iron gall ink documents, utilizing imaging spectrometry and laser induced fluorescence, widely used in biology to sort out cells and tissue based upon spectra.The approachis twofold: 1) Replacing broadband photography with an image cube to measure the fluorescence spectrum (as previously discussed, narrowband imaging retains spectral features); and 2) excitation-response measurements. Fluorescent materials usually respond to a number of illumination (excitation) wavelengths and generate a different fluorescent spectrum (response) for each wavelength. Excitation-response curves, acquired with an imaging cube, could be used to delineate ink from parchment more easily, or perhaps later inks as well. For example, separate illumination at 253.7nm, 312.6 nm and 435.8 nm, all produced by a mercury UV lamp, may result in different fluorescent spectra. Another source of illumination would be an argon-ion laser,which covers a number of wavelengths in the blue suitable for this applications.A collimating optic is used to produce a very large area beam with low power density.This is an application for a cooled CCD camera, as fluorescent spectra tend to be weak, and longer exposure times may be necessary. 6 Acquiring image cubes, as indicated above, was a lengthy procedure (up to forty minutes) with the camera and software used during the 1994 field trip. During the project researchers determined the optimal wavelength for the ink and parchment of DSS fragments generally resides in the wavelengths of 970 nm to 1000 nm. Thus, in the interest of time and as no new knowledge was to be gained by taking image cubes of every fragment, image cubes were taken of only selected subjects. However, a new CCD camera and data acquisition software now under development at JPL will reduce the time required to obtain a full image cube to only a few minutes. A cut-on filter is one that rejects all wavelengths shorter (bluer) than its cut-on wavelength; e.g, a 900 nm cut-on transmits only radiation longer than 900 nm.
7
Bibliography Androlini, I., Menci, G., Bertan, D., Cetica, M. and Poggi, P 1993 Use of CCD Cameras and Red-extended Photographic Film for Inspection and Imaging of Dark Papyri. Journalof the Comitato Nazionaleper la Scienzae al Technologia die BeniCulturali2:115-23. Asmus, J. and Marshack,A. 1988 Monochromatic Imaging for Pigment Mapping. Pp. 71ff. In Proon Non-destructiveTesting, ceedingsof the 2nd InternationalConference April, 1988. Avigad, N. and Yadin,Y 1956 A GenesisApocryphon.Jerusalem: Magnes Press. Bearman, G. H, Zuckerman, B, Zuckerman, K. and Chiu, J. 1993 Multi-spectral Imaging of Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Documents. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature,Washington, D.C.,November, 1993. Cutts, J.A, Bursch,T.K.,Glackin, D. L.,Houghton, B.A., Miller,E. A., Norris, D. D., Pettus, C. E.,Reilly,T H., Wheelock, S. L. and Willis, W 1984 ConceptualDesign of a MonitoringSystemfor the Chartesof Freedom. JPL Publication 83-102. Elsner, P, ed. 1995 CutaneousBloodFlowand Erythema.Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Ginnell, W 1993 Reporton Dead Sea ScrollStudies.Marina del Ray: Getty Conservation Institute. Hook, S. and Rast, M. 1990 Mineralogical Mapping Using AVIRISShortwave Infrared Data Acquired Over Cuprite, Nevada. Pp. 199-207 in Proceedingsof the SecondAVIRISWorkshop. JPLPublication 90-5.
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Johnson, L. E, Baret,E and Peterson, D. 1992 Oregon Transect: Comparison Of Leaf-level with Canopy-level and Modeled Reflectance. Pp. 113-5in Summariesof theThirdAnnual JPLpublication 92-14,vol. 1. JPLAirborneGeoscienceWorkshop.
Smith, A. H. and Norman, E 1937-8 The Photography of Manuscripts. LondonMedievalStudies1:179ff.
Kruse, E A. 1990 Analysis of AVIRISData for The Northern Death Valley Region, California/Nevada. Pp. 100-6 in Proceedingsof the SecondAVIRIS JPLpublication 90-54. Workshop.
Throll, J. 1967 Short Wave Ultraviolet Radiation-Its Document Laboratory.Police11:21-30.
uscripts. Journalof Transactions of the VictoriaInstitute82:146ff.
Uses in the Questioned
Plenderleith, H. J. 1950 Comment on a PaperEntitled:Recent Discoveries in BiblicalMan-
IAA Documents Imaged During the 1994 Imaging Pilot Project IAAfragment #
document
PAM#
ROC800
date imaged
4Q365 Rpc
43.372-43.373
6-22-94
ROC198 ROC900 ROC311 ROC406
4Q26 Levd 4Q317 cryptAPhases of the Moon 4Q225 psJuba 4Q53 Samc
43.040 43.380 43.251 43.077
6-23-94/6-26-94 6-22-94/6-26-94 6-21-94 6-23-94
ROC698 ROC 1119 ROC 1085 ROC830
4Q270 De 4Q107 Cantb 4Q27 Numb Mur 9 Mur 10
43.295 43.093
6-23-94 6-21-94 6-22-94 6-26-94
ROC122B
4Q377 apocrMoses C
43.154-verso
6-26-94
ROC 1092
4Q47 Josha
43.060/43.057
6-27-94
ROC215 ROC127
4Q2 Genb 4Q407 ShirShabbh 4Q413 SapientialWork
43.004 43.485 43.499
7-11-94 7-11-94
41.658/41.256 40.192/41.327
These items were selcted by the IAAfrom a list submitted by the authors and intended to include a number of typical problems such as flaking ink, severe fading of ink, darkening of background, and colored inks. IAA= IsraelAnitquities Authority;ROC= RockefellerMuseum Inventorynumber;PAM= ProjectAncient Manuscript.
Dr Gregory Bearman is a member of the Technical Staff of the Imaging and Spectrometry Technology Systems Section at NASA'sJet Propulsion Laboratory.He received a B. S. Degree in physics from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1975.An experimnentalist,his research focused initially on atomic and molecular collisions and high precision spectroscopy. At JPL,he has worked on laser physics and high precision atomic clocks Recently,his interests have moved into the design of optical instruments for flight applications, focusing on miniaturized instruments that can meet the reduced mass and power allocations of future NASA missions. This work has led into imaging spectrometers where Bearman heads efforts to transfer this technology to academic as well as commercial applications. Dr. Bearman also has a serious amateur's knowledge of archaeology and Hebrew Bible. Sheila I. Spiro is the executive director of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center (ABMC).She arranged the 1994Jerusalem field expedition and served as its imaging technician and project troubleshooter. At ABMC, she has initiated a number of electronic collaborations, arranged for the digitizing of its Dead Sea Scrolls collection, and coordinated the ABMCs ability to provide on-line access to its catalogue of holdings, including its major reference volume, TheDead Sea Scrlls Catalogue(Scholars Press, 1994).
66
BiblicalArchaeologist59:1 (1996)
Arti-Facts The American Discovery of Ancient Egypt DisThe major exhibition TheAmericatn AncientEkglptpremiered at The Los of coverqy Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in November 1995.Co-organized with the American ResearchCenter in Egypt (ARCE), the exhibitiontracesthe remarkablesequence of contributionsby AmericanScholarsto the understanding of the history and culture of ancient Egypt.More than 250 objects from varied archaeological sites-cult centers to ancienthomes-represent key Americandiscoveries and span a period of roughly four and a half millennia, from the Predynastic period (about 4,000 BCE)to the end of the Romanoccupation of Egypt in 395 CE.North American Egyptologists have also focused on the culturally rich area of Nubia and, for the first time in an exhibition of Egyptianartshow,selectedmonumentsfromEgypt' southernneighborin a parallelmanner.Highlightsincludea twelve-tonPtolemaicgateway reassembledforthe firsttime forpublicviewing, imagesof the pharaohAkhenaten,jewelry and preciousobjectsfromthe tombsof Nubian monarchs,sculpture from the reignof Queen Hatshepsut, and the elaboratecoffin lid of a Twenty-SixthDynasty official. In contrast to the well-known efforts of ChamEuropeanEgyptologistsJean-Frangois pollion and HowardCarter,the achievements of American scholars remain largely unnoticed by the American public. TheAmerican DiscoveryofAncientElgpt will rectify this by focusing on the accomplishmentsof the preAmerican of eminent figures Egyptology-George A. Reisner,JamesHenry Breasted,and HerbertE.Winlock,among others-and on the institutions that supported their work. Early American interest in Egypt was sparkedby travelers,as well as by excavations conducted from 1890 to the early twentieth century by Flinders Petrie excavations that were increasingly supported by American institutions. Growing collections of Egyptian art encouraged American institutional r~)r
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interestin Egypt.Forexample, from1906-08the French EgyptologistHenride Morganexcavatedsuch Predynasticmaterialas Female Figurine (ca. 3600 BCE)during the Brooklyn Museum's expedition to a number of Predynasticsites. James Henry Breasted(1865-1935)introduced Egyptology into the U.S. university system when he arrived at the University of Chicago in 1895.Breastedfounded the Oriental Instituteand concentratedon the study of excavated monuments. Dedicated to the copying and publicationof texts,he founded the EpigraphicSurvey under the auspices of the Oriental Institutein 1924.The survey has completedsixty-sixseasons of recordingwork in the Theban area.The exhibition includes original field drawings, revealing the exacting methods used by the EpigraphicSurvey, as well as a selection of objects from the University of Chicago excavations. whose GeorgeAndrew Reisner(1867-1942), fieldwork is the subject of a majorsection of the exhibition, is considered a founding figure of American Egyptian archaeology and a leader in the application of scientific methods to excavation.Reisneris best known forhis work at Giza and on the Meroiticmonumentsin Nubia.He was the firstarchaeologist to include extensive photographic documentation as a necessary component to fieldwork; more than 60,000glassplate negatives and hundreds of object registers and excavation diaries survive from the Harvard/ Museumof FineArts,Boston,expeditions During his work at Giza, Reisnerexcavated over 420 Old Kingdommastaba-tombsalong with the mortuary complex of the Fourth Dynasty king Menkaure. Reisneralso directed excavations in the Nubian region of Kermaand along the upriver stretches of the Sudanese Nile. was an exactClarenceS.Fisher(1876-1941) ing excavator whose careful recording techniques were directly influenced by Reisner,forwhom he servedas expeditionarchitect
r
Memphis. between 1908-10. Fisher,the Egyptian curator and field directorat the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania from 1914-25,counted among his major achievements the retrievalof the architecturalplan of a remarkablywell preserved royal palace of the Nineteenth Dynasty king Merneptah at Memphis. HerbertE.Winlock(1884-1950) joined the excavations of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and through his excavations at Deir el-Bahri (in Thebes), he contributed greatly towardan understandingof the complex site of the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut was a remarkable queen who erected many monuments and served as the reigningpharaohduring the Mid-Eighteenth Dynasty The exhibit also takes note of the excavations of the University of Michigan at the Greco-Romantown of Karanisand displays a monumental twelve-ton sandstone gateway of the Ptolemaicperiodthatwas excavated by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The catalog of the exhibition, TheAmericn DiLscont~ (f Anllcienit by NancyThomas E~kgpt with essays by Gerry D. Scott IIIand Bruce G. Trigger, is available from the LACMA museum shop (213-857-6522).
Venues: The exhibition is currently on view at The Saint Louis Art Museum (until May 27,1996). It will move to The Indianapolis Museum of Art in July through September
LACMAPress Release, adapted
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ClarenceS. Fisherpainstakinglifts beads in their originalorderduringthe final clearanceof a grave at Dendera.Fisher's excavationsat this cemeteryadded to his work at Merneptah'sroyalpalace at
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Female figurine from the
NaqadaIIAperiod(3600BCE) tombs at el-Mamariya. Henri de Morgan excavated this terra-cotta figurine (H = 34 with beaklike face for the
-cm)
Brooklyn Museum in 1906-7.
The tomb of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty King Taharqa
contained as many as an astonishing 1,070 stone
"
NubiaTaharqa's shawabtis. based dynasty controlled
Egyptfor half of a century, until the Assyrianspushed the rulersout of the north SKushite These funerary (ca. 660 BCE). figurines were surrogates for the deceased-intended
necessarytasks in the next world.
to perform
Statuette of Akhenaten, famous Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh (ca. 1353-1335 BCE),Stands 21.9 cm and was excavated from a private house.
•'• ~~~~~~~ ;':••,•
stands in the smiting pose on Pharaoh Merneptah (ca. 1224-1214 BCE)
~(a
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660
. lLwhere Fisher :: ...in Memphis, from his?hs this doorjamb recovered -• •:,•:• palace worked for nearly a decade, 1915-1923. Between the King's head and his raised arm the hieroglyph reads: " Horus, strong of arm."
•
The
Race
against
Progress
in
Central
Jordan
inflicted to site aftersite in this fascinating region, the report fromKRP's1995season is more than a little depressing. As any recent visitor can attest, the demographic and economic changes of Greater Amman are moving at an incredible pace.The transformation of the Kerak area is caught up in these same progressive trends. Due to the demand for land, building materials, and cash income, ancientsites arebeing plowed, Generalview of Mdeibic(fromthe north-north-east). Photographsby R.Bullard,Jr.and W Reid,Jr. quarried, and looted at an the General view of south). (from V el-Mreigha alarmingrate.Dr.Ghazi Biseh, Director-General of Jordan's Department of Antiquities, is well aware of these problems and is deeply committed to the taskof protectingand preserving the thousands of sites that have been documented in the Hashemite Kingdom. However,the social,economic, and political realities of our day combine to createan inexorableprocess.The same factors are at work whether we are talking about preserving an In his final report on the Miller-Pinker- EarlyBronzeAge village or a battlefieldfrom ton archaeologicalsurveyof the KerakPlateau the American Civil War,and a realist must (1991),Miller frequently noted that modern accept the fact that in a certain percentageof Glueck had come to life on sites cases, the ancient will lose out to the modmany villages ern. had found abandoned in the 1930s.Nearly a KRPrecordeddamageat some fortysites and Pinkersince has Miller generation passed in 1995.Particularlysignificant is the threat ton decided to follow up Glueck'spioneering to the importantclassicaltown of el-Mreigha, efforts and draw more attention to the land of Moab.However,the changesthathavetaken with its extensive standing architecture.The area around the site is designated for complace in Jordan-and in Kerakitself-since Millerand Pinkertonbegan theirwork in 1978 mercialagriculturaldevelopment,and by our conservative estimate at least 825 Byzanseem out of proportionto the eighteen years tine tombs have been looted in the adjacent that have passed. A new, long-term research venture, the cemetery. Also seriously damaged is the KerakResourcesProject(KRP),was launched Nabataean-through-Byzantinearchitecture at Nakhl, where the north gate is being quarin this same territory during the summer ried for building stone. of 1995.The main purpose of KRP is to docAs it enters the race against progress in ument ways in which ancient inhabitantsof the Kerakdistrictexploited availablenatural the Kerakdistrict, KRP intends to work on three fronts over the next few years: 1) conresources,including site location and access duct a problem-solvingexcavationat the Iron to local and long-distancetradegoods. However,when one considers the recent damage Age fortressof Mdeibic;2) coordinateon-site
r,
.
hn.
?-
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Moat, roadway,towers, and collapsed (fromthe north) gate at Kh.MdeinetCAliya
I
\/ Crossin reused blockof door jamb in abandoned village of Sul.
and regional researchby social and natural scientists-in the faceof a dramaticalteration of this region's cultural and natural environment; and 3) continue documentation and photographyon and around the 443 sites recordedby the Miller-Pinkerton survey,since the development of Kerakwill resultin additional encroachment or destruction of these ruins. We take this opportunity to encourage other scholarsto join the taskof studying this regionsrichheritage.Bruceand CarolynRoutledgehavebegun workat Kh.Medeinet'Aliya, a fortified Iron I town. Due to the likelihood of furtherdamage,archaeologistsshould conduct an extendedstudy of el-Mreighaas soon as possible.A small researchteam might also find the abandoned Ottoman village at Sul a worthy subject.While few of the 443 sites recordedby the Miller-Pinkertonsurvey will ever receiveadequate attention from archaeologists, many are of exceptionalimportance and deserve full-scale investigation.
Gerald Mattingly Jolihisol BibleCollege
'.i tA
ib
71rc
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New
Finds Ekron
Philistine at Tel
Dead
Sea
Miqne-
Tel Miqne Ekron MOAB
Giza
.
Memphis Karanis Birkat
Q riuii n
Amarna
Faienceamulet of Ptah-patecus,Egyptian god of craftsmen,found in palace complex at Miqne-Ekron(H= ca. 4 cm). This summer a team of American and Israeli archaeologists headed by Professor TrudeDothan and ProfessorSeymour Gitin uncovered the ancient city of Ekron'sburned storehouses and plundered administrative center.Finds including gold and silver artifacts,scarabsand thousands of oil and wine storage containers testify to the commercial prosperity of this Philistine city that was destroyedby the Babylonianarmy in 603 BCE. The most important finds of this year's digging are a spectacular golden cobra, a uraeus, meant to be affixed to a statuette of Egyptianroyaltyor of a deity; Egyptian-style scarab seals; and a faience amulet of Ptahpatecus, the Egyptian god of craftsmen.All were found in nearby rooms of the most extensivepalaceever excavatedin Israelfrom this period.They testify to the growing commercial and cultural links of Ekron with Egypt,a diplomaticshift with ominous implications. The multi-storied palace of Ekron was builtin a Neo-Assyrianstylewith a throne room approached by a short flight of steps
Thebes 0 0
~gllf.
Ur~
~h~,V91
I
100 50
150
I I I 100
200 km 150 mi
el-Mamariya
Nuri, Nubia and what appears to be an Egyptian-style monumental, colonnaded entrance hall. Its tumbled columns, smashed pottery,and collapsed upper floors have provided a clear illustration of Zephaniah's prediction that "Ekronshall be uprooted" and Zechariah's warning that Ekron'spolitical hopes would soon be "confounded." LastApril,the TelMiqne discoverieswere the centerpiece of an international symposium, "MediterraneanPeoples in Transition," sponsored by the Philip and Muriel Berman Centerof BiblicalArchaeologyof the Hebrew University and attended by scholars working in the eastern Mediterranean basin. The finds fromTelMiqne also play an important role in a new project,"TheNeo-Assyrian
NkyZ q ? p (
50
Empire in the Seventh Century B.C.E.:A Study of the Interactionsbetween Centerand is an internationaleffortorgaPeriphery."This nized by the Albright Institute involving archaeologistsworking throughoutthe Middle Eastand Mediterraneanregionto examine the politics and economics of empire in the ancient Near East. The 1995excavationseason at TelMiqneEkron was carried out by an international expedition comprised of 157 staff members and studentvolunteersfromthe UnitedStates, Canada, Israeland the West Bank,England, Australia,Poland,and Hungary. Seymour Gitin W.EAlbright Institute
IN THE CAUGHT ELECTRONIC
OPPORTUNITIES
Archaeologyon the Internetis becoming more sophisticated; the emergence of new web sites means new ways of keeping trackof them.FortunatelyANE's ABZU and now AegeaNet's KAPATIJA allow easy access. Another factor is the sudden appearanceof the personal web home-page-designing one is a major undertaking,but still worthwhile.Finally, I "lurk"on two more discussion lists,one on coins, then another on medieval women.
Mysteries of ABZU
ARCHAEOLOGY
Ubar" (how can one resist?). Greg Reeder has produced a couple of sites, one of which, "The Enigmatic Tekenu,"I opened tentatively, but was quickly seduced into following (to the bitterend) his nested files,each carefully illustrated and informative-great fun! The Demotic DictionaryProjectcontains clean images of Demotic Egyptianscript, both as entire papyrus documents and alphabetically by individual word with images of each one'suse in various documents-impressive.Anotherimpressive site is the KelseyMuseum;its exhibit of glass has a dense cataloguewith infrequent but stunning illustrations. The Perseus Projectpromises a vast arrayof information in its Encyclopedia Subject Index. I browsed only a few headings: "Architecture" has repetitivelistings (e.g., "Frieze" and itsGreekequivalent Zophoros); Fromthe catalog of glass at the Kelsey and most of the entries are merely text, with only intermittentillustrations. Museumsite, this green Romanflask (H= ("Head 21.5 cm)was excavatedat Karanis,Egyptby Cup"had a single outline drawing of a the Universityof Michigan.The flask dates woman's head vase while "Phorminx" to the third or fourth centuryCE.Visitthe receivedno illustrationwhatsoever).Here is a site that cries out for lots of pictures, site at: http://www.umich.edu/-kelseydb/ and when it gets them (admittedlya vast ExhibitsNV/WondrousGlass/RomanGlass.html. of the used Kelsey Image by permission project in itself), it will be of immense Museumof Archaeology. use to students of all levels of expertise.
A devoted reader asked me to delve into"themysteriesof ABZU"-with pleasure!ABZUis theWWWsite thatCharles Jones of the OrientalInstitutemaintains along with the ANE list. It lists and links what seem to be hundreds of web sites, most of which concern Egypt and the Near East (a similar but more modest is maintained for gateway,"KAPATIJA" the Aegean and classical worlds-to access them both, see box, next page). ABZU (a Sumerian word that denotes Enki'sshrine as well as "amythicalplace where the life influencingpowersreside") began in October 1994 and now occupies two files,"WhatWasNew in Abzu" (October 1994-5) and "What's New in Abzu" (October1995-present). I didn't have time to go through all the web sites listed in ABZU (I would need several lifetimes),but I did surf a few in "What'sNew."Their range is wide, from book reviews to academic exercises to tourist brochures, and the quality is equallyvaried (beware!);most arebetterviewed overNetscape. One valuableresourceis the ABZU DirectoryIndex (in "What Was New"), which includes a directory of scholars; there is a similar one in KAPATIJAfor the Aegean. One of the great joys about browsing ABZU is that you can give in to your own tasteswithout feeling guilty.Not being a specialist in Near Eastern or Egyptian matters, I accessed sites whose titles I found intriguing. One such was NASA's radar images (enticing even in the thumb-nail images). The site is advertised under "Giza,Egypt,"but its picture gallery contains a clickable map of the world with images taken by the Space ShuttleEndeavorin 1994,including volcanoes (I love volcanoes!) and video simulations of flights around the Galapagos islands, Death Valley,and "the legendary Lost City of Caught in the Net
IN
NET
WebHome-Pages
In my last column I gleefully announced my web homepage address and asked that you all check it out. Of course when I wrote that announcement, I had not actually created the home-page, figuring there'dbe time enough before publication. Designing the home-page, though, took a lot longer than I had thought, a whole week-end! I'm sure there are easier ways to construct home-pages (undoubtedly there are books of instructions), but what I did was this: I first requested my local Webmaster (helpful Rob and Michael) to create a web-site for me: www.duke.edu/web/jyounger. Then I surfed the web with my server Netscape and found a couple of web sites whose lay-out (bold headings,indented paragraphs,italicizedphrases) looked useful; these I "saved"as files in HTMLformat (hypertext markup language). When I accessed them through my word-processor (MicrosoftWord),I could then see what types of commands did what (all commands occur in anglebrackets at the beginning of each line-some look quite BiblicalArchaeologist 59:1(1996)
71
mysterious;for example,
createsa new line, <STRONG> on Netscape again to see (with relief)thatparticularerrorcorputs the following words in bold, indents, and a com- rectedbut (oh,no!)anotherone showingup equallyas egregious. plicated command createsthe links to other addresses).I then HTML is a sensitive, and precise, language-you'll need wrote the text of my home-page with the commands imbedlots of patience! ded. This Word-file I up-loaded into my web-site as the main file (index.html);thus,when you access my address with Two Discussion Lists Like last time, I lurked on another two discussion "/" (backslash)at the end you automatically get that file. that the was not the took the groups forthreeweeks and then signed off:NUMISM-Labout Writing home-page part longest time; it was checking it to make sure it would come early coins and MEDFEM about medieval women. Again, I up on the screenlooking okay and thatthe hyper-linksworked. didn't really know anything about either subject when I It took a good day of constantlyopening up Netscape,pulling subscribed, but I found both lists worth the time. Next issue:what lies beyond the classicalworld (orbeyond up my home-file, seeing some ghastly mistake (like the entire second half in bold), quitting, and then accessing the text of the Mediterranean,for that matter)?And list pedagogy and the home-file through the Internet (using the word-process- e-mail etiquette: a purpose and a format for the future. If you have any comments or questions, or would like to ing program"pico"),finding out that I had omitted cancelling at the <STRONG> command (by placing the see a topic discussed, e-mail me: [email protected]. end of the phrase I wanted bold), repairing the damage, and John Younger then quitting that program so as to bring up the home-page Duke University
D
i
s
c
u
s
s
i
o
NUMISM-L was generating about two messages a day,with about 350 subscribers.Becauseof the topic of the list,coins to ca. 1454 cE,postings concerned both the academicdisciplineof numismaticsand the collecting of coins. The academic interest was strong, with postingsthat ranged widely, includingobservationson subtle differencesamong Julia Domna denarii,and questionsconcerningthe authenticityof bronze (follis)anepigraphicCrispuscoins from the mint of Ticinum.Whilethe main focus of the list seems to be on ancient and early Europeancoinage, there was some discussionon early moderntopics such as Tibetantongkas and on the formation of numismaticcabinets. As one might expect (especiallyafter the caveats in the introductorywelcome message),the collecting of coins brought out some sensitivecommercialissues.Subscribers quite rightlywanted to know currentmarketvalues, where they might be able to purchasecertaincoins, and who were the reputabledealers.Suchconcerns,however,also invited schemes ("spams")to makeA LOTof money,to which the subscribersrespondedwith considerablehumor.Prof. Kluessendorfof Marburg,Germany,requested that those who did indeed make a lot of money should send him a checkto supporthis numismaticresearch-count me in, too! mail "subscribenumism-l"to Tosubscribeto NUMISM-L, "[email protected]".
n
L
i
s
t
s
MEDFEM was also generating about two messages a day,with about 620 subscribers.Wellover three-quartersof the messages concerned "Callsfor Papers"and various conferences.Therewere extremelyfew academicpostings:a short stringon Englishwomen as health care providersand apothecariesin the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; another on the development of the nun'shabit in the fourteenth century(no, it apparentlydid not develop from widow's costumes);and a third on the 1456 rehabilitation trial of Joan of Arc(burntin 1431)that explained her privilegeto wear men'sclothing as a privatelaw (lexprivata) contractedbetween her and God. But the majorityof posts concernedup-comingconferenceson variousaspects of medieval society and on women of all periods-this concentrationreflectsthe increasingattention paid to the medievalworld as cruciblefor the modernand to women's studies as a correctivemethodology for analyzing society.Ifelt that the introductorywelcome message could have usefullyprovideda statement about the purposeof the listthat would have elicited more scholarlydebate. mail "subscribemedfem-IYour Tosubscribeto MEDFEM-L, Name"to "[email protected]".
DiscussionListsfor the Near Easternand ClassicalWorld Fora general list of archaeologicale-mail discussionlists:http/lwww.duke.edu/webfjyounger/archlist.html mail "subscribeane" to "[email protected]" ANE(list manager,CharlesJones:[email protected]) ABZU,the Near East'sWWWgateway: httpJ/www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/RA/ABZU/ABZU_NEW.HTML AegeaNet (listmanager,John Younger:[email protected]) mail "subscribeaegeanet" to "[email protected]" for a currentTableof Contents FTP/Gophersite: gopher or ftp:/ftp.duke.edu/pub/archive/lists/aegeanet/toc ForAegean WWWsites, consult KAPATIJA:httpJ//www.duke.edulwebfjyounger/kapatija.html
72
BiblicalArchaeologist 59:1 (1996)
Caught in the Net
FUOH
of
Journal
I
http:/www~apet-com
Science Archaeological
This well-respectedJournalis published in associationwith the Society for ArchaeologicalSciences. The Journal'sparticularinterest is in advancesin the applicationof scientific techniques and methodologiesto all areas of archaeology.The Journalwelcomes papers on the following topics: Theoreticaland empiricaldevelopmentsin the following areas: " Study of anthropological,botanical, zoological, geological and soil components of archaeologicalsites and of their environmental settings, geomorphology,and paleohydrology * Physical and chemical analysis of materials and artifacts * Surveyand prospecting techniques * Dating methods
EDITORS
* Application of mathematical, statistical, and computational techniques to archaeologicalproblems VOLUME 23 (1996), 6 ISSUES, ISSN:0305-4403 InstitutionalSubscription rate:?295.00 (all countries)
K BUTZNER University of Texas. USA D GILBERTSON University of Sheffield. UK
Fordetailsof reducedrateofferedto members of the Societyof Archaeological Sciencescontact: ChristinePrior,Department of Anthropology, Riverside,Riverside,California92521, USA Universityof California Tel:909 787 5521 E-mail:[email protected]
J HENDERSON University of Sheffield, UK R KLEIN Stanford University. USA
The
International Journal
Nautical Archaeology
Nautical Archaeolog
The InternationalJournalof NauticalArchaeologyis publishedby AcademicPress for the NauticalArchaeologySociety.It covers all aspects of nautical archaeologicalresearch,the Journal'stheme being seas, ships, cargoesand the sailors of the past. It welcomes papersfrom the following researchareas: * Archaeologyof sites in rivers, lakes, and the sea * Conservation * Legislation for the protection of sites * Reports of dives * Surveyingtechniques * Underwaterexcavations VOLUME 25 (1996), 4 ISSUES, ISSN:1057-2414
EDITOR
InstitutionalSubscription rate:?115.00 (allcountries) Fordetailsof reducedratecontact: NASMembership Secretary,206 MoorviewWay, Skipton,N YorksBD23 2TN,UK
V FENWICK London, UK Teh
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A Scholarfor All Seasons Philadelphiaborn in 1908, CyrusH. Gordon has been a prolificand pioneering contributorto the study of the world of the Near East and eastern Mediterraneansince he received his Ph.D.from the Universityof Pennsylvaniain 1930. Mentored by some of the discipline'sgreat luminaries(JamesMontgomery, Max Margolis,and W. F.Albright),Gordon has joined their constellation. Hisuniquely broad command of ancient studies has issued forth in hundreds of publications,dozens of Ph. D. graduates, and an abidinglyfecund legacy of ideas.
