Well preserved remains of an ancient ship possibly from the first century has been found in the port that served ancient Rome.

Roman and Byzantine buildings have been discovered in Jiftlik, a Palestinian town near Alexandrium-Sartaba in the Jordan Valley.

“Geography and culture are important.”  Jim Elliff explains why in this bulletin insert that you can download and reproduce for your church.

Infanticide was apparently common in the Roman Empire.

The first phase of the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation is scheduled to open next month.

The country of Turkey is starting to recognize the value of its Christian sites for bringing in tourists (NY Times).

The Alphabetical list of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies surpassed 900 titles this week.

Wayne Stiles shares his thoughts (and video) on Mount Arbel and the Sea of Galilee (JPost).

Tour guide Joe Yudin describes his jeep tour of the Judean Desert in a new column at the Jerusalem Post.

As a follow-up to the list of finalists for the 2011 Christian Book Award, it may be noted that the winner in the Bible Reference Category is the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds 
Commentary, edited by John H. Walton.

Accordance is giving away a Bible a day (to one winner) and offering a big discount for all users, through the month of May.

ICEJ News reports on Israel’s plans to invest in Nazareth: On Wednesday, Israeli tourism minister Stas Meseznikov announced that the government is planning to invest more than NIS 12 million over the next four years in Israel’s largest Arab city, Nazareth, which is also a major tourist attraction due to its status as the town where Jesus grew up, being visited by over 40% of the tourists who arrive in Israel every year. One of the strategies used in order to develop the city is to encourage local residents to open their own businesses, and grants of up to 30% of their start up investments are therefore offered.  “The program to boost development of the tourism industry in Nazareth is part of a 2010 government initiative to encourage development in the Arab sector,” Meseznikov said.

HT: Paleojudaica, Jack Sasson

Share:

Routledge Wall Maps for the Ancient World, edited by Richard Talbert, is available as a set or individually.

From the publisher’s website:

Routledge Wall Maps for the Ancient World provide both students and scholars with detailed and exacting geographic information of the ancient world. Using the world renowned geographic data from the Ancient World Mapping Centre, the sweeping views of the ancient world allow students to understand important concepts such as trade, movement, spatial and cultural relations and to consider how the ancient terrain would have affected them. The maps provide a powerful tool for comprehending how the ancient world worked and also to help re-evaluate out-dated theories in light of precise geographic information.
Those students who are new to the discipline of ancient history will find them invaluable in orientating themselves within the world of the past. How far is Athens from Sparta, what type of terrain did Alexander have to cross on his journeys, how did the valley of the Nile look in 500 BC? Such questions and many more are answered by the maps within this series.

Egypt and the Near East 3000-1200 BCE
Wall Map: 978-0-415-58500-2: $64.95 [$21.80 at Amazon]

Egypt and the Near East 1200 – 500 BCE
Wall Map: 978-0-415-58499-9: $64.95 [$38.35 at Amazon]

Greece and the Aegean in the 5th Century BCE
Wall Map: 978-0-415-58441-8: $64.95 [57.94 at Amazon]

Greece and Persia in the Time of Alexander the Great
Wall Map: 978-0-415-58498-2: $64.95 [57.94 at Amazon]

Italy in the Mid First Century CE
Wall Map: 978-0-415-58440-1: $64.95 [57.94 at Amazon]

The Roman Empire around 200 CE 
Wall Map: 978-0-415-58439-5: $64.95 [57.94 at Amazon]

The World of the New Testament and the Journeys of Paul
Wall Map: 978-0-415-58501-9: $64.95 [57.94 at Amazon]

Professors may request a complimentary examination copy via a link at the Routledge website.  As I write, the publisher’s website is painfully slow, but the links to Amazon work quickly. In many cases, the maps are available from the Amazon Marketplace for even less than the prices listed above.

HT: Jack Sasson

Share:

Kent R. Weeks has written an important assessment in Newsweek of the situation in Egypt: “Can Egypt Protect Its Ancient Monuments?”  Weeks is professor emeritus of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo and founding director of the Theban Mapping Project.

The SCA’s on-site inspectors, who are supposed to administer and preserve the country’s heritage, are underpaid and unmotivated. Most are young and—for the first few years, at least—enthusiastic about their job. But the low salary and near-universal reluctance of their superiors to delegate authority leads to frustration. A large number leave to become tourist guides. Instead of taking 300 Egyptian pounds a month from the SCA (about $50), they can earn six or seven times that amount as guides.
Besides staffing problems, the SCA is perennially underfunded, even though archeological tourism generates considerable income. In December 2010 ticket sales to sites in Luxor alone earned $30 million for Egypt. But much of this money goes to the government treasury, and the SCA routinely postpones or ignores conservation, maintenance, documentation, and tourist management because of a lack of funds.
Meanwhile, the number of visitors to archeological sites increases every year. The Valley of the Kings, which had perhaps 100 visitors a day in 1970, had 8,000 a day in December of last year, and the Ministry of Tourism hopes for 15,000 a day by 2015. The pressures such numbers inflict on tombs and temples are enormous. Yet no long-term comprehensive management plan to protect them has yet been agreed upon.
Tourism is a major pillar of the Egyptian economy, and given the income that archeological sites generate, one might think their protection would be a primary goal. After all: no sites, no money. But almost every branch of government wants some control over that income and wants as much of it as possible for themselves, focusing only on short-term gain. Since the revolution, the number of tourists has dropped dramatically, and one can imagine that the SCA will now feel even more financial pressure.

The whole is worth reading for all who are interested in Egypt’s archaeological heritage.

HT: Jack Sasson

Share:

From the Associated Press:

Archaeologists unearthed one of the largest statues found to date of a powerful ancient Egyptian pharaoh at his mortuary temple in the southern city of Luxor, the country’s antiquities authority announced Tuesday.
The 13 meter (42 foot) tall statue of Amenhotep III was one of a pair that flanked the northern entrance to the grand funerary temple on the west bank of the Nile that is currently the focus of a major excavation.
The statue consists of seven large quartzite blocks and still lacks a head and was actually first discovered in the 1928 and then rehidden, according to the press release from the country’s antiquities authority. Archaeologists expect to find its twin in the next digging season.
Excavation supervisor Abdel-Ghaffar Wagdi said two other statues were also unearthed, one of the god Thoth with a baboon’s head and a six foot (1.85 meter) tall one of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet.

The full story is here.  The temple is best known to visitors by the well-preserved Colossi of Memnon, but most of the stones of the temple were robbed away in antiquity.  Amenhotep III’s temple was the largest in ancient Thebes, covering a total of four million square feet.  A diagram and aerial photo is included with an article about the temple by Mark Andrews.

Colossi of Memnon in floodwaters of Nile River, cf34-74

Colossi of Memnon, with floodwaters of Nile, c. 1965
Source: Photographs of Charles Lee Feinberg
Share:

Gordon Franz has updated his article about Simcha’s nails, including statements from several authorities that deny that the nails came from the tomb of Caiaphas.

The excavators of Tel Burna have posted the report on the first archaeological season.

James Hoffmeier is lecturing on “The Exodus from Egypt in Light of Recent Archaeological and Geological Work in North Sinai” in Houston on May 21.

The Global Heritage Fund has created “its own spy agency, created to allow armchair archaeologists (as well as real ones), to watch for looting, disasters and other calamities at some of the most endangered sites of human history.”

This July, Thomas Davis will become Professor of Archaeology and Biblical Backgrounds at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Forth Worth, Texas.  Davis is author of Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology.  One clear result of the fall of biblical archaeology is that professors now have significantly different titles.

If you believed the recent report about dishonesty by the author of Three Cups of Tea, perhaps you were unaware that it was the work of 60 Minutes.  These are the same folks who brought us the report exposing the James Ossuary and the Jehoash Tablet as forgeries.  The heart of their case was the on-screen confession of an Egyptian artisan.  Yet Hershel Shanks has investigated and determined that it was all a lie.  And 60 Minutes knew it all along.

Share:

In a Passover article for the Jerusalem Post, Stephen Rosenberg searches for indirect evidence connecting the Israelites to Egypt.  He finds some significant connections:

The Torah is full of references to Egyptian geography and religious cults and customs, and it is clear that the compiler was speaking to an audience familiar with Egypt. When Lot parted from Abraham, he chose the plain of the Jordan because “it was well watered… like the Land of Egypt” (Genesis 13:10). The Tower of Babel in Mesopotamia was built of brick, because “they used brick for stone” (Gen. 11:3), it being necessary to explain this to the Israelites, who only knew monuments built of stone, as in Egypt.
[…]
With reference to temples, one can see that the description of the Tabernacle of the Wilderness, the Mishkan, is based on Egyptian models. The Ark of the Covenant is made of three layers, a wooden chest overlaid with gold inside and outside, like the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun. It is protected by two cherubim, just like that of Tutankhamun, except that he had four. Much of the furniture from his tomb was fitted with carrying staves, like those of the Tabernacle.

But then he goes further and suggests that the Israelite tabernacle was in fact the battle tent of King Tutankhamun, stolen by the escaping slaves.  That leads him to propose a 14th-century date for the exodus.

In that case Akhenaten, who had started his reign under the official name of Amenhotep IV (1350-1334 BCE), was the persecutor of the Israelites, “the Pharaoh who knew not Joseph” (Exodus 1:8). He was the one who ordered the male babies to be drowned, from which fate Moses was saved to become a prince at his court, as Sigmund Freud suggested 80 years ago. When Moses saw his brothers slaving at the building of the city, he reacted as described in the Torah and eventually, on the death of Akhenaten, saw a chance to lead them out of Egypt.

The “suspicious circumstances” of the deaths of both Akhenaten and Tutankhamun later “perhaps gave rise to the idea of the slaying of the firstborn.”  Rosenberg seems serious when he suggests that the story of the tenth plague originated from the life of Akhenaten who “had six daughters and two sons who seem to have died young.”  I wonder if there was a single Pharaoh who did not have some children die young, and I doubt that the Israelites required such an occurrence to prompt them to make up such a story.

Rosenberg then proceeds to propose a chronology, but since he refuses “to take the biblical figures at face value,” he must admit that “all this playing with figures is speculative.”

He concludes:

Sitting around the Seder table we like to believe the full biblical account of the Exodus, the 12 brothers, the slavery, the Ten Plagues, the national release and the gaining of our freedom. The historians and archeologists think it is all a wonderful folk-tale but hardly one founded on any historical fact. Proof there is none, but information based on equating the battle tent of Tutankhamun with the Tabernacle of the Wilderness can, when put together as above, make a credible narrative.

I doubt the anti-supernaturalist historians find this approach credible, and I certainly prefer to accept the biblical account over the latest attempt to create a new story by admitting certain evidence and excluding the rest.  Nevertheless, I appreciate Rosenberg’s presentation of data that may be understood in several different ways.

Share: