Professor Nadav Na’aman of Tel Aviv University will be lecturing this week at Pennsylvania State University on the subject of “Text and Archaeology: Two Sets of Competing Data of Urban Culture Decline.” The lecture will be held on Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 4:00 p.m. in 102 Weaver Building.
It’s probably just a coincidence that this week Penn State professor Donald Redford is lecturing on a variety of subjects in Jerusalem.
HT: Eric Welch
Iraq
Efforts are underway to resurrect Iraq’s tourism industry. CNN reported in January on conservation work at the site of Babylon, and the Global Heritage Fund has been involved in similar work at Ur. In 2009 and 2010, the Iraqi government reported 165 tourists visited the country.
The online edition of Archaeology magazine has posted a piece entitled “Letter from Iraq: The Ziggurat Endures.” It was written by Michael Taylor, a National Guardsman who visited Ur in May, 2008. There are a few photos of the ziggurat and one of the royal tombs.
Last fall, American archaeologists returned to southern Iraq for the first time in 25 years. A report at PhysOrg outlines the research of Jennifer Pournelle. She is studying the importance of marshland resources, and how proximity to marshlands may have helped determine where ancients cities were founded in southern Iraq. A short video can be seen here.
Egypt
Last Sunday, the Cairo Museum reopened, along with five other museums and all of Egypt’s antiquities sites. On Wednesday night, looters attempted to make off with a 160-ton, red granite statue of Ramses II located at Aswan. Their efforts were thwarted by security personnel (and maybe the size of the statue).
Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs, has claimed that a 3,200 year-old funerary mask owned by the Saint Louis Art Museum was stolen from Egypt. The mask was discovered in excavations at Saqqara in 1952 and purchased by the museum for half-a-million dollars. The museum has filed suit to prevent seizure of the mask by the U.S. attorney’s office in St. Louis.
Beginning today and running through September 4, the Tennessee State Museum is featuring a three-part exhibition entitled Egyptian Relics, Replicas & Revivals: Treasures from Tutankhamun. The exhibit brings together objects and replicas from the University of Memphis, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Vanderbilt University, and the International Museum Institute of New York.
Admission is free. Details are available at the museum’s website.
Anson Rainey Tributes
A week ago Saturday, Anson Rainey passed away at the age of 81. This past week, the radio program LandMinds produced a four-part tribute to Rainey in which they conducted interviews with Paul Wright of Jerusalem University College, and Yigal Levin and Aharon Demsky of Bar-Ilan University.
Audio of the program can be found here. Biblical Archaeology Review also has a brief note about Rainey’s passing on their website.
Miscellaneous
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae has made available an online edition of the Classical Greek lexicon Liddell-Scott-Jones, with hyperlinks to texts in the TLG database. The lexicon can be found here and an account of its print and digital versions here.
On Monday, March 21, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm, Thomas Levy will speak at George Washington University’s Capitol Archaeological Institute in Washington, DC. His lecture is entitled “Quest for Solomon’s Mines: Cyber-Archaeology and Recent Explorations in Jordan,” and will be presented at the Elliott School, 1957 E St. NW, Room 113. Both the lecture and a reception are free and open to the public. Some information is provided here.
HT: Joe Lauer and Jack Sasson
On Monday, March 14, at 7 pm, Peter Machinist will present the second lecture of the new Trinity Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology Lecture series at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL. He will speak on “Achaemenid Persia as Spectacle.” This lecture is free and open to the public. See the announcement for details.
The website for the Lynn H. Wood Archaeological Museum Lecture Series at the Institute of Archaeology, Southern Adventist University (Collegedale, TN) reports that John Monson will speak on the topic of “Solomon’s Temple: The Center of the Universe Then and Now,” on Wednesday, March 16, at 7 pm. This appears to be a change from our earlier report which had Bryant Wood speaking at this same date and time. The Lynn H. Wood Lectures are free and open to the public. See the website for more information.
Israel Finkelstein has written a brief article explaining why he believes conclusions based on the lack of archaeological evidence trumps the biblical text every time. “Archaeology as a High Court in Ancient Israelite History: A Reply to Nadav Na’aman” (pdf) is published in the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures.
James Tabor has posted an update on the Mount Zion excavation project, including news that the 2011 dig season will be conducted at Suba (“Cave of John the Baptist”) instead of on Mount Zion.
Ferrell Jenkins explains why you should check out his extensive collection of links to Biblical Studies resources, especially the Bible Places and Scholarly categories.
Aren Maeir has posted the schedule for the Aharoni Symposium, to be held on February 17 at Tel Aviv University.
In response to the recent story about the “Small Kotel,” Leen Ritmeyer observes:
It is ironic to see that Haaretz is worried about a strong reaction from the Waqf (the Muslim religious trust), while the praying Jews are apparently oblivious to the fact that they are touching stones laid by Muslims, which may have been taken from a destroyed Christian church, in order to repair the ancient Jewish Temple Mount walls.
Aren Maeir reports on several recent and one upcoming archaeological meetings in Israel.
For the retirement of Amihai Mazar, Maeir provides summaries of eleven presentations, including one by Ronnie Reich in which he:
proposed a new dating for the so-called Hezekiah tunnel. Due to his dating of a feature which he claims is the origin of the tunnel to the late 9th/early 8th centuries (“the round pool”), he believes that the tunnel could only have been made at a time earlier than Hezekiah. If I may note, now that there is a suggestion to date this tunnel to after Hezekiah (as I mentioned here) and now this suggestion to before, I think a defense of poor Hezekiah is required…
Another presentation of note was that of Israel Finkelstein who
reviewed the long debate that Ami and Israel have had on the chronology of the Iron Age, and, bottom line, suggested that they have both now reached the point where they have almost met in the middle. Time will tell…
Another conference honored the memory of Hanan Eshel, and Maeir writes briefly on a few of the presentations. Ami Mazar presented a paper on seven 10th- and 9th-century inscriptions from his excavations at Tel Rehov. A paper by Shmuel Ahituv on the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions proposed that
the Asherah refers to an object and NOT to a female deity, partner of YHWH – as opposed to most scholars who have dealt with this topic.
Finally, Maeir provides information about the Annual Archaeological Conference in Israel, which will be held on April 14th at Bar-Ilan University.
Thank you, Prof. Maeir, for serving us so well with these reports.
An Iron Age fortress next to the Yarkon River in Tel Aviv shows evidence of trade with the island of Lesbos in the 8th-7th centuries. Archaeological work done at Tel Qudadi seventy years ago have only now been published. For a large version of the image published in the article, see Leon Mauldin’s blog.
The recent storm revealed an underwater cache of weapons from the British Mandate period at Caesarea. Divers were surprised by the changes they found. “We knew things would be different after the storm, but the site was changed so much that we could hardly recognize it.”
Israel had a record-breaking number of tourists in 2010. Christians comprised 69% of all visitors.
“The most visited sites included the Western Wall (77%), the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem (73%), the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (61%), the Via Dolorosa (60%) and the Mount of Olives (55%).”
“Archaeologist” Vendyl Jones passed away recently.
Eight Americans were killed in Egypt when their bus crashed into a parked truck. The tourists were traveling from Aswan to see the temples of Ramses II at Abu Simbel.
This editorial at the New York Times suggests one way that museums can avoid buying off the black market: excavate the archaeological sites themselves.
Geza Vermes tries to rewrite history in a lengthy article on Herod the Great, arguing in part that Herod was the victim of nasty old St. Matthew who “transformed him into a monster.” I thought it was interesting how the author preferred the passive voice when describing the deaths of the people that Herod murdered. For instance, “Augustus with a heavy heart allowed Herod to try his two sons, who were found guilty and executed by strangulation in Sebaste/Samaria.” Josephus provides the only surviving account of the episode. He writes of Herod, “He also sent his sons to Sebaste, a city not far from Cesarea, and ordered them to be there strangled” (Wars 1.551; 1.27.6).
Scholars will present papers tomorrow (Dec 30) in honor of the retirement of Prof. Amihai Mazar. Aren Maeir has posted a schedule of the meeting (Hebrew).
The annual symposium in memory of Prof. Yohanan Aharoni is planned for February 17 at Tel Aviv University. A list of the papers is given here. Part II is entitled, “Debating the Future of Biblical Archaeology: Do Science and Technology Show the Way?”
If you need your football fix while in Israel, the full-contact amateur Israel Football League may beat staying up until dawn.
If you ever drive to the nature reserve at En Gedi, you may want to avoid parking under the trees next time.
HT: Joe Lauer, Keith Keyser, Gordon Govier