'Of No Concern' Ignorance as regards the Temple Mount

In an academic journal, Revista d’Arqueologia de Ponent 34, 2024, Bijan Rouhani of the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford and Bill Finlayson, also of that same School of Archaeology, published "Constructing, Deconstructing, and Reconstructing Heritage Values Amidst Conflicts".

Israel is mentioned, of course, mostly in the connection with Iran and the heritage legacy of Cyrus the Great. They note, in another reference, that "in April 2024, UNESCO confirmed the destruction of at least 43 historical sites in Gaza, including a museum."

They quote from a 2000 work by Meron Benvenisti which "details how over 9,000 Palestinian natural features, villages, and ruins were systematically renamed with Jewish names, reshaping the physical and human landscape into a Jewish state, reflecting profound changes and cultural erasure." There is no counter-source to that and so the readers must assume that Benevinisti's claims are absolute truth, an incorrect assumption.

In another mention they further press this point:

The 1948 Israeli-Palestinian war transformed Palestine’s cultural landscape, with the systematic destruction of village landscapes as a key Israeli military strategy. The surviving ruins,  representing a lost cultural topography for Palestinians, challenge claims denying their historical ties to the land (Falah 1996).

What is not mentioned is the 7th century conquest and occupation of Judea, then ruled by the Byzantine Empire which it had assumed from the Roman Empire which applied to the territory the name "Palastina". That conquest was done by Arab tribes from the Saudi Peninsula who then applied Arabic names causing the loss of a 'cultural topography' not to note the various prohibitons by subsequent Muslim rulers on Jewish residency, immigration, property ownership and other elements of suppression, All this, especially the denial, until this very day, which obliterates the historical claims of Jews to this land.

It never occurs to them to see the other side of the picture.

They do quote from a speech delivered by Prime Minister Biyamin Netanyahu at the United Nations in 2013 in which he described the proclamation of Cyrus:

"he proclaimed the right of the Jews to return to the land of Israel and rebuild the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. That’s a Persian decree. And thus began an historic friendship between the Jews and the Persians that lasted until modern times."

A temple. A temple? Could a temple or a place where a temple, or even two, were located be part of all this culutral topography?

Could a cultural site, a heritage and legacy location be added to their study? After all, they do deal with the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, India.

I am referring to Jerusalem's Temple Mount. But they do not relate to it. At all.

A response there in that issue does not mention the Temple Mount either. In the response to that response, "temple" is mentioned. An Aztec one.

The Temple Mount's Jewish character is adamantly denied by Muslims and, in particular, the Palestinian Authority (Ramallah) and Hamas (Gaza). Under the supervision of the Islamic Waqf Trust, with Jordan's oversight, much archaeological destruction has been done. That, it appears, does not concern them although I would guess they have no idea of this issue at all. Their "of no concern" translates into their willful ignorance.

Moreover, it probably just isn't part of their agenda, their political interest, that is.

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Judea, Samaria and...Tahpanhes, Egypt

In a recent academic archaeological article you can read of Judean Jews who are soldiers arriving in Egypt. The article is "Judeans and Samarians at Tahpanhes: Speculating on the Identity of the King in Papyrus Amherst 63" by Marshall A. Cunningham in Advances in Ancient, Biblical, and Near Eastern Research  4, no. 1 (Spring, 2024).

Cunningham highlights similarities between the story in the Papyrus record and the story of  the prophet Jeremiah’s forced flight to Egypt in Jeremiah 40–44.  Finally, he suggests that the two accounts are similar enough to use the Jeremianic version.

He thereby provides another ex-Biblical source that could possibly confirm the truth of Biblical history. He identifies the unnamed king as Apries, the fourth pharaoh of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, and the royal outpost of  Tahpanhes as the site where he receives the Judean and  Samarian caravan.

Excerpts:

Papyrus Amherst 63, a scroll featuring a collection of Aramaic compo-sitions written in Demotic script, features a short narrative concerning the arrival of a group of Judean and Samarian refugees to an unnamed royal outpost. At this outpost, they are received by an  unnamed king who welcomes them into his kingdom with an offer to sustain them...The narrative of the Judean and Samarian caravan occurs in col. xvii of P. Amh. 632...the text opens with narration in the first person...When asked their place of origin, a spokesman for the caravan answers:ʾ[n(h)] ⸢mn⸣-[y]hwd ’t(h) [I] come from [Y]ehud. ’ḥy mn-šmry⸢n⸣ m{m}y⸢t⸣(y) My brother is brought from Samaria. pkʿt ʾdm ⸢m⸣sq ’ḥty myrwšl{l}m And now a man is bringing my sister up from Jerusalem.

...In a recent article on when the Judean garrison at Yeb was established, Kahn (2022, 154)  has  connected this scene with the description of the Elamite jackal causing chaos in Rash’s temples in the preceding column, suggesting Rash as the caravan’s point of origin...

...While the details surrounding the scene are vague, there is strong evidence to suggest that the Judean and Samarian caravan is to be understood as a group of refugees: displaced soldiers and their families fleeing war and seeking shelter. First of all, the narrator identifies the band of Samarians as a gys, [גיס] a “troop” (l. 1).

... a comparison with a similar account of migration to Egypt may allow us to fill in some of  the omitted details. Jeremiah 40–44 narrates the prophet Jeremiah’s forced flight from Judah in the aftermath of a political assassination of the Babylonian-appointed governor, Gedaliah, and his supporters. While the traveling party in that narrative is primarily composed of Judeans fleeing  Babylonian reprisal, it does include a group of Samarians that had been taken captive by the rebel Ishmael outside Mizpah. Notably, the group includes men of fighting age alongside their families (41:16; 44). Finally, according to Jeremiah 43:7–9, the Judeans and Samarians in  Jeremiah’s  caravan made their first stop at the Egyptian city of  Tahpanhes (תחפנחס). Once there, the prophet received an oracle that began by identifying the city as the site of a royal palace  (בית פרעה) before performing a sign-act and announcing Pharaoh’s (and the caravan’s) impending devastation at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian army (43:8–12)...

Impressive.

And another study there, posits that the Damascus Document, in existence before its earliest copy 4Q266 was produced in the first half of the first century BCE, employs a rhetorical use of  the terms “Israel,” “Ephraim,” and “Judah”.

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An Observation on Israelis and Archaeology

Ariel David of Haaretz reported on a new find, one that appears here and deals with An Israelite Residency at Mahanaim in Transjordan?

It deals with  "the site of Tall adh-Dhahab al-Gharbi in the valley of the az-Zarqa River, the biblical Jabbok, in Jordan. We discuss a group of incised ashlar blocks found there, probably dating to the first half of the 8th century BCE. We suggest that the blocks originated from an official building, a residency or a gate complex, not yet excavated, and propose thematic similarities with visual imagery from Kuntillet ʿAjrud. We then show that this site can be securely identified with biblical Mahanaim and point to several biblical verses that may hint at the existence of a North Israelite residency there."

Credit: Pola et. al./Ruhama Bonfil / The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

And he needed to add two, let's call them 'hesitations'.

The first:

To be clear, no one is proclaiming that evidence has been found confirming the historicity of this or other biblical narratives linked to this region. Rather, the evidence of a strong administrative Israelite presence in Transjordan helps us understand why key foundational biblical stories were set in this area, say the study's authors, Prof. Israel Finkelstein of Haifa University and Prof. Tallay Ornan of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

And the second:

A word of caution must be sounded again: identifying the names of biblical places like Mahanaim or Penuel doesn't necessarily say anything about the historicity of biblical stories that take place there. It simply means that – based on the geography, the modern names of the sites, the biblical descriptions and the archaeological or historical evidence – scholars think that these are the real locations that the authors and readers of the Bible would have had in mind as a setting for their stories.

I am almost tempted to write "God forbid that anything that could seemingly confirm the Biblical narrative would be accepted as as close to the scientific truth as possible.

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Did Israel 'Emerge' in 'Ancient Palestine'?

In a review of Emanuel Pfoh's "The Emergence of Israel in Ancient Palestine: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives" by Jeremy Hutton you can find this theory gaining a grip on the academic discourse - and soon to be mass discourse:

...an increasingly vocal contingent has challenged the critical theory (/theories) of historiography employed by traditional historical-critical approaches to the biblical text...Emanuel Pfoh steps into the gap and offers his own terms for peace with this book...itself is a methodologically and theoretically grounded study of how one might begin to write about “the emergence of Israel in ancient Palestine.”

...The author marshals critical historiographic theory, state formation theory, and other anthropological models in an attempt to deal “specifically with Israel’s origins and the question of statehood in Palestine”.  Throughout this introduction Pfoh positions himself as a proponent of “alternative historical explanations of what happened in Iron Age I Palestine in regard to ‘Israel’ ” (emphasis added). This effort comes as nothing surprising in the field of “biblical historiography” (construed loosely as the total combined subsets of biblical scholars, historians, archaeologists, Egyptologists, and Assyriologists who concern themselves with the reconstruction of the history of an ethnic group in the Southern Levant known as “Israel”)...he seeks “to assess the changing historical nature of the entity called ‘Israel’ as a product of contemporary history-writing” through both a review of the various proposals for understanding Israel’s emergence in Palestine (conquest, pastoral infiltration, etc.) and a sharpening of the “minimalist” critique of traditional biblical historiography....of Israel, Pfoh attempts to justify the critical historians’ foundational premise that “we cannot speak of Israel in history without firm evidence, and we cannot base our image of historical Israel on the biblical Israel that dwells in the Old Testament”...

...we have little or no access into the Bible’s meaningfulness within the original social context of its production. Because the historical narratives’ “intention is not historical,” “one cannot deem [them] historiographic” either...

...Pfoh attempts to deconstruct the putative relationship between the various “Israels” known from the ancient epigraphic texts. Pfoh dismisses as skewed any archaeological interpretations of the data that may be linked to the biblical text (e.g., A. Faust’s connection—hardly new with Faust—between
“the absence of pig bones in the Iron I highlands” and Israelite identity; 165; cf. 166–67).  Instead, Pfoh argues that the name “Israel”—if that is in fact what the Mernepta Stela says—“had survived afterwards in the territory and was adopted—from the ninth century on—by people living in the highlands” (172). Moreover, because “[e]thnic consciousness is… "retrospective” and “historiography … defines and creates ethnicity,” we have no access to the identity of early Judaism’s namesake Israel. There follows an outline of what we can know (from epigraphic remnants) or reconstruct (on the basis of archaeology and social-scientific theory) about the genesis and organization of the earliest known polity in the Iron Age II southern Levant: the Bīt-Humriya. This history, however, is not accessible through the biblical text, since “it is during the later periods of however, is not accessible through the biblical text, since “it is during the later periods of ancient Palestine’s history, the Persian and the Graeco-Roman, that we find the proper context in which biblical Israel was created”.

In his “Concluding Reflections” (188–94), Pfoh wraps up a number of independent lines of argumentation that have been touched upon through the course of the study. In a few pages, Pfoh defends himself (and implicitly his congeners) from charges of anti-Semitism and nihilism. But the more salient threads of this short summary are tied together around the theme of epistemology: comparison of the historical reconstruction and the biblical text proceed “only at the final stage of research, but such an endeavour must never aim to achieve a harmonization or an historical corroboration of ancient mythic images,” since doing so “simply misses the point of the original intention [of the biblical text] because of the mixing of logical categories”. “Mythic traditions are rationally unfalsifiable, they just cannot be tested, not because they may not be confirmed by historical or archaeological data—which they are sometimes!—but because they are
created by a different mentality, by another episteme, which never should be confused or blended with our own”...

An Attack on Tel Shiloh and the Biblical Narrative

I think I may have missed this hit piece on Shiloh's archaeological value at the time.

Excerpts:

About 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) north of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, just west of the Israeli settlement Shiloh, lies Tel Shiloh, an archaeological site that attracts tens of thousands of evangelical Christians every year.

There, Scott Stripling, an evangelical pastor from Texas, heads a dig...

...Stripling calls Tel Shiloh Israel's "first capital", based on the idea that Shiloh was the first capital of the Israelites for close to 400 years from the 15th century BCE. ...Biblical scholars beg to differ.

"Properly credentialed biblical scholarship does not assume the historicity of anything prior to King David [ca. 1010-970 BCE]," says Southern Methodist University Professor of Old Testament Susanne Scholz. "That Stripling projects the biblical stories into the historical record exposes him as a Christian fundamentalist. That's the origin of his drive to do archaeology at Tel Shiloh."

Scholz also points out that the claim that Shiloh was the capital of ancient Israel is "utter nonsense".

"Such statements are used to advance geopolitical goals," she says.

The first question an academic like her should be asked is: have you reviewed any of the results of the dig? After all, to depend on a news media site is really an inadequate source.

Has she reviewed the previous results of any earlier digs? The pottery? The walls? Etc.

Some of the studies:

- Buhl, Marie-Louise, & Svend Holm-Nielsen, Shiloh--The Danish Excavations at Tall Sailum, Palestine, in 1926, 1929, 1932 AND 1962: The Pre-Hellenistic Remains. Copenhagen: The National Museum of Denmark, 1969.

- Finkelstein, Israel, et al. Shiloh: The Archaeology of a Biblical City. Tel Aviv, 1993.

- Hizmi, Hananya, and Reut Livyatan-ben-Arie. “The Excavations at the Northern Platform of Tel Shiloh the 2012-2013 Seasons [Translated from Hebrew].” Edited by D. Scott Stripling and David E. Graves. Translated by Hillel Richman. Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin 62 (2017): 35–52.

- Kaufman, Asher S. “Fixing the Site of the Tabernacle at Shiloh.” Biblical Archaeology Review 14.6 (Nov-Dec1988): 42-49.

- Schley, Donald G. Shiloh: A Biblical City in Tradition and History, Sheffield, 1989, 2009. 

and this from Stripling:

- Stripling, Scott. “The Israelite Tabernacle at Shiloh.” Bible and Spade 29.3 (Fall 2016): 88-95.

Or even a semi-academic presentation, as here.

Even Finkelstein accepts Shiloh as site of the Tabernacle (religion is not his driving force) and as 

"the sacred religious center of the Israelite population of the hill country"

More from Finkelstein, no Christian fundamentalist, here.

And in this article, evidence of Carbon-14 is presented dating a major conflagration at Shiloh at 1050 BCE, plus or minus 25 years, which corresponds with the Biblical narrative.

According to her CV, her archaeological experience is minimal:

Susanne Scholz is Professor of Old Testament at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas. As a diasporic German-American feminist post-Holocaust scholar, she researches, writes, and teaches in the area of sacred text studies, primarily in Hebrew Bible studies.

Dr. Scholz holds a Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Born and raised in Germany, she studied at the University of Mainz and the University of Heidelberg while preparing for the equivalent of the Master of Divinity. She also studied in a one-year study program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, prior to coming to the United States. During these years, she participated at an archaeological dig at Tell el-Oreme/Tel Kinrot on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, led by one of her professors in Mainz.

I would suggest that perhaps it is Scholz who has an agenda rather than an independent objective body of knowledge.

The ongoing excavation and the investigation of the artifacts discovered are impressive and present real evidence and not just theories.

Maybe, when she gets the opportunity, she should visit Tel Shiloh?

^

The Khan al-Lubban

I came across an archaeological survey article on the Al-Lubban Khan.

But I noticed something I thought in error.

So I wrote to the author Mahmoud K. Hawari at the The Khalili Research Centre in Oxford.

Dr. Hawari,

I appreciated your article which I have only now come across.

Regarding the "Location" section at the beginning, you place the Khan at the northern edge of the al-Lubban plain.

Having lived in the area for almost 40 years now, having passed it many hundreds of times and even walking by it, my impression is that it actually is at the southern edge, with the plain extending beyond As-Awiya village.

I attach a satellite picture* which shows the Khan at the bottom-left and the plain continuing on to the north.

Sincerely,

Yisrael Medad

*

Incidentally, the village is Lubban e-Sharkiya as there is another Lubban, Al-Lubban al-Gharbi.

Hawari is also the Director-Heneral of the Palestine Museum. Sorry, former Director-General.

If I receive a reply, I will update.

^

Ancient Jerualem Bar-Kochba Coin Discovered

The Israel Antiquities Authority informs us that a rare Bar-Kochba Revolt period has been discovered.  And hwere?

At the Foot of the Temple Mount, north of the City of David and it bears the inscription 

“Year Two of the Freedom of Israel,” 

with the reverse side featuring a palm tree and the word “Jerusalem.”

It is the only coin from the period of the Bar Kokhba revolt bearing 
the name “Jerusalem” ever discovered within Ancient Jerusalem.

As the Authority explains:

Coins from the period of the Bar Kokhba revolt, which declared the rebels’ purpose - to liberate Jerusalem from Roman occupation after the destruction of the city - are well-known in archeology. Discovering such coins helps researchers map out the revolt, which took place approximately 1,900 years ago. It is interesting to note that the rebels minted these revolt coins on Roman regime coins with stripped or damaged faces, possibly out of defiance of the Roman occupation. The revolt coins featured the Temple facade, trumpets, a harp/violin, as well as the inscriptions: “Redemption of Israel” and “Freedom of Israel.”

The coin:

Perhaps a Roman soldier who had picked it up as a souvenir, dropped it at camp.

Photo credit:  Photo: Koby Harati, City of David Archive (Koby is a friend)

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Even Seen the Hebrew Letter Samekh from the 12th Century BCE?

Coming out of a team of archaeologists led by Professor Yosef Garfinkel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute of Archaeology and Professor Michael Hasel at Southern Adventist University in Tennessee, we now have a view of extensive ruins of a Bronze Age-era Canaanite temple dating to the 12th century BCE uncovered in National Park Tel Lachish. (Their academic article is here; I am working from the press release).

The layout of the temple is similar to other Canaanite temples in northern Israel, among them Shchem/Nablus, Megiddo and Hazor.  The front of the compound is marked by two columns and two towers leading to a large hall.  The inner sanctum has four supporting columns and several unhewn “standing stones”.

Credit: D. Rosenberg

In addition to archaeological remains, a trove of artifacts including, bronze cauldrons, 

Credit: T. Rogovski

Hathor-inspired jewellery, 

Credit: T. Rogovski

daggers and axe-heads adorned with bird images, scarabs, and a gold-plated bottle inscribed with the name Ramses II.

Credit: C. Amit/IAA

Of particular interest was a pottery sherd engraved with ancient Canaanite script.  There, the letter “samek” appears, marked by an elongated vertical line crossed by three perpendicular shorter lines.  

Credit: T. Rogovski

This makes it the oldest known example of the letter and a unique specimen for the study of ancient alphabets. 

We can only hope more will be revealed of the Biblical narrative as it comes out of the ground.

^

To What State Does that Artifact Belong?

I read that the U.S. – Jordan Cultural Property Agreement was signed on December 16, 2019.  It aims to "restrict the import of Jordanian artifacts to the United States of America, which includes coins, manuscripts, stones, minerals, ceramics, glass, mosaic plates and ancient bones, seashells and human, animal and plant remains, whose history ranges from about 1.5 million years BC to about 1750 AD".  It also stresses the "need to return Jordanian artifacts that was confiscated in the United States of America to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan".  In addition, there is the goal of "increasing awareness of the Jordanian civilizational and cultural heritage".

Far be it from me to interfere with archaeological preservation but I am wondering about a problem.

Up until 1922, the territory of that kingdom by the desert was part, and so it was known, of Palestine. 

If there is an artifact in the US from, say, 1100 BCE, does it belong to Jordan, a future Palestine or, perhaps, Israel, the state that ruled the area at that time? Please recall, it was named Palestine by the Romans only in 135 CE.

This is confounding me.

Did Assistant US Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Mrs. Marie Royce who signed the document or her superiors give a thought about that?

^

Brainwashed and Lied To

You are asked to believe this:

“Tourists coming here are brainwashed, they are lied to, they do not know this is our land”, said a Palestinian farmer living next to Shiloh settlement, where the Israeli government is funding a large visitor centre to draw tourists to an archaeological site.

Don't.

There are no lies at Shiloh.

We do know whose land this is.

We know what the Arabs did to the site before Jews returned.

We know exactly what Arab period remains are at the site.

Come and judge for yourself.

^ 

Two Impressive Exposed Busts Found By a Perambulating Woman

As the Israel Antiques Authority reports:

Beth She’an Woman Taking a Walk Finds 1,700-year-old Stone Busts

Scholars say such sculptures were usually placed at the entrance to burial caves, and are probably images of the deceased. The finder will receive a good citizenship certificate from the Israel Antiquities Authority

Two impressive Roman busts 

 

were found in early December near Beit She’an – thanks to the alertness of a local resident, who spotted the top of one of the busts’ heads sticking out of the ground as she was taking a walk north of the old city. The woman and her husband called the Israel Antiquities Authority Theft Prevention Unit, and inspectors were quickly sent to the site. Together, they unearthed the first bust and as they worked, they found another one right next to it. The busts, which date to the Late Roman period (3rd–4th centuries CE), were taken to the Israel Antiquities Authority laboratories to protect them from theft and to study and preserve them...the busts were exposed following the recent heavy rainfall in the area. 

Who says archaeology is dull?

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What Could Be Missing in Jordan Archaeology?

Jordan was created by Winston Churchill in 1921.

Given that, it would difficult to find "Jordanian" archaeological artifacts and remains.

However, since Transjordan, besides being part of "historic Palestine" (and thanks to Marc Lamont Hill for resurrecting that term), was also Eastern Eretz-Yisrael, 

the two tribes and the half-tribe have received their inheritance beyond the Jordan at Jericho eastward, toward the sun-rising.'  Numbers 34:15

I would have expected mentions of the territory's Jewish past in an official archaeological report.

I was wrong.

I searched this 104 page document for the terms "Jewish", "Israelites" and "Hebrews". It is entitled "Archaeology in Jordan Newsletter - ACOR, 2016-2017 Seasons". The ACOR is for The American Center of Oriental Research. Its Board of Trustees. It is private and was founded in 1968.

In its Mission Statement, it notes,

ACOR has broad relationships in Jordan as well as deep relationships with key Jordanian national and local governmental agencies and academic institutions. 

I found no mentions of those three terms.

I continued to search.  "Roman" came up 37 times. "Christian" 5 times. "Byzantine" 16 times. "Ottoman" 11 times.

Here is a map of the sites:

To be fair, and honest, I couldn't find "Crusader" or "Canaanite".  But I did not review all past issues.

Still, odd that the Jews were missing.

On page 513 of the 2010 report I found this:

An ostrakon of a storage jar should be mentioned: the partly preserved inscription is in a Transjordanian dialect/Old Hebrew. 

Hebrew is  "a Transjordanian dialect"?  Really?

According to a 1993 publication, ACOR

As a member of ASOR, it has a strict policy of non-involvement in politics and follows their code of archaeological ethics

They seem to have an odd concept of "non-involvement in politics".

P. S.

I emailed them asking for a response or comment.

^ 

It's Gelt. It's Gold. It's Chanukah

As received from the Israel Antiquities Authority:


Hanukkah Gelt:

A cache of rare gold coins and a 900 year old gold earring were discovered at the port of Caesarea.

..."The cache is a silent testimony to one of the most dramatic events in the history of Caesarea -- the violent conquest of the city by the Crusaders. Someone hid their fortune, hoping to retrieve it -- but never returned."

This rare and important treasure, a small bronze pot holding 24 gold coins and a gold earring, was uncovered a few days ago at the Caesarea National Park...The gold cache was found hidden between two stones in the side of a well, located in a house in a neighborhood dating to the Abbasid and Fatimid periods, some 900 years ago.

According to the directors of the excavation, Dr. Peter Gendelman and Mohammed Hatar of the Israel Antiquities Authority, "The coins in the cache dating to the end of the eleventh century, make it possible to link the treasure to the Crusader conquest of the city in the year 1101, one of the most dramatic events in the medieval history of the city. According to contemporary written sources, most of the inhabitants of Caesarea were massacred by the army of Baldwin I (1100–1118), king of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. It is reasonable to assume that the treasure’s owner and his family perished in the massacre or were sold into slavery, and therefore were not able to retrieve their gold."

...At the center of the excavation and conservation activity...[i]s part of a sacred compound first built by Herod more than two millennia ago, as a tribute to his Roman patron, the emperor Augustus, and the goddess Roma. The newly discovered treasure was found in this area.

The well where the treasure was found was part of a house within the Fatimid and Abbasid neighborhoods, built some 1,000 years after Herod's reign, below the western façade of the Herodian temple. These neighborhoods also extended to parts of the inner harbor of the Caesarea port, which had already silted up by that time.

According to Dr. Robert Kool, coin expert at the Israel Antiquities Authority, "The cache is of a unique combination of coins not yet seen in Israel consisting of two types of coins: 18 Fatimid dinars, well known from previous excavations in Caesarea where it was the standard local currency of the time; and a small and extremely rare group of six Byzantine imperial gold coins. Five of the coins are concave and belong to the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Michael VII Doukas (1071–1079).

Week Three at Tel Shiloh

The short version of what happened and was discovered at Tel Shiloh by Dr. Scott Stripling of ARB, his team and volunteers:-


In Squares AH29-30, Tim Lopez identified two more walls to add to his wall list – Roman, Iron Age (Israelite) and Middle Bronze Age (Canaanite)...on Friday...the dirt they dug was then sent to our new wet sifting station. There, Richard from my square, wet sifted the dirt and recognized an ancient Egyptian scarab. It had a cartouche with an Egyptian pharaoh’s name – but we’re not certain what it said. I thought I could read it, but wasn’t sure. We’ve sent it to an expert…and I’ll let you know how good my knowledge of hieroglyphics really is!

opened new Square AG29...finding a wall-line on Friday afternoon. Still, in all that dirt, his team uncovered a large number of wonderful finds – including seven coins, fragments of nine oil lamps, two slingstones and one stone mortar. Then on Friday his team discovered a ceramic object which no one knew for sure what it was- even our conservator said she had never seen one before! Best guess at the moment…an inkwell.

In Square AF29, we were able to find two more stones in the interior face of the Canaanite perimeter wall that runs the full width of our square. In the bulk take-down, we did find a number of interesting pottery sherds and small objects, including one coin, which were kept for further study. 

in AC28-89 and AD29, have been excavating a long stretch of the outer face of the 5m-wide Canaanite perimeter wall – and by the end of the week, they found a hole in the wall! Well, not exactly a hole, the wall was just stopped – from top to bottom! Yet it does not appear to be a gateway and neither does it appear to be part of the original Canaanite wall construction. 

In AF27 and AG27, Ruth Vanderford supervised the final clearing of the glacis – a 35-degree sloping earthen rampart constructed around the outside of the ancient perimeter wall. It was designed in antiquity to hinder attacking armies from reaching the wall and to protect the wall’s foundation from being undermined. Directly above the glacis, they found a large amount of disintegrated red mudbrick, apparently the fallen mudbrick superstructure of the perimeter wall’s stone foundation.

In Square AG30, Kevin Larsen and his team have four walls from a Roman house. It includes what looks like a circular stone column drum deliberately set in the corner of one room. In the next room was a restorable whole New Testament era storage jar along with an unusual stone mortar found in situ within the same room. While the base was flat, the bowl of the mortar sat at a 30-degree angle, seemingly tilted especially for someone’s convenience while sitting on the floor. Finally, one of the corners in this house is created with well-cut stones – maybe the finest Roman room corner in all Israel – probably not…but it was still really well-constructed!

Suzanne Lattimer’s team, in AE29, sits next to mine and she has also uncovered the inner face of the city wall – giving us about 10m of continuous exposure. They have also cleared the wall’s top – almost to the outer face. And, in the process, they found a large dump of Roman pottery – the largest pile of broken pottery we’ve found on the site.

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What Has Been Found at Tel Shiloh Recently?

From Week Two of Dr. Scott Stripling's excavations:


an intact Iron Age saucer oil lamp

a mendable bag jar from the Roman era

a bronze arrow head

a decorative ceramic pomegranate

hundreds of sherds related to several Middle Bronze Age storage jars and pitho

a number of small kitchen vessels such as grinding stones

sling stones

multiple rows of a MB III wall

the remnants of two MBII storage jars

a scarab (this is now the third scarab found to date)

a fully intact glacis/rampart to the city in Square AG27 as well as the remnants of the fallen mud brick wall just east of Smith’s square. A number of MB pottery sherds embedded in the glacis helped date the wall to that period.

30 coins, which included 10 coins from the Danish/Finkelstein dump. Our grand total for two weeks is 53. Other metal finds include a bronze chisel, a sword or dagger point, an iron ring, and an assortment of sandal tacks.

the wet sifting work yielded a number of small finds such as Roman glass, beads, and stone vessel fragments

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Blood Vengeance Evidence

From the (edited) press release of " earliest evidence of blood vengeance" found:

...in a cave in the Jerusalem hills 

Prof. Boaz Zissu, of the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University, discovered a human skull and palm bones that have been dated to the 10th-11th centuries CE.
 According to the researchers, "The skull cap shows signs of two traumatic injuries that eventually healed -- evidence of previous violence experienced by the victim -- as well as a small cut-mark caused close to the time of death, and a blow by a sword that caused certain and immediate death...the skull shows a great resemblance to the local Bedouin population...

...in the period under discussion some 1,000 years ago, the Jerusalem hills were inhabited by a Bedouin population that came from Jordan and northern Arabia.
 A text from the beginning of the 20th century tells the story of a case of revenge, during which the murderer presented his family with the skull and right hand of the victim in order to prove the carrying out of a commandment. These are precisely the parts of the body that were discovered in the present case. Since this is a person who was previously involved in violent incidents who then died from the fatal blow, the researchers say it can be concluded that the earliest evidence of blood vengeance has been discovered.

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The Guardian's Holmes and His Journalism

The Guardian's Olive Holmes simply mouthpieced a report from the EU the other day.

Its essence:

Israel using tourism to legitimise settlements, says EU report

Exclusive: European Union Heads of Mission warn 

‘touristic settlements’ are being used as a political tool

I am going to guess, without any inside knowledge that Emek Shaveh was central to this.  A bit nasty they are.

In any case, as we know with archaeology in the Holy Land, Israel's archaeologists preserve all finds no matter from who, even of Arabs who occupied the Jewish homeland in 638 CE

That includes Canaanites, Philistines, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Persians, Muslims, Crusaders, Mamelukes, Ottomans...and even prehistoric civilizations.

Israel also protects the finds from those who steal, deface and destroy them (guess who).

But that is but one side to this story's unprofessional journalism.

No Israeli archaeologist is asked for a reaction.

No response from the Israel Antiquities Authority.

No quotations from a government representative like...the Minister of Toruism.

Was a "settler", aka Jewish resident, asked? From City of David or Ancient Shiloh?

Was this a balanced report?

Fair?

Objective?

Factual?

After all, the reports underlying theme is astounding:

Archaeology and tourism development by government institutions as well as private settler organisations established what it said was a “narrative based on historic continuity of the Jewish presence in the area at the expense of other religions and cultures”.

That is a flat-out lie.  Holmes had not the sense to realize that and work a bit harder to include a riposte?

Shameful, really.  (UK MediaWatch post)

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Yes! First Temple Archaeological Proof

As the Israel Archaeological Authority has announced today:

"A unique and significant discovery was made during archaeological works in the Western Wall Plaza, on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority and in association with the Western Wall Heritage Foundation: A stamped piece of clay from the First Temple period, which belonged to the “governor of the city” of Jerusalem – the most prominent local position to be held in Jerusalem of 2700 years ago.

This extraordinary find is a lump of clay, stamped and pre-fired. It measures 13 X 15 mm and is 2–3 mm thick. The upper part of the sealing depicts two figures facing each other, and the lower part holds an inscription in ancient Hebrew script.

The sealing was presented to the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, during his visit to Davidson's Center, near the Western Wall, last week. After the completion of the scientific research, the sealing will be on temporary exhibit in the mayor's office.

The sealing, its use unknown, was retrieved by Shimon Cohen while wet-sieving the soil from a late First Temple-period building (seventh-sixth centuries BCE).

Dr. Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah, excavator of the site located in the northwestern part of the western Wall Plaza, on behalf of the IAA, believes that "the sealing had been attached to an important transport and served as some sort of logo, or as a tiny souvenir, which was sent on behalf of the governor of the city." Dr. Weksler-Bdolah further suggests that "it is likely that one of the buildings in our excavation was the destination of this transport sent by the city governor. The finding of the sealing with this high-rank title, in addition to the large assemblage of actual seals found in the building in the past, supports the assumption that this area, located on the western slopes of the western hill of ancient Jerusalem, some 100 m west of the Temple Mount, was inhabited by highly ranked officials during the First Temple period." According to Dr. Weksler-Bdolah "this is the first time that such a sealing is found in an authorized excavation. It supports the biblical rendering of the existence of a governor of the city in Jerusalem 2700 years ago."

Prof. Tallay Ornan of the Hebrew University, and Prof. Benjamin Sass of Tel Aviv University, studied the sealing and describe it thus: "above a double line are two standing men, facing each other in a mirror-like manner. Their heads are depicted as large dots, lacking any details. The hands facing outward are dropped down, and the hands facing inward are raised Each of the figures is wearing a striped, knee-length garment. In the register beneath the double line is an inscription in ancient Hebrew: לשרער, with no spacing between the words and no definite article. It denotes לשר העיר, i.e., “belonging to the governor of the city." Prof. Ornan and Prof. Sass add, that "the title 'governor of the city' is known from the Bible and from extra-biblical documents, referring to an official appointed by the king. Governors of Jerusalem are mentioned twice in the Bible: in 2 Kings, Joshua is the governor of the city in the days of Hezekiah, and in 2 Chronicles, Maaseiah is the governor of the city in the days of Josiah.

Nir Barkat, Mayor of Jerusalem, When the find was presented to him related that "it is very overwhelming to receive greetings from First Temple-period Jerusalem. This shows that already 2700 years ago, Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, was a strong and central city. Jerusalem is one of the most ancient capitals of the world, continually populated by the Jewish people for more than 3000 years. Today we have the privilege to encounter another one of the long chain of persons and leaders that built and developed the city. We are grateful to be living in a city with such a magnificent past, and are obligated to ensure its strength for generations to come, as we daily do."

According to Dr. Yuval Baruch, archaeologist of the Jerusalem District in the IAA: “the outstanding significance of the finds brought upon the decision to conserve the First Temple-period building exposed in the Western Wall plaza excavations and open it to visitors"."

A short explanatory film clip.

This find is quite special as unlike other similar finds,

"Ours is special because this was the first time the seal of the Governor of the City of Jerusalem itself was found in the right place," Weksler-Bdolah says.

Take that, o ye Muslims.

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Chanukah Archaeology at Tel Shiloh

New finds at Tel Shiloh (in Hebrew).  And now in English.

Remember Emek Shaveh's wars and campaigns against Israel's archaeology administration beyond the Green Line, but not only?  We have news for them (below, keep scrolling).

Remember this?

Mizrachi also cites the Tel Shiloh and Sussiya archeological sites in the West Bank as problematic because they are run by settlers instead of a neutral body of experts.
“These sites have been handled very badly by settlers who use them to justify their settlements there and have ignored many layers of archeological evidence to focus on the Bible regarding their finds,” he says.
“We regularly criticize the way their finds are being presented because it’s always linked to the settlement. Now, I’m not saying that there is no Jewish history at these sites – we do believe Jewish history is there – but we are saying you cannot only focus on this period and ignore the whole story.”

These things and also these unnerve them to insanity. 

And these events:

Searching for the Lost Oil Lamp

Chana's Prayer

Dance Festival

Well, now the news.

See that spot?

Well, that was formerly a Hellenistic period non-Jewish dwelling area.  It's preserved.  Tel Shiloh people don't destroy or hide things.  The pottery and other artifacts attest to its identity.

And in the 2nd century BCE, during the time of the rule of Antiochus IV, it was razed by a conquering force.  It was a violent act.  And it was done by the Hasmoneans during the revolt against an oppressive rule.

Yes.

The Chanukah story.

The archaeology excavation was supervised by the Civil Administration's Archaeology Unit headed by Hanina Hizami and conducted by Reut Livyatan Ben-Aryeh.

The Hebrew Yedioth Ahronot item with a lamp and a coin from the period of Antiochus III:

There is evidence of a fire, smashed jugs and ballista stones.  Other evidence included a fish bowl and handles of wine containers:

The site then became the residence of Jews. The proof for that are mikvaot, coins of the Hasmonean dynasty, the Herodian dynasty as well as from the period of the Great Revolt against Rome, 67-70CE.

Archaeology - from then to today.

And there's this at Susiya, too.

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