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Downloaded From UC Berkeley Postprints Title Moving Beyond King Mesha: The Archaeology of Social Life in Iron Age Jordan Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0m915846 ISBN 9781316661468 Author Porter, Benjamin W. Publication Date 2018 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California SEVENTEEN MOVING BEYOND KING MESHA A Social Archaeology of Iron Age Jordan BENJAMIN W. PORTER In 1868, members of the Bani Hamida tribe revealed an inscribed basalt stone resting on the surface of a ruined city named Dhiban to a passing Christian missionary. As epigraphers would determine soon after, this stone possessed a first-person account detailing the statecraft of Mesha, a ninth-century Moabite king (Fig. 17.1). The inscription described the king’s wars against the Northern Kingdom of Israel, his subsequent actions to expand Moab’s territory, and ambitious construction and irrigation projects. The inscription’s decipherment led to great excitement throughout Europe because the text corroborated events described in the Hebrew Bible’s 2 Kings 3. For scholars eager to find written sources to narrate the history of Jordan’s Iron Age kingdoms, Meshaʼs inscription provided them with a reputedly factual description of Moab’s ninth-century history. Despite its valuable content, Meshaʼs inscription has been a poisoned chalice for archaeologists and historians of the Iron Age Levant. The inscription’s decipherment inspired the exploration of ancient Jordan in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The twentieth century would see landscape surveys (e.g., Glueck 1940) and the excavation of major Iron Age settlements, such as 1 the ‘Amman Citadel, Busayra, Dhiban, Hesban,̣ and many others. This physical evidence, scholars believed, would hopefully fill in the remaining gaps in the historical sequence culled from the Hebrew Bible, the “Moabite Bible” that was the Mesha Inscription, and other chance epigraphic finds. Beginning in the 1980s, the Mesha Inscription took on a renewed purpose as 324 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. BILL TO Berkeley Law Library, on 23 Jan 2021 at 03:20:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316661468.019 SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY OF IRON AGE JORDAN 325 17.1. The Mesha Stele (Louvre, AP 5066). The light gray stone is the original portions, while the black stone is a cast reconstructed from a frieze of now-missing portions. (Photo by Mbzt. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- sa/3.0)].) historians and archaeologists turned to writing social histories, using the text to issue general statements about the political and social structure of Jordan’s Iron Age societies (LaBianca and Younker 1995). Meshaʼs characterization of Moabite society as one that consisted of distinct familial identities fixed to territories resonated with evolutionary typologies, such as “tribes,” “chiefdoms,” and segmentary lineage systems that were discussed throughout Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. BILL TO Berkeley Law Library, on 23 Jan 2021 at 03:20:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316661468.019 326 PORTER twentieth-century political anthropology. Believing they had discovered parity between an ancient “emic” worldview and a scholarly “etic” typology, scholars used trait lists built on ethnographic observations of, for instance, tribal societies with pastoralist economies, to reconstruct Iron Age society. One outcome of this line of reasoning has been that politics is the singular lens through which the investigation of Iron Age society is understood. Iron Age persons, their identities and motivations, and their relationships with each other are reduced to static categories, such as “pastoralist,”“tribe,” or “king.” Confusion often ensues when archaeological evidence does not easily fit within such predefined categories or is absent altogether. The archaeology of Jordan’s Iron Age societies presently appears at an impasse, unable to resolve the rigid scholarly ontologies with the thin and difficult to interpret archaeological record. One productive direction is to recognize that Meshaʼs (or his scribe’s) goal was not merely to chronicle events but rather, prescribe a vision for how his expanded kingdom should be understood. Mesha casts west-central Jordan as a space consisting of distinct identities fixed to territories, using phrases, such as “Land of ‘Atarot” and “Land of Madaba,” to which groups such as the “Men of Gad” and “Men of Sharon” were assigned. Meshaʼs goal in his narrative was to integrate disparate segments within a single territorial and symbolic rubric of “Moab” under the sponsorship of the god Kemosh (Routledge 2004: 133–53). Hence, the Mesha Inscription deploys a hegemonic vision of Moab, one that seeks to naturalize the expanded Moabite territory – and Meshaʼs legitimacy to rule it – by drawing on broadly recognized frameworks of “tradition” that were likely recognized by the stele’s audience. Therefore, by questioning the structuralist ontology that has dominated scholarship on Iron Age Jordan for the past twenty-five years, it is possible to create opportunities to discover the myriad ways that the material world of Iron Age Jordan mediated real and ideal identities and relationships. Scholars may observe how groups assembled themselves in dynamic networks of political, economic, and social relationships that often obscure predefined categories. Given the brevity of space, three episodes are queried in this chapter to understand the diversity and complexity of social life at different moments in Iron Age history. This ambitious mission, it must be said from the onset, falls short of its goals due to the quality and abundance of available evidence. More research is needed if scholars desire to move beyond Meshaʼs rhetoric to understand the everyday social worlds of Jordan’s Iron Age peoples. complex communities across the iron age i During and following the demise of the Canaanite polities that canvassed the Levant in the late thirteenth and twelfth centuries, a patchwork of diffuse Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. BILL TO Berkeley Law Library, on 23 Jan 2021 at 03:20:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316661468.019 SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY OF IRON AGE JORDAN 327 17.2. Map of Khirbat al-Mudayna denoting Buildings 100 through 800:(1) a tower, (2) a moat, (3) a possible gate, (4) a paved pathway, and (5) a courtyard. (Drawing by B. W. Porter.) settlement systems emerged in venues throughout Jordan. Archaeological investigations determined that each system contained multiple small 1–2 ha settlements that were relatively equal in size and, often, architectural design. The conspicuous absence of rank-size settlement hierarchies within systems suggests that villages were relatively autonomous entities. Yet, the similarities in building design and material culture across settlements indicate communities were aware of each other and likely collaborated when advantageous. While Iron Age I settlement systems are visible throughout western Jordan (Ji 1995), two systems are particularly well documented. One system is located along the Wadi al-Mujib watershed that drains north and then west into the Jordan Valley (Porter 2013). At least seven settlements emerged and declined between the twelfth and mid-tenth centuries BCE. These settlements pos- itioned themselves on the edges of steep canyons at the bottom of which were thin riparian zones with key resources for subsistence, including water, soils, and wild animals. Excavations have determined that these settlements consisted of domestic residences encircling large empty courtyards. Substantial fortifica- tion systems made up of walls, moats, and towers protected these residences (Fig. 17.2). The predominance of domestic residences indicates that house- holds were a basic unit of Jordan’s Iron Age I societies, a pattern found throughout the Iron Age Levant. An intra-site comparison of domestic resi- dences, however, reveals that they differed slightly in size and structure. Such patterns indicate a limited degree of inequality in wealth and authority that were likely exacerbated during periods of scarcity, when those households that had limited food reserves grew dependent on other households with more abundant resources (Porter 2013: 104–32). A second Iron Age I settlement system, quite different in design from the Wadi al-Mujib system, emerged in southwestern Jordan between the twelfth and mid-tenth centuries BCE (Levy, Najjar, and Ben-Yosef 2014). These Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. BILL TO Berkeley Law Library, on 23 Jan 2021 at 03:20:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316661468.019 328 PORTER settlements were strategically located adjacent to outcrops of copper ores located in the seasonal tributaries that drained into the Wadi Aravah. The best-documented settlements were studied in and around the Wadi Feinan. Khirbat en-Nahas, for instance, was a mining community whose domestic residences were surrounded by slag heaps, the residue of an intensive copper mining and smelting industry that was a major supplier for the Levant and possibly Egypt. Archaeologist have interpreted western Jordan’s settlements as those
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