2018 Editor’s Selection Vol. 1: Five Articles from The Ancient Near East Today

A PUBLICATION OF FRIENDS OF ASOR TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 “About that Museum in Washington” by Alex Joffe

2 “Were There Phoenicians?” by Josephine Quinn

“Three Israelite Psalms in an Ancient Egyptian Papyrus” by Karel van der 3 Toorn

“Life of a Salesman: Trade and Contraband in Ancient Assyria” by Mathilde 4 Touillon-Ricci

“Comics, Narrative and the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East” by John 5 Swogger Chapter One About that Museum in Washington About that Museum in Washington

By: Alex Joffe

On a quiet street corner two blocks south of the National Mall and just above the busy highway that is Virginia Avenue is the latest addition to Washington’s cultural life, the Museum of the Bible. But unlike the Smithsonian Institution, sprawled out across the Mall, this new museum is a private venture, a labor of love by the Green family of Oklahoma City, they of Hobby Lobby fame. From the outside, the building looks like a forgotten branch of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. Inside is a state of the art museum, spread over seven floors and hundreds of thousands of square feet. But the Museum of the Bible is more than that; it is a unique performance space that operates on multiple layers to present an American Protestant perspective on the Bible, God, and History.

Some readers are doubtless ready to stop right here. That would be a mistake, not only because they’d miss some witty insights, but because the museum itself is a serious place that deserves consideration and respect, if only because of the questions it poses for us about the Bible. Who has the right to interpret the Bible? The Museum of the Bible. Photo by the author. museum makes it clear that, following the Protestant tradition, all people do. But using what tools? That’s where things get complicated.

Entering the museum through its main door, flanked by tablet-like engravings, visitors are thrust into a marble clad interior space that feels like the corporate headquarters of a global pharmaceutical firm. Giant touch screens and video displays hint at what is to come, as do the moveable pillars of the Philistine temple in the children’s room, ‘Courageous Pages,’ which junior Samsons can push apart. Another important hint is the Vatican Museum room filled with manuscripts on loan; the museum has been relentless and successful in developing partnerships with other institutions around the world. On the one hand the strategy vastly expands the scope of the displays. On the other, this is a way for an upstart museum to generate respectability and put itself on the map.

Respectability is an important issue, both for the museum and for its patrons. Any new cultural institution in Washington needs to establish itself, and in a city dedicated to the Seven Deadly Sins and then Hobby Lobby. some, a Museum of the Bible is at a disadvantage. So too is the Green family, which founded its first arts and crafts store in 1972. The chain now employs 32,000 people in 800 stores, and is famous for stocking over 70,000 different crafting and home decor items. It is also famous for winning its case in the Supreme Court, in which it argued that as a closely held corporation with religious objections, it did not have to provide contraceptive coverage to employees as otherwise mandated by the Affordable Care Act. Reasonable people may disagree about this, but academics are not generally reticent. Nor have they been restrained regarding the Green family’s outsized interest in collecting antiquities. One of these purchases was a collection of several thousand cuneiform tablets, looted in Iraq and exported to the US through the United Arab Emirates and Israel. Labeled “ceramic tiles,” the tablets were seized by the Federal government and recently returned to Iraq. The Green family agreed to pay a $3 million fine. Overall the family has donated almost 3,000 items to the museum. While they do not run the institution, they have shaped it, both conceptually and materially.

Cuneiform tablet seized by the US Government. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/artifacts- seized-hobby-lobby-may-come-lost-sumerian-city-180968931/)

But it seems nothing is born without sin. The National Gallery of Art, which reposes on the Mall, was founded by former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, then on trial for tax evasion, through a trust he established which also happened to buy paintings that the Soviet Union had sold from the Hermitage Museum. That inconvenient narrative is today completely forgotten. We might reasonably insist on higher ethical standards in the 21st century but if we become too insistent all cultural life on this planet will grind to a halt. Of course, the idea of a Bible museum (partially) built on loot has a certain appeal, especially in Washington.

But I digress. As an archaeologist, the first stop was a gallery is devoted to ‘The People of the Bible,’ interpreted as Canaanites and Israelites of the second and first millennium ‘BC’ (not BCE). Objects on loan from the Israel Antiquities Authority present aspects of life and society from the Middle Bronze Age through the Roman period, enlivened with computer animations, a wholly unobjectionable tour of some of the greatest hits of Israeli archaeology. Also unobjectionable are special exhibits on theatrical performances of the Bible in Renaissance Florence and on Jerusalem and Rome in the first century CE (not AD, go figure).

Still, the world of the Bible proceeds in one direction: the heart of the museum are Bibles, and boy are there a lot of them. The Green family are indefatigable collectors of the word of the Bible in every conceivable form, from papyrus fragments to Gutenberg Bibles to every edition of every modern translation into every language. It is here that the narrative is most visible and that the museum is at its best. Photo by the author.

Leave aside for the moment the question of whether the museum’s tiny Dead Sea Scroll fragments (purchased in the early 21st century) are real or not. To their credit the displays include disclaimers that raise the question. Also leave aside the provenance of certain Greek papyri, which may or may not be real, stolen, or unraveled after reuse as papier-mâché mummy masks. The structure of the exhibit leads a visitor from the Biblical world of Israelites and Judeans to a world where the Word stands alone. Throughout the exhibit, and indeed the exhibitions as a whole, the figure of Jesus is rarely the focus. Instead, the word is the center, the Bible, as an artifact and concept; it is the only reality in exhibits that mix ancient objects and simulacra.

The path is telling. A real Gilgamesh tablet and a replica of the Hammurabi stele illustrate the Near Eastern foundations of the Bible and of writing. The Exodus is not mentioned but David is king. There are replicas of the Tel Dan inscription and the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser but the Bible as canon begins with the Dead Sea Scrolls, and with real and facsimile Greco-Roman papyri. The real story, however, begins with Christian codices. There are lots, telling the story of the Bible’s translation into many different languages and its dissemination around the world.

Occasionally the translators even speak. Approach the niche holding a Latin translation and a video image of an actor playing St. Jerome appears to humbly explains his background and problems in creating the Vulgate. Maimonides does the same regarding his authoritative Biblical exegesis. These special effects enliven a long wandering through 1500 years of the Bible, through acres of illuminated manuscripts and sectarian editions, in which certain issues are tactfully elided, namely the splits within the church. The stewardship of the Catholic Church and the Papacy is graciously acknowledged, but the enthusiasm displayed over Gutenberg, Luther and Erasmus makes the Protestant narrative clear. A full size replica of Gutenberg’s press shows the power of printing, while Luther and Erasmus ‘themselves’ helpfully inform visitors about their efforts translating the Bible into vernacular and scholarly editions, respectively. The Bible Recreated Gutenberg press. (https://upload.wikimedia.org/ belongs to the world. wikipedia/commons/c/c3/PrintMus_038.jpg)

But just as the Bible itself is not static, the museum is not simply the exhibitions of objects, which mostly play it straight regarding narrative; mentions of God are few (and readers will ponder whether these are references to the deity moving in History or to literary perceptions thereof). The ‘Drive Through Theater’ hosted by Dave Stotts, (a sort of Christian broadcasting version of Josh Gates) is a light hearted, quick cut Discovery Channel (and History Channel, and Travel Channel, all those channels) style trip through archaeological sites in Israel by jeep (and eventually Germany and Britain).

Dave Stotts. (https://www.tbninafrica.org/schedule/programme/drive-thru- history-with-dave-stotts)

The invented drama of Biblical archaeology in brought to life with a snappy soundtrack, much as it is for the pursuit of ancient astronauts and Bigfoot. But so what? I’ve argued countless times that without this sort of mostly harmless PR, Biblical archaeology would be in the same dire straits as its global counterparts; neglected until highways and skyscrapers are built, and forgotten between discoveries of ice men (or women) and pyramids.

The real drama happens in the multimedia displays, sound and light shows that Disney would envy. Moving from room to room through a literal narrative from Creation through the Exodus, although without a stop at Sinai to receive the Law, visitors are bombarded by light and darkness, waves of sound, abstract figures and scenes projected on walls, and occasionally even mist. Guiding the journey, possibly out of a misguided notion of ‘authenticity,’ is a narrator with a vague German Jewish accent. It is a high tech Biblical pageant, abstract but powerfully presented.

Above it all, literally on the top floor, is the World Stage Theater. Here Jesus finally takes top billing in a planetarium style show without Pink Floyd and lasers, as water turns into wine and spills from ceiling to floor, and the money changers’ coins ricochet around all four walls. The theology is even more evident, as John tells Nicodemus that he must be born again.

Which brings us to America. Half of an entire floor is dedicated to the Bible in America, to its significance to various traditions, controversies, and communities. Here, too, there is a story arc. The story obviously begins with the first European settlers – and it is legitimate to complain that the negative impact of these Biblically inspired peoples on the indigenous populations of North America deserves much more attention. But the remainder of the exhibit does an admirable job demonstrating the absolute centrality of the Bible to the self-conception of early American communities, their contrasting traditions, and to the institutions they created, from higher education (recall that Harvard commencement included a Hebrew oration until 1817), to slavery, where Biblical arguments were used on both sides. The Bible was a central political document for the Founders (and for their European counterparts); they did not simply see themselves as the New Israelites but debated future forms of government through the didactic and moral lenses of the Bible.

Religious liberty as a Biblically inspired political virtue is also touted, as are the Biblical origins of the Civil Rights and Human Rights movements. But at a certain point the exhibit becomes ‘The Bible in the World,’ and the Biblical origin of everything dissolves into a vague celebration of religious morality as foundational to modernity and civilized society. This is a fair claim but the Bible itself is no longer a clear focus. Still, as a museum aimed at Americans, it is more than fair to point repeatedly and proudly at the Bible as the document, the experience and lived reality, upon which America was founded. Pride is the crux of the question. There is every reason for Americans of all faiths to have pride in the nation’s Biblical heritage. It is also legitimate for the Green family, who are in the background throughout the museum. Their collections are the rock on which the museum is founded but their role is not trumpeted.

But to understand their role we need to understand the psychology of collecting. I’ve suggested elsewhere that collecting is about power, obviously to possess, but also to create a uniquely individual relationship or intimacy with the past. Ethics are usually rationalized away by arguments regarding salvage and preservation (which academics dismiss all too readily in pursuit of their own form of possession).

But with the Greens and the Museum of the Bible I think things work differently. Most collectors display their goods sparingly or not at all, until perhaps the end of their lives when items are resold or gifted to a museum, an act of lustration for the collector and collection alike, as well as of commemoration. But the Greens have chosen to exhibit parts of their collection now. Unethical collecting decisions are on display for all to see, except that their stated rationale is to bring the word of the Bible back to the people. This act of democratization is at once phenomenally altruistic and, consciously or not, an effort to cover or justify ethical failings. They answer to a higher authority, and occasionally to the Department of Homeland Security.

For academics there is another issue, the loss of public authority over the Bible. The intellectual monopolization of the Bible by academics in the post-World War II era coincided with the gradual collapse of Biblical literacy in America, along with many mainline denominations. With this went an important part of the language of American identity, conversation, and consensus. The Bible in the Public Square was taken over by professors.

Inevitable or not, this was not healthy in social or political terms. Invocations of the Bible, religion, or God in politics today, earnest, banal, or grotesque, are condemned instantly. And yet this cuts Americans off from not only a vernacular but from history; the agony – national, personal, and spiritual - that Abraham Lincoln expressed in his Second Inaugural Address is explicable only by reference to the Bible:

“Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.””

Academics have hardly been faithful stewards of the Bible any more than other forms canonical knowledge; efforts to reclaim the Bible on the part of faith were also inevitable. If these also lead to more earnest engagement with the Bible as literature, tradition and morality on the part of academics and intellectuals, all the better. Unfortunately, I see the opposite occurring; Biblical reclamation will be met with further academic approbation, which will only increase the distance between academia and society, heightening mutual suspicion and alienation, and setting up at least one side for a nasty surprise. As Lincoln said, “Certainly there is no contending against the Will of God; but still there is some difficulty in ascertaining, and applying it, to particular cases.”

Much more could be said, about the replica Biblical village complete with re-enactors, about other multimedia Passion Plays, and about the museum’s collection of over 2,000 Torah scrolls from extinct Jewish communities of the Middle East, North Africa, and especially Eastern Europe. Just how they got to Washington is far from clear, and the idea of that a Christian museum should become a Genizah or repository for Jewish documents raises more questions than could possibly be answered here.

The families and church groups visiting the Museum of the Bible are unlikely to be troubled by such issues or converted to one denomination or another, but they might have elements of their faith, in the Bible and in America, reaffirmed. They are also likely to come away interested in Biblical history and archaeology. Many will go on to the Air and Space Museum for other sorts of reaffirmations, in technology and the human imagination, or to the National Gallery, filled with silent tributes to religious faith and to beauty itself. None of these are unalloyed goods, but that is the nature of museums. The good that one comes away with depends in part on what one goes in with.

Alex Joffe is the editor of The Ancient Near East Today. Chapter Two Were There Phoenicians? Were There Phoenicians?

By Josephine Quinn

The ancient Phoenicians are the Mediterranean’s first celebrities: sailors and merchants who traveled from their narrow strip of coastline in the Levant across the Mediterranean and through the pillars of Hercules, refining the arts of trade and navigation. From at least the ninth century BCE they founded settlements from Cyprus to North Africa to the Atlantic coast of Spain. This was long before the Greeks started their colonial expeditions, and Herodotus reports that the Phoenicians taught the Greeks many things, including the alphabet. Their homeland cities, including Tyre and Sidon, were conquered by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, but in the west Carthage went on to survive two Punic Wars and was only finally destroyed by Rome in 146 BCE.

Byblos, Temple of the Obelisks. All images courtesy of Josephine Quinn. Carthage.

Sidon. Tharros, Sardinia.

Tophet at Carthage. In their own eyes, however, the Phoenicians don’t seem to have existed. ‘Phoenician’ was a label Greek writers used for Levantine mariners who spoke similar dialects of a language very different from their own. The term implied little about those people’s cultural or ancestral ties, and it apparently meant nothing to the people themselves: no one from the coastal cities or their overseas colonies ever to our knowledge described themselves as ‘Phoenician’.

In fact, there’s no evidence that they thought of themselves as a community at all. Scholars sometimes suggest that the people we call Phoenician called themselves ‘Canaanite’, but there are only two late, weak pieces of evidence for the use of this term as a straightforward self-description. One is a Phoenician inscription from a Numidian city in second century BCE Algeria that is often said to be dedicated by a ‘man of Canaan’ (ʾŠ KNʿN), although it was pointed out as long ago as the 1960s that the final ‘N’ in is fact an ‘L’. The other is an anecdote recorded by St. Augustine more than five hundred years later about Algerian peasants who call themselves ‘Chanani’, but the Latin of the passage is corrupt, the manuscripts are in disagreement, and the comment provides suspiciously convenient evidence for the theological argument being made in the passage concerned.

This lack of evidence for ethnic identification is not simply due to a lack of evidence: we have over 10,000 Phoenician inscriptions from the Levant, the western colonies (especially Carthage), and other Mediterranean cities, almost all of them funerary or votive – which is to say they describe a person who is being commemorated or making an offering. And they describe them in different ways, sometimes as coming from particular towns – Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Carthage – or by their political offices, but most frequently in terms of their families, regularly going back two or three generations and in some cases sixteen or seventeen.

Perhaps things would look different if we had Phoenician equivalents of the Homeric epics or the Hebrew Bible, where we can read of larger identities people found beyond their towns and families, as ‘Achaeans’ or ‘Sons of Israel’, identities that could persuade them to act together to face foreign foes. But whether Phoenician literature is lost or never existed, we just don’t know what it might have said - and in any case, literary accounts can be quite misleading in such matters: the views of a small coterie of intellectuals are easy to read onto a larger group of people who may not share them or even know about them.

Luckily, explicit self-description isn’t the only way people reveal their sense of themselves: we can also look at the evidence for what they do, and in particular what they do together. In the case of the Phoenicians this sometimes picks out regional identities much smaller than ‘Phoenician’, but it can also reveal larger groups that cross what are now considered ethnic boundaries.

To take religion as an example, in the former category a small group of Levantine settlements clustered around the Straits of Sicily in the central Mediterranean practiced child sacrifice to Baal in communal sanctuaries, a very distinctive behavior that would have marked them off in social and cultural terms from other peoples in the region, including other ‘Phoenicians’. And in the latter we find the much more widespread cult of Melqart, a god who mapped so easily and often onto the Greek god Herakles that it is frequently difficult to tell whether their followers saw any significant difference between them at all: this was a god who brought Greek and Phoenician speakers together across the whole of the Mediterranean.

How did we get from a world of local identities and idiosyncratic regional communities to the modern image of the Phoenicians as a distinct historical and cultural group? This is a relatively recent development, fully emerging only in the later nineteenth century, and in part it reflects modern European assumptions about the universality of national or ethnic identities and even of identity itself. But it also reflects the unexpected role played by the Phoenicians in the construction of modern nationalisms.

In sixteenth and seventeenth century Britain a fantasy that the island had been colonized by this sophisticated and adventurous maritime people helped differentiate the British from the French, associated more closely with the Romans and their territorial empire. In eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland, by contrast, similar stories of Phoenician ancestry recast the British occupation of Ireland in terms of the great struggle between noble Carthage and the savage imperial power of Rome. And in the early twentieth century, back in the Levant, successful Catholic agitation for a separate Lebanese state was based on a claim to a common Phoenician past that repudiated the new country’s Arab history and heritage in favor of a Mediterranean identity.

The reality is that the Iron Age Levant, like the Mediterranean as a whole, was a patchwork of different kinds of community with different needs, desires, and identities. Some, like the Israelites and Moabites, seem to have been actively seeking a common identity in this period; others, like the Phoenicians, were ignoring or even rejecting that possibility.

In part this was the result of their environment: a set of natural harbours open to the sea, but cut off from the hinterland by the bulk of Mount Lebanon and from each other by deep river valleys. These cities may look like neighbours on a map, but their most obvious contacts, customers, and relationships were overseas.

It may also however have been deliberate: James C. Scott argued in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) that self-governing people living on the periphery of expansionary states tend to adopt strategies to avoid incorporation, and to minimize taxation, conscription, and forced labor. This produces what he calls ‘shatterzones’, areas where people live mobile lives, often physically dispersed in rugged terrain that is hard to police from the outside. They tend to resist state formation and expansion among themselves as well as by their more powerful neighbours, and they often have flexible identities, easy to change and hard to read. This picture rings true too for the ancient ‘Phoenicians’, both in the mountainous Levant, on the edge of the great plains empires of Mesopotamia and Iran but never fully subject to them, or as migrants in the Mediterranean, another kind of shatter zone, where the activities of Levantine sailors were invisible and unaccountable to their overlords further east, and often to each other.

Josephine Quinn is Associate Professor (University Lecturer) in Ancient History at Oxford University, and Fellow and Tutor of Worcester College, Oxford.Lior Schwimer Chapter Three Three Israelite Psalms in an Ancient Egyptian Papyrus Three Israelite Psalms in an Ancient Egyptian Papyrus

By: Karel van der Toorn

It is one of the most spectacular discoveries in ancient Near Eastern studies of recent years - an Egyptian papyrus from the mid-fourth century BCE containing three psalms that originated in the Kingdom of Israel before the fall of Samaria (722 BCE). They provide a unique insight into the beliefs and practices of the early Israelites.

The scribes of the scroll used Egyptian Demotic script to write texts in the Aramaic language. The Israelite psalms are also in Aramaic, though several irregularities show they were originally in Hebrew. One of them bears a close resemblance to Psalm 20. The two others are completely new to us. They stand side by side in the papyrus, connected by a common theme.

These songs were to be sung at the Early image of Papyrus Amherst 63, Column 11. Image autumn harvest festival and the God courtesy K. van der Toorn. they invoke is called Yaho or Adonay. There are references to sacrifices of lambs and sheep, bowls filled with wine, and music of lyres and flutes. On the day of the New Moon there is a solemn banquet for the God and his worshippers during which Yaho determines destinies for the year to come. “The Merciful One exalts the great, Yaho humiliates the lowly one.” The psalms celebrate his kingship over all the other gods. In combination, these various elements point to a setting in the New Year festival-the historical antecedent of Rosh Hashanah. Recent image of Papyrus Amherst 63, Column 11. Image courtesy K. van der Toorn.

Several stories from the Bible have their setting in the harvest festival at the beginning of the New Year. Thanks to an Egyptian papyrus, scholars now have access to some of the songs that belonged to that occasion.

Understanding these texts has taken over a century. The three Israelite psalms are part of a collection of traditional Aramaic texts. The papyrus scroll has 23 columns and contains about 35 separate compositions. Some of them cover almost 100 lines, others consist of no more than five lines. Because the Aramaic texts were written in the Demotic script, experts classified the scroll initially as an Egyptian papyrus. After Lord Amherst of Hackney acquired the text in the 1890s, Egyptologists tried in vain to break its code. Papyrus Amherst 63 was a particular mystery. It took the collaboration of an Aramaic scholar and a Demotic specialist to solve the riddle.

A few lines in translation were published in the 1940s. Almost forty years later, Aramaic and Demotic Early image of Papyrus Amherst 63, scholars discovered the Aramaic version of Psalm Column 11. Image courtesy K. van der 20 and published other portions of the papyrus. But Toorn. until very recently there was no scholarly edition of the complete text. That situation has now changed. Today anyone who is interested can look at the photographs of the papyrus, its transliteration and translation, plus a commentary. The text provides an entry into a vanished world. It contains the literary heritage of three communities that had once lived together but now seem worlds apart.

Papyrus Amherst 63 is divided in sections. The first section is devoted to texts from an Aramean community from Babylonia, worshippers of Nanay and Nabu. The second section contains texts from Syrian Arameans that came The Amherst papyri: being an account of the Egyptian papyri in from Hamath; their religion is the collection of the Right Hon. Lord Amherst of Hackney, F.S.A. at focused on the god Bethel. Didlington Hall, Norfolk. London : B. Quaritch, 1899. (Archive.org) The third section is Samarian and contains the three Israelite psalms. They refer to Yaho as “our Bull,” which is entirely in line with the North-Israelite practice of venerating Yaho in the form of a young bull (the “Golden Calf”). To judge by the shape of the Demotic characters of the text, the papyrus dates from the mid-fourth century BCE.

From Aramaic texts from a century earlier, we know about the existence of several Aramaic speaking communities in southern Egypt. At Aswan and Elephantine—know at the time under the names Syene and Yeb—there were two Aramean communities, and a Jewish one. The Arameans had separate temples for Nabu and Banit, on the one hand, and Bethel and the Queen of Heaven, on the other. At Elephantine there were Jews, living around the Temple of Yaho. Assyrian and Babylonian texts show that Banit is another name of Nanay. The consort of Bethel (the Queen of Heaven) was presumably Anat, known as Anat-Bethel or Anat-Yaho among the Jews of Egypt. Arameans and Jews served in Egypt as soldiers. In a land-for-service system, they were ultimately responsible for the defense of Persian interests on the southern frontier of Egypt.

Papyrus Amherst 63 is the literary heritage of these Aramean and Jewish communities. But they did not meet in Egypt for the first time. During much of the 7th century BCE, they had lived together in the caravan city that later became known by the name K. van der Toorn, Papyrus Amherst 63. Münster: of Palmyra. The fourth section of the Ugarit-Verlag, 2018. Amherst papyrus contains traditions that go back to the time spent in Palmyra. This Syrian city on the edge of the desert, blessed with an eternal water source, had offered the three communities shelter against the aggression of the Neo-Assyrian empire. At Palmyra, the Samarians and the Arameans developed a civil religion that accommodated several religious traditions. No group had been asked to abandon its gods. The textual compilation of the Amherst papyrus is testimony to the mood of inclusivity that had characterized the coexistence of the three communities at Palmyra. This is the heritage they brought to Egypt. Under the impact of the Babylonian expansionism of the sixth century BCE, the communities decided to transfer to Egypt. It proved to be a migration with momentous consequences. The Samarian community had thought of itself as primarily Aramean,

Map showing location of Elephantine (DailyMail.com)

Reconstruction of the Judaean temple, after a drawing by Stephen Rosenberg, “The Jewish Temple at Elephantine,” Near Eastern Archaeology 67 (2004): 4. but they came to be defined as Jewish as a consequence of the Persian policy to recognize Jews as a separate nation. The Elephantine Jews were ordered to observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread (and probably Passover as well) in conformity with the official Jewish practice throughout the Persian Empire. The eventual split between Jews and Arameans was inevitable.

Papyrus Amherst 63 is a unique document. Not only does it preserve three ancient Israelite psalms, it also bears witness to the historical coexistence of three ethnic communities open to each other’s religious traditions. After the codification of the Torah and the rise of Judaism, such a spirit of receptivity became a thing of the past.

Karel van der Toorn is Faculty Professor of Religion and Society at the University of Amsterdam. For a recent edition of the Egyptian “mystery papyrus,” see Karel van der Toorn, Papyrus Amherst 63. Alter Orient und Altes Testament 448 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2017). Chapter Four Life of a Salesman: Trade and Contraband in Ancient Assyria Life of a Salesman: Trade and Contraband in Ancient Assyria

By: Mathilde Touillon-Ricci

Whenever I am asked what I do for a living, I have to confess: I read people’s private papers. In my defense, I have to say that any secrecy on these papers was lifted a few thousand years ago. These are not even made of paper but were shaped out of clay 4,000 years ago by traveling merchants along the roads of Mesopotamia and Anatolia.

Old Assyrian letters on cuneiform tablets written around 1900 BCE. Photo: Mathilde Touillon-Ricci © 2018, The Trustees of The British Museum

Around 1900 BCE, the kingdom of Kanesh and the city-state of Ashur, in modern- day Turkey and Iraq respectively, enjoyed a deep and special partnership against a backdrop of trade agreements and the circulation of goods and people.

Out of sight, out of mind?

Old Assyrian merchants, as we call them, exported textiles and tin to Anatolia to be exchanged for silver, gold and copper. This was one of the first long-distance trading enterprises. To facilitate this trade, it was common for merchants to move from Ashur to Kanesh. There they settled more or less permanently in the lower town, forming what we could recognise as an expat community.

To sustain their long-distance activities, the merchants needed to communicate. 4,000 years ago, the most efficient and fastest information sharing devices were inscribed tablets. Shaped out of clay by hand, tablets were impressed with a stylus while the clay was still soft. Once dried out, Cuneiform writing takes its name from the wedge-shaped they were wrapped in a sheet of strokes impressed by the stylus on the soft clay, from Latin clay bearing the names of the cuneus meaning ‘wedge’. Photo: Alberto Giannese © 2018, The sender and the addressee – in Trustees of The British Museum other words, an envelope.

Archaeologists have found 23,000 of these tablets, from a period of about 150 years. The many letters merchants sent and received offer us a glimpse of what life would

A clay tablet inside its half-open envelope. Tablets were enclosed in a clay envelope to preserve the information they carried. Just like today, envelopes were usually discarded after being opened. (BM 115206, BM 115206 A). Photo: Mathilde Touillon-Ricci © 2018, The Trustees of The British Museum have been like in those days. Having spent the last year studying these tablets, I have got to read some of their stories and it is always a thrill to sit down in the Museum’s study room and to walk down memory lane, albeit further down than I usually would.

First person accounts

What I love most about Old Assyrian letters is their spontaneity. The introduction formula is kept to a minimum, ‘from so-and-so to so-and-so say this’, then comes the message in the first person. The message typically contains instructions from one merchant to his trading partner about the forthcoming shipment: the types and quantities of goods, their unit price and the applicable exchange rates, practical arrangements for the caravan and its staff in terms of accommodation and subsistence, even including the fodder for the donkeys.

Sometimes, the message has a more peculiar substance. While reading a letter of instructions sent by Buzazu to his trading partners, I discovered that he said:

“Let them [the transporters] bring the tin via the narrow track [smuggling route] if it is clear. If not, let them make small packets of my tin and introduce them gradually into Kanesh, concealed in their underwear.”

In this letter Buzazu actually cancels the smuggling operation after the situation had changed and was no longer favourable. Yet we are left wondering about the hows and whys of trade Buzazu cancels a smuggling operation, detailing how the goods and contraband, not to mention the would have been brought if the plan had happened. (BM 115172). Photo: Mathilde Touillon-Ricci © 2018, The Trustees of practicalities of concealing ingots of The British MuseumThe Trustees of The British Museum metal in one’s underwear. Rule makers and rule breakers

The agreement struck between Kanesh and Ashur regulated the activities of the trade in terms of authorised or prohibited goods as well as in terms of taxes to be applied to transactions. For example, iron – a rare and expensive metal costing up to 7 times the price of gold – and the lapis lazuli extracted from distant Afghanistan were sold under state monopoly.

Mirroring these regulations, a system of contraband was set up, either to avoid paying the relevant taxes or in order to trade restricted products. Thanks to the letters they wrote, we know of some of the taxes Old Assyrian merchants were supposed to pay: transport and import taxes upon arrival in Kanesh, tolls and duties on goods and persons en route and an export tax upon departure from Ashur.

Where there is a will there is a way, and for smugglers this was the ‘narrow track’. Going through the mountainous paths of Anatolia, merchants got around some of the taxes by taking a detour away from authorised routes and checkpoints. Lacking the protection offered on official routes, the journey was more perilous, exposed to wild

Writing to his partners Pushu-ken and Rabi- Ashur, the merchant Kunilum instructs them to wait for cleared goods to return from the customs office so that they can be mixed and shipped together with undeclared goods in order to arouse less suspicion. (BM 113332). Photo: Mathilde Touillon-Ricci © 2018, The Trustees of The British Museum beasts, highway thieves, and a harsh climate.

Smuggling also meant fooling the customs system either by not declaring taxable goods or by making a partial declaration. Along with the underwear trick elaborated by Buzazu, the merchants’ letters describe various ruses, whether that meant paying off the guards or hiring mules among the locals who would have known the place inside out.

As lucrative as it may have been, smuggling was still illegal and convicted smugglers would have faced sanctions ranging from cash penalties to house arrest and jail. We know of the case of the merchant Pushu-ken, whose house was raided and found with smuggled goods, leading to a jail sentence for contraband. Despite the risks, merchants remained keen to smuggle, as we can read in Ishtar-pilah’s plea to Pushu- ken: “You are my colleague! Just as you send an order for your own goods to be smuggled, do also send one for my goods.”

A family affair Funnily enough, Pushu-ken happens to have been the father of Buzazu. Old Assyrian trade was a family business and we can still read the correspondence between Buzazu and his relatives: his mother Lamassi, his sister Ahaha, his brothers Sueyya, Ikun- pasha and Ashur-muttabbil.

Buzazu’s family tree, reconstructed from the letters he sent and received. Sueyya, the eldest son, grew up and went to school in Ashur while Pushu-ken had already settled a thousand miles away in Kanesh to oversee the activities of the family firm. One of the most touching letters was written by the young Sueyya to his father, boasting about his learning of cuneiform and demonstrating it with neat and careful writing. The tablets written by Old Assyrian merchants are their private papers, recounting in the first person what they did, what they wish they had done and what they shall do, in life and business alike. So whenever I am asked what I do for a living, A letter about school from the young Sueyya to his father Pushu- I have to confess: I listen to ken. (BM 115085). Photo: Mathilde Touillon-Ricci © 2018, The people’s accounts of their lives Trustees of The British Museum in their own words. I read the tablets they wrote 4,000 years ago, fascinated by the stories of the life they lived. And what a life they led!

Mathilde Touillon-Ricci is a Collaborative Doctoral Award researcher at the British Museum. This piece appeared originally on the British Museum blog. We are grateful to the author and to the British Museum for permission to repost it. Chapter Five Comics, Narrative and the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East Comics, Narrative and the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East

By: John Swogger

Archaeologists have always embraced new ways of visually recording and representing the past and the work that they do. In the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, photography was enthusiastically adopted by archaeologists not only as a way of recording excavations and documenting sites, but also as a way of giving public audiences a better idea of what their work entailed.

In the middle of the twentieth- century, greater access to x-rays, aerial photography and microscopic photography changed once again the way in which archaeological work and the past was represented. Developments in scientific and Sir Flinders Petrie with his camera. (Petrie Museum archive PMF/ statistical analysis of artefacts, WFP1/115/5/2) soil samples, and radiocarbon dates similarly resulted in new ways of viewing the past: through charts, graphs and histograms. Throughout the history of the discipline, various forms of representational media have given greater visibility to the archaeological profession as well as to archaeological research.

A new medium now also being used for the same reasons are comics. For most people, the term “comics”, conjures up images of talking animals or superheroes in capes. But “comics” simply describes a very specific form of illustration in which image and text are closely inter-related. Comics and other forms of graphic narrative have been used for decades to tell non-fiction stories, too. In archaeology, this stretches back, arguably, to nineteenth-century reporting in the Illustrated London News. In the United States, non- fiction newspaper comic strips were used as early as 1926 to tell the history of the state of Texas. In Europe, factual comics were used from the 1960s to teach younger audiences about history and archaeology, through popular educational publications like the Look and Learn magazine.

The ability of comics to closely interrelate image and text within a coherent narrative makes them ideal for introducing an audience to an unfamiliar subject. The combination of

A ‘battleship curve’ of frequency distribution. explanation and visual context can convey (http://www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/ significant amounts of information in an easy- deathsheadfg1.html) to-digest format, meaning a comic can unpick a complex subject without “dumbing it down”. As an archaeological illustrator, I have used informational - or “applied” - comics for the past ten years to explain a wide range of aspects of archaeology: from excavations to landscape surveys, from site preservation to radiocarbon dating, from museum repatriations to community heritage. Comics speak to audiences unfamiliar with archaeology in an engaging and accessible way that makes them ideal for public outreach in a wide range of contexts.

I have created comics about research projects and excavations that have been put up as posters on community noticeboards and local businesses; I have created comics about prehistoric sites that have been used as educational hand-outs for school visits; and I have created comic strips about local heritage, history and Reception of Nineveh sculptures at the British Museum, Illustrated London News, 1852. (http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/ collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=1285510001&objectId=3498943&partId=1) archaeology that have been published in local newspapers. Significantly, in all these cases, I have been able to use comics to talk about archaeology in places like shops and supermarkets, schools and local papers - not just museums, visitor centres and archaeological sites. In other words, using comics for public outreach has genuinely allowed me to “reach out” to audiences that might not otherwise engage with archaeological research at all.

But public audiences are only half of the story. I have also used comics to talk to academic audiences and other archaeologists. The principles that make comics so useful for public outreach also make them useful for talking to audiences of one’s own peers. They can be used to quickly explain background concepts that guide research, communicate effectively with staff and students on fieldwork projects, and engage with interdisciplinary scholars. And I have used such comics to create graphic abstracts for academic papers, to report on the results of research projects, to de-complicate highly technical statistical and analytical approaches, and to illustrate multi-layered social Ceramics, Polity and Comics – Page from the 2015 article in Advances in Archaeological Practice illustrating the “translation” of an article from American Antiquity into a comic. Image courtesy of John Swogger. Archaeology on Carriacou – Page from 2011-2014 comic series, published as a set of posters distributed on the island of Carriacou, WI. Image courtesy of John Swogger. Journeys to Complete the Work – Page from an informational comic about NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) aimed at both museums and Native communities explaining how the law works – or, sometimes, doesn’t. Image courtesy of John Swogger.

What is Heritage?, Oswestry and the Romans, Oswestry Castle Excavations, Ancient Routeways – Four strips from the series “Oswestry Heritage Comics”, published in the Oswestry & Border Counties Advertizer and on Facebook, Sept. 2016 – June 2018. Project supported by the UK Heritage Lottery Fund. Images courtesy of John Swogger. and cultural interpretations. They can supply a much-needed narrative and contextual framework to data provided by excavation, lab analysis, and remote sensing - and even technological visualisation techniques such as 3D scanning and LIDAR. I made this argument in an article in the Society for American Archaeology’s journal Advances in Archaeological Practice a few years ago - in the form of a comic, of course!

Critical response to my argument has been positive, but still cautious. “Narrative” still suggests “fiction” to many; “comics” suggest something for children. But modern comics are a sophisticated, mature medium, capable of talking seriously about complex and even contentious issues. Authors like Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman have used comics to talk about the war in Bosnia and the Holocaust; graphic autobiographers such as Peter Dunlap-Shohl have used comics to recount his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. Such narratives are not aimed at children - nor are they dependent upon gratuitous use of “drama” to make their point.

The growing realisation among archaeologists and anthropologists that comics are a sophisticated and nuanced medium for communicating complex information has resulted in a diverse range of follow-on projects and commissions undertaken for academic clients: comics about heritage and immigration in Scandinavia, comics about the repatriation of ancestral remains to Native American nations, comics used to recruit students to university research projects, and comics as graphical abstracts Aehtwelighu – Example of a graphic abstract illustrating discussion of cross-border relationships around Offa’s Dyke during the Anglo-Saxon period. Image courtesy of John Swogger. for academic papers. These are comics designed to meet the communication needs of archaeological scholars, demonstrating that - at least in some quarters - the medium’s unique potential for communication beyond public outreach is starting to be recognised.

Although I have worked as an archaeological illustrator all over the world, my background is in the archaeology of the ancient Near East: I was site illustrator for over a decade for the Çatalhöyük Research Project in Anatolia, and have worked on material from Göbekli Tepe, Jericho and have excavated in the Sudan. I am familiar with the issues that make communicating information about the ancient near east to both public and local audiences difficult: the complexity and great time-depth of the archaeology, the convoluted historical, contemporary and political contexts of sites, and the sometimes remote and unfamiliar nature of the way in which archaeological work is carried out.

But it seems to me, too, that the archaeology of the ancient Near East suffers from an additional problem in its public outreach: that of “representational fatigue”. Audiences are perhaps now so used to seeing photographs, paintings, cutaway drawings and 3D models - even filmed reconstructions - of the ancient Near East that I wonder if they have stopped really “seeing” the information they contain. These ways of representing have become so familiar to people that they may think they already know all there is to know about the subject, making it harder to communicate the importance or impact of new research.

Perhaps those who work with this material - whether in the field, in the lab, in the academy or in the museum - could benefit from a new way of taking about their results, process and research? An unexpected way - a way that prompts audiences (both public and academic) to think again about what they think they know about the archaeology of the ancient Near East?

John Swogger is a freelance archaeological illustrator, specialising in finds and reconstruction illustrations for excavation projects, museums and for publication. He was site illustrator for the Çatalhöyük Research Project in Turkey for almost ten years, and now works on sites in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and in Serbia. ARTICLES EDITED BY ALEX JOFFE

@DrAlexJoffe • [email protected]

Alex Joffe is the editor of the Ancient Near East Today. The publication features contributions from diverse academics, a forum featuring debates of current developments from the field, and links to news and resources. The ANE Today covers the entire Near East, and each issue presents discussions ranging from the state of biblical archaeology to archaeology after the Arab Spring.

MANAGING EDITOR CYNTHIA RUFO [email protected]

Cynthia Rufo is ASOR’s Archivist and Website Manager.

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