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Movement, Liminality, and Ritual in the Southern Levantine Drylands

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Movement, Liminality, and Ritual in the Southern Levantine Drylands Connectivity on the Edge of Empire: Movement, Liminality, and Ritual in the Southern Levantine Drylands By Andrea M. Creel A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Near Eastern Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Benjamin W. Porter, Co-Chair Professor Marian H. Feldman, Co-Chair Professor Aaron Brody Professor Rosemary S. Joyce Summer 2017 Abstract Connectivity on the Edge of Empire: Movement, Liminality, and Ritual in the Southern Levantine Drylands by Andrea M. Creel Doctor of Philosophy in Near Eastern Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Benjamin W. Porter, Co-Chair Professor Marian H. Feldman, Co-Chair In the ancient Near East, the Sinai, the Negev, southern Jordan and northwestern Arabia constituted a marginal and peripheral landscape, a liminal land considered both lifeless and teeming with fantastic creatures and divine powers. However, the position of this region between the more populated areas of Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian Peninsula marked this landscape as a crossroads for materials and people, a movement of phenomena perpetuated mainly by local mobile pastoral communities. As such, roadside ritual comprised a major expression and practice of multiple ideologies about the land from earliest times. Sites of ritual along roadsides harnessed a variety of overlapping and intersecting senses of liminality, the potency and danger of being inbetween, to lay claim to the land and offer protection against human and suprahuman dangers. In this context, roadside ritual sites operated as confluences of interaction for multiple communities and religious traditions in this region. The ways in which these communities understood and experienced this landscape often drastically differed, and the interaction of these communities generated new and distinct ways of seeing. This dissertation utilizes textual, ethnographic, and archaeological materials to explore these phenomena in the sixth through the first millennium BCE, with a focus on the early first millennium BCE. This period sees the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in ancient Iraq, which came to dominate much of the ancient Near East in the ninth, eighth, and seventh centuries BCE. Imperial domination inscribed the land with new settlement patterns, monumental architecture, and fortifications that recursively interacted with the ancient meshworks of pilgrimage, subsistence, memory, and liminality already engraved within the landscape. Two ritual sites, Kuntillet ʾAjrûd in the northeastern Sinai (eighth century BCE) and Ḥorvat Qitmit in the northern Negev (seventh century BCE) act as case studies that both manifest these ancient traditions of movement and interaction and presage their acute intensification in later Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Early Islamic, and Ottoman contexts. 1 Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................. 1 Table of Contents ........................................................................................................ i Acknowledgements ................................................................................................... iv Introduction ................................................................................................................ 1 I.I. Methodologies ........................................................................................... 4 I.II. Terminologies and Topographies ............................................................... 5 I.III. (Re)modeling the Iron Age II Southern Levantine Drylands ..................... 7 I.IV. (Re)modeling Kuntillet ʾAjrûd and Ḥorvat Qitmit .................................. 10 I.V.I. Kuntillet ʾAjrûd .............................................................................. 11 I.IV.II. Ḥorvat Qitmit .............................................................................. 13 I.V. Mapping the Terrain ................................................................................. 15 Chapter 1: Methodological Movements in the Southern Levantine Drylands ........ 18 1.1. Contouring, Intersecting, Entangling, Embodying, Tacking .................. 19 1.2. The Contours of Religion and Ritual ....................................................... 23 1.3. The Contours of Landscape and Liminality ............................................. 27 1.4. The Contours of Memory and Materiality ............................................... 35 1.5. Ritual on the Rural Road – (Re)Envisioning Memory, Materiality, Landscape, and Entangled Liminalities in the Southern Levantine Drylands .................................................................................................... 41 Chapter 2: Strangers in a Strange Land – Ways of Seeing and Intra-action in the Southern Levantine Drylands ................................................................ 44 2.1. (Re)Defining the Land ............................................................................. 44 2.2. (Out)Sourcing the Land ............................................................................ 49 2.2.1. Egypt .............................................................................................. 49 2.2.2. Assyria ........................................................................................... 51 2.2.3. Hebrew Bible ................................................................................. 52 2.3. (Mis)Perceiving the Land ......................................................................... 53 i 2.3.1. Egypt .............................................................................................. 53 2.3.2. Assyria ........................................................................................... 58 2.3.3. Hebrew Bible ................................................................................. 60 2.4. (Un)Peopling the Land ............................................................................. 64 2.4.1. Egypt .............................................................................................. 65 2.4.2. Assyria ........................................................................................... 67 2.4.3. Hebrew Bible ................................................................................. 68 2.5. Strange Ways of Seeing the Strange Land ............................................... 70 Chapter 3: Contextualizing a Palimpsest Landscape – Meshworks and Networks in the Southern Levantine Drylands .......................................................... 73 3.1. Meshworking and Networking ................................................................. 74 3.2. Meshworking the Visible Past –Visibility, Landscape, and Memory in the Southern Levantine Drylands ................................................................... 75 3.2.1. A Meshwork of Pilgrimage ........................................................... 76 3.2.2. Egypt in the Meshwork of Pilgrimage .......................................... 83 3.4. Networks within Meshworks – Regionalism in a Marginal Landscape .. 88 3.5 Networking at Nodes – Gateway Cities and Senses of Movement in the Southern Levantine Drylands ................................................................... 92 3.5.1. Tel Arad (Tell ʿArad) .................................................................... 94 3.5.2. Tel Masos (Khirbet el-Mashash) ................................................... 97 3.6. Contextualizing the Palimpsest Landscape – Senses of Liminality in a Landscape of Movement ........................................................................ 103 Chapter 4: Ritual on the Rural Road – Empire, Connectivity, and Senses of Liminality in the Late Iron II Southern Levantine Drylands ............... 105 4.1. The Meshwork of Empire ....................................................................... 106 4.2. Networking Communities ina Landscape of Movement ....................... 111 4.3. Networking at Ritual Nodes ................................................................... 113 4.3.1. Kuntillet ʾAjrûd ........................................................................... 114 4.3.1.1. Building B ..................................................................... 115 4.3.1.2. Building A .................................................................... 118 ii 4.3.1.3. Kuntillet ʾAjrûd as a Ritual Node in a Landscape of Movement ..................................................................... 132 4.3.2. Ḥorvat Qitmit ............................................................................... 135 4.3.2.1. The Large and Small Enclosures ................................... 136 4.3.2.2. Complex A .................................................................... 136 4.3.2.3. Complex B ..................................................................... 140 4.3.2.4. Favissa (?) ...................................................................... 142 4.3.2.5. Ḥorvat Qitmit as a Ritual Node in a Landscape of Movement ..................................................................... 142 4.4. On the Road at Kuntillet ʾAjrûd and Ḥorvat Qitmit Community, Liminality, and Empire in the Late Iron II Southern Levantine Drylands ................................................................................ 145 Conclusion ............................................................................................................
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