Biblical Archaeology_A Very Short Introduction Page 3
Born in England in 1853, just a year after Robinson’s second trip to Palestine, Petrie initially honed his archaeological skills in Egypt. He was nearly forty years old when, in 1890, he was hired by the Palestine Exploration Fund and began excavating at the site of Tell el-Hesi, located in what had once been the Southern Kingdom of Judah. There Petrie became the first person in Palestine to excavate according to the methodology of stratigraphy—a seemingly obvious yet profound concept that had its origins in the geological principle of superposition.
Unlike Robinson who preceded him, Petrie realized that when succeeding cities are built directly on top of one another, they eventually form a man-made mound, or ancient tell—the very tells that could be seen scattered across the landscape of the Holy Land. Moreover, Petrie realized, within those tells, the lower, or deeper, cities will always be earlier in time than the later, or upper, cities. Thus, as Petrie excavated from the top of the mound down, he was proceeding back in time, revealing the history of the tell and the many iterations of the city that lay within it, sometimes uncovering thousands of years and numerous destructions and rebuildings.
Petrie also introduced the concepts of pottery typology and pottery seriation, in which he used the thousands of pieces of broken pottery he uncovered to determine the chronological date of the various levels and of the different cities that lay one on top of another within the mound that he was excavating. Essentially, Petrie realized that pottery types go in and out of style, just as today’s fashions do, and can therefore be used to help date the various cities and stratigraphical levels within a single tell.
3. Stratigraphic levels at Tel Kabri in Israel. The history of the Middle Bronze II palace can be seen in the balk, in the form of several plaster floors with occupational layers, lying one on top of another.
He extended this concept to cities and levels in other ancient mounds, both nearby and farther away, reasoning that if similar types of pottery are found at different sites, the levels in which they are found at each site are likely to be contemporary. This point is especially important for eras before the existence of coins, which were not invented until 700 BCE in ancient Lydia, in what is now Turkey.
The results of Petrie’s excavations at Tell el-Hesi were published in collaboration with his American partner at the site, Frederick J. Bliss, as a book titled A Mound of Many Cities (1894). Petrie’s methods and the publication of his discoveries revolutionized the young field of biblical archaeology and firmly established his reputation as one of the founding fathers of the discipline.
Two years later, in February 1896, when excavating in Egypt within Pharaoh Merneptah’s mortuary temple, located near the Valley of the Kings across the Nile River from the modern town of Luxor, Petrie discovered an inscription dating to the fifth year of the pharaoh’s reign (1207 BCE). Published by Petrie the following year, the inscription—now known as the Israel Stele—is the earliest textual mention of Israel outside of the Bible and is one of the most important discoveries ever made in biblical archaeology. The inscription reads in part:
The Great Ones are prostrate, saying: “Peace”;
Not one raises his head among the Nine Bows.
Plundered is Thehenu; Khatti is at peace;
Canaan is plundered with every evil;
Ashkelon is conquered;
Gezer is seized;
Yano’am is made non-existent;
Israel is laid waste, his seed is no more;
Kharu has become a widow because of Egypt;
All lands together are at peace;
Any who roamed have been subdued.
The inscription, and its interpretation, has fueled decades of scholarly debates. At the very least, it shows that the Exodus (if it actually occurred) must have taken place by 1207 BCE, since an entity (or people) called “Israel” was present in the land of Canaan by that date.
By the time of Petrie’s excavations, additional expeditions to explore the Holy Land were being organized. These explorations were not sponsored by museums such as the Louvre or the British Museum, which undertook excavations in other places in the Near East including the area that is now modern Iraq. Rather, like the PEF, they were sponsored by quasi-national scientific associations such as the Deutscher Verein zur Erforschung Palästinas (DPV)— the German Society for the Exploration of Palestine—which were an extension of imperialistic political movements on the part of the European nations anticipating the demise of the Ottoman Empire’s authority in the region. The concept was simple, as the British had previously figured out; if the Ottoman Empire were to collapse, the European countries that already had a presence or interest in Palestine would have the best claim to the territory. “Biblical explorations,” including mapping expeditions and preliminary excavations, provided the best excuse—and cover story—for establishing a presence in the area.
One large-scale excavation—quite likely with such imperialistic underpinnings—was undertaken from 1903 to 1905 by the American-born Austrian archaeologist Gottlieb Schumacher, at the site of Megiddo. Known today as the site where biblical Armageddon—the penultimate battle between good and evil—is to take place, as described in the New Testament (Rev. 16:16), Megiddo has been excavated by four different expeditions, of which Schumacher’s was the first.
His excavations at Megiddo were conducted on behalf of the DPV and sponsored by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had visited Jerusalem and the Holy Land in 1898. Unfortunately, Schumacher’s methods left much to be desired from a technical point of view, although he did make a number of important discoveries, including the graves of presumed royalty from the second millennium BCE and an inscribed seal belonging to a servant of Jeroboam, one of the kings of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.
Like Heinrich Schliemann, who excavated at Troy in northwestern Turkey just a few decades before (1870–90), Schumacher decided the best way to attack the seventy-foot-tall mound of Megiddo was to employ hundreds of local workmen to dig a huge trench that cut across, and deep into, the entire mound. Portions of the great trench can still be seen today. Just as Schliemann dug right through the level of Priam’s Troy for which he had been searching, so Schumacher missed much at Megiddo, including a fragment from an inscription erected at the site by Pharaoh Sheshonq (the biblical Shishak) after his capture of Megiddo ca. 925 BCE. Schumacher’s workmen threw the inscribed fragment out on the spoil heap, where it lay among other discarded rocks from dissembled walls until later found and retrieved by the next set of excavators, those from Chicago, in 1925.
Despite the crudity of his excavation methodology, Schumacher was a skilled draftsman with a decent eye for stratigraphy, who created good plans of the remains that he uncovered at Megiddo. Although he published his architectural and stratigraphical discoveries quite promptly, in 1908, it would take another twenty years before the small finds from Schumacher’s excavations were published by another German scholar, Carl Watzinger, who is perhaps better known for co-directing his own excavations at the site of Jericho from 1907 to 1909 and again in 1911.
Other excavations were undertaken in this period by the Irish archaeologist Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister on behalf of the PEF. Macalister dug at a number of sites from 1898 to 1909, but his excavation at the site of biblical Gezer, conducted in 1902–05 and 1907–09, was one of the largest in Palestine at the time. Unfortunately, Macalister was the only actual archaeologist working at the site, alongside four hundred workmen and an Egyptian foreman. He dug fast and carelessly, failing to record the precise find spots of most of the objects that he recovered. He apparently did understand stratigraphy, which had been introduced only a decade earlier by Petrie, but was more interested in ancient daily life than in strict chronological ordering. He did not have as much regard for either pottery or stratigraphy as Petrie did, and subsequent work by later archaeologists showed that he had missed much at the site, including misidentifying the age of the Iron Age entrance gate by nearly a thousand years.
Not surprisingly, although he di
d circulate his results quickly— three large volumes within three years of finishing the excavations—Macalister’s publications on his work at Gezer were somewhat lacking. He did, however, successfully excavate a Canaanite “High Place” (a raised altar or hilltop shrine) at the site, which dates back to the Middle Bronze IIB period, ca. 1600 BCE, and consists of ten large standing stones with possible evidence of animal sacrifice. He also found the so-called Gezer Calendar at the site, in 1908. This is an inscription written in paleo-Hebrew (the earliest known version of Hebrew) or possibly Phoenician that probably dates to the tenth century BCE. It describes the principal agricultural activities conducted during the year and thus provides an insight into life during biblical times. It reads: “Two months of ingathering, two months of sowing, two months of late sowing, one month of chopping flax, one month of barley harvest, one month of harvest and completion, two months of grape cutting, one month of summer fruits.”
In direct contrast to Macalister, though excavating at approximately the same time, was George Reisner of Harvard University, whom Macalister reportedly detested. Reisner had begun his archaeological career in 1902 excavating in Egypt and the Sudan, especially in the royal cemeteries of Giza, but in 1908–10 he was appointed to lead the excavation of Samaria in Palestine.
4. Reproduction of the Gezer Calendar, found by R. A. S. Macalister at Gezer, Israel, in 1908. Written most likely in paleo-Hebrew and dating to the tenth century BCE, the inscription describes the principal agricultural activities conducted during the year.
Samaria had served as the capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel during the period of the Divided Monarchy in the first millennium BCE, after the territory ruled by David and Solomon had been split in two following Solomon’s death ca. 930 BCE.
Since Reisner had previous commitments for 1908, the director of the team for the first season was Schumacher, who was just a few years removed from excavating at Megiddo. However, Reisner was able to direct the dig for the following two seasons and did a much better job than Schumacher. The team of workmen used at Samaria was almost as large as that used by Macalister at Gezer, usually numbering about two hundred but occasionally rising to as many as four hundred fifty, but the difference lay in the staff. Reisner had assembled a good team, including Clarence Fisher, an architect who would later work at Beth Shean and Megiddo, and they were able to control the workmen and methodically record the finds, both architecture and small objects.
Reisner was well aware of the processes that had created the man-made mounds such as Megiddo and the remains on top of rocky hilltop sites such as Samaria. He saw his mission at the site as an attempt to untangle the human history that lay beneath his feet and ordered early on that one trench be dug as a probe all the way down to bedrock, so that they would have some idea of the complexity of the site and the various strata that they could expect to encounter in other trenches to be dug.
Reisner’s documentation of his archaeological excavations and discoveries was more meticulous even than that kept by Petrie and far more than the records kept by Macalister. He was one of the first archaeologists to note that in excavating a site, the archaeologist also destroys it. There is one chance, and one chance only, to excavate any one part of a site. Thus, proper recording was considered essential. Although Reisner was not quick to publish and the results of his excavations at Samaria did not appear until 1924, some fourteen years after the completion of the excavations, they were well done, with good descriptions, beautiful photographs, and understandable architectural plans that can still be used today.
In 1914, just before World War I broke out, the Palestine Exploration Fund hired T. E. Lawrence to conduct an archaeological survey in southern Palestine. Better known today to the general public as “Lawrence of Arabia,” from the 1962 biographical film starring Peter O’Toole, Lawrence was an Oxford-trained archaeologist, receiving his degree in 1910. By the time he was hired by the PEF, he had already excavated at Byblos in what is today Lebanon, at Carchemish in what is now northern Syria, and with Petrie in Egypt.
In less than two months, Lawrence and his companion, Leonard Woolley (who would later go on to fame in his own right as the excavator of Ur in Iraq and be knighted for his efforts), managed to survey and record many of the archaeological remains, from all periods, visible in the Negev desert and the Wadi Arabah, all the while ostensibly searching for biblical sites and tracing old caravan routes in an area which the Bible refers to as the “Wilderness of Zin.” Unknown to most others, though, was that the archaeological survey was actually a cover for a British military mapping operation, concerned with the overland routes that an invading Ottoman army might take to reach Egypt in the event of war. Military matters aside, Lawrence and Woolley’s report of their archaeological findings, titled The Wilderness of Zin, was published by the PEF in 1915 and is still used by scholars today; a reprint with a new preface and additional historical material was made available by the PEF in 2003.
By the time World War I ended, biblical archaeology had been transformed from its earliest beginnings, especially through the efforts of men like Petrie and Reisner. However, the discipline was still essentially in its infancy and would soon be transformed once again.
Chapter 3
The interwar period: square holes in round tells
After World War I, Petrie returned to Palestine from Egypt and continued excavating at a number of sites until the 1920s. By this time, he had been eclipsed to a certain degree by new faces and a new chapter in the field of biblical archaeology. This was the period of the British Mandate, during which the British authorities created the first Department of Antiquities in Palestine. At approximately the same time, the British organized the first Department of Antiquities in Jordan and, in the final years of the Mandate, constructed the Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem to house all of the finds that had been made to date.
During this period, universities began to replace, or at least to challenge, national organizations in the sponsorship of excavations in the Holy Land. In part this was because many of the new archaeologists working during this period taught at universities, colleges, or seminaries. Frequently their teaching careers and archaeological careers went hand in hand, as they sought proof in the field for their theological beliefs and for their classroom and professional presentations and interpretations of the biblical account. Since these professors taught during the school year, year-round excavations ceased to be the norm and were replaced by excavations conducted primarily during the summers, although there were significant exceptions, such as the site at Megiddo.
This trend has continued to the present day and most foreign archaeologists who work in the area have their home base in either a university or a museum, and excavate during the summers. Many local archaeologists are also professors or curators, although a large number work in governmental establishments such as the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Jordanian Department of Antiquities.
It was in the 1920s that William Foxwell Albright, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, first came to prominence, beginning a decades-long domination of the field of biblical archaeology, including training some of the leading archaeologists, epigraphers, and biblical scholars of the next generation. He is a complex figure—an exemplary excavator, a careful scientist, and a devout Methodist. Albright is frequently referred to as the “dean of biblical archaeology,” in part because of the sheer quantity of his writings, the large number of graduate students whom he trained, and his insistence that the Bible was essentially correct, from a historical point of view, and that archaeology could be used to prove it.
Although this is something of an oversimplification of his beliefs, especially since his opinions changed over the decades, Albright was responsible for laying the scholarly groundwork and maintaining the academic integrity of this still-young intellectual discipline. For instance, in large part because of Albright’s publications and influence, the first true attempts to divide the history of the
Holy Land into proper and discernable archaeological periods were begun. In his publication of Tell el-Hesi several decades earlier, Petrie had referred to the Early, Middle, and Later Jewish Periods. Similarly, when Macalister published the results of his excavations at Gezer in 1912, he classified his finds in terms of a Pre-Semitic and First through Fourth Semitic Periods. In 1922, however, Albright met with three other scholars to devise a proper archaeological chronology—one that took advantage of the so-called Three Age System of classification invented by the Danish scholar C. J. Thompson nearly a century earlier, e.g., the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. In the subsequent publication of his excavations conducted at Tell Beit Mirsim (1932), Albright used the new terminology for essentially the first time in a publication concerned with biblical archaeology, further subdividing each of the major periods as necessary. For example, the Bronze Age was divided into the Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Ages, with each of those periods then being subdivided again in turn. Refinement of these periods still continues today (see table 2).
In conducting his research, Albright relied upon a combination of archaeological excavation, textual analysis, and biblical exegesis (a close reading of the text), which is an approach that many still use today. Simply stated, he used the data found during excavations in conjunction with both the biblical text and extrabiblical inscriptions to formulate his conclusions. In so doing, he and his students had to master not only the techniques of archaeology but a number of ancient languages as well, including Hebrew, Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Hittite. His excavations at the site of Tell Beit Mirsim were exemplary, employing Petrie’s ideas of stratigraphy and pottery typology/seriation in a fashion not seen before.