« Δημοκρατία -- in the etymological sense | Main | Tar baby »

A hot town in the old time

By Michael J. Smith on Monday July 12, 2010 08:25 PM

This just in:

A tiny clay fragment - dating from the 14th century B.C.E. - that was found in excavations outside Jerusalem's Old City walls contains the oldest written document ever found in Jerusalem, say researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The find, believed to be part of a tablet from a royal archives, further testifies to the importance of Jerusalem as a major city in the Late Bronze Age...

.... Details of the discovery appear in the current issue of the Israel Exploration Journal.

Excavations in the Ophel have been conducted by Dr. Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology. Funding for the project has been provided by Daniel Mintz and Meredith Berkman of New York, who also have provided funds for completion of the excavations and opening of the site to the public by the Israel Antiquities Authority, in cooperation with the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and the Company for the Development of East Jerusalem. The sifting work was led by Dr.Gabriel Barkay and Zachi Zweig at the Emek Zurim wet-sieving facility site.

... the script is of a very high level, testifying to the fact that it was written by a highly skilled scribe that in all likelihood prepared tablets for the royal household of the time, said Prof. Wayne Horowitz , a scholar of Assyriology at the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology.

Rrrright. Somebody should write a book -- if it hasn't already been written -- about the politics of archaeology in the Promised Land. A good deal of money seems to be spent there on grubbing up potsherds and ossuaries and sad old bones, all of which goes to show, supposedly, that the thieving conquerors really belong.

I especially love the bit about the "high-level" script. No clumsy cuneiform in Jerusalem, already a hip and happening town fourteen centuries before the Unfortunate Misunderstanding.

Comments (5)

Reading Sand's "Invention..." right now. He demolishes the political archeology premise. Worth a read.

RedPhillip:

One is immediately reminded of those 'finds' from a few years ago that purported to offer evidence of King David and the historical Jesus. Forgeries, of course.

Saxo:

Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (U. of Chicago Press, 2001)

Dig this fascist art I encountered last night:

http://artfulgoods.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/smokin-obama/

Obama as tired worker/beatnik. Sick shit.

slk:

John Rose's The Myths of Zionism also does a decent job of debunking the claims of Zionist archaeologists:


In October 1999, Herzog summarized their discoveries in a sensational article in the magazine of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz ('Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho', Ha'aretz Magazine, 29 October 1999: 6-8). In the article, Herzog described how what he calls the 'crisis stage' in Israeli archaeology has matured in recent years. He described it as nothing less than a scientific revolution. It is a process well known to all research scientists familiar with the dynamic of scientific break through:

"A crisis stage is reached when the theories within the framework of the general thesis are unable to solve an increasingly large number of anomalies. The explanations become ponderous and inelegant, and the pieces do not lock together...

"This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David &: Solomon described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom... (Ha'aretz, 29 October, 1999)"

In other words, no Abraham, no Moses, no Joshua; David and Solomon at best pagan tribal chieftains.

Masada, a tourist trap for George W. Bush, on his last visit to Israel is also a myth:


Why did the archaeologists involved, all scientifically trained scholars, ignore scientific evidence in favor of a version of history that now appears to be largely a myth? The answer is the focus of this intriguing study, which looks not only at Masada, but at the whole issue of deception in science and the social construction of knowledge. Ben-Yehuda considers the larger question of how society creates the symbolic moral boundaries between truth and deception, as well as the subtle interplay of science, politics, and ideology.

Post a comment

Note also that comments with three or more links may be held for "moderation" -- a strange term to apply to the ghost in this blog's machine. Seems to be a hard-coded limitation of the blog software, unfortunately.

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on Monday July 12, 2010 08:25 PM.

The previous post in this blog was Δημοκρατία -- in the etymological sense.

The next post in this blog is Tar baby.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Creative Commons License

This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Powered by
Movable Type 3.31