ridge toward Rosh Ha'Ayin, closer to Tel
Aviv called Izbet Sartah, which is a lovely site excavated by Israel Finkelstein in the 80s, which is a big central four-room house with a beautiful
pavement. It's surrounded by a ring of smaller buildings and then a whole bunch
of pits between, in the spaces in between. Why do you need all the pits?
Generally, when you have pits like this, and now we're pretty sure they're for
the storage of grain, it's because things are insecure. You're afraid that
somebody's gonna come and take your grain, so you hide it in pits. And even if
the enemy comes and takes 80% of your grain, you still have some of it left
that they didn't find. And this is, once again, one of these archetypal aspects of
the settlements. These small settlements in the hill country, together with the
collared rim pithoi, lots and lots of pits like this, in this case, surrounding a
very large building that looks like that typical four-room house. Here's one way
that it could be reconstructed. There's a bit of argument about this. Some people think
there's a courtyard in the middle, the lowest floor was for animals, sheep and
goats. The sheep and goats also kept the building warm in the
winter from their heat. Others, professor Larry Stager, for example, who
used to be here, claimed that the houses were completely roofed over and that
there were no open spaces that would be too muddy and too much exposure to the
elements. Today his approach is considered
preferable, but they're still both in the literature. Here's the open courtyard
version. So this is another one of those aspects of so-called Israelite
settlement in the hill country. This kind of house becomes totally normative for
domestic architecture in the later Iron Age also. When you read about houses in
the biblical text, the Book of Kings for example, or the prophets, they're talking
about houses like this: the four-room or quadripartite house was the typical
house. If it was in the countryside, it was big. If it was in the city, it was
small. Izbet Zartta also has one of the earliest examples of the alphabetic
script. This dates to probably the late 11th or 10th century BC. It's what we
call an abecedary, which means it has the ABC on it. If you go over here, let's say,
right over, let's see where should we start? We're
missing the alef, there's the alef, is right there. There's
a bet, dalet, hei, hei is there, vav, etc. You have a b c d e etc. This is one of
the earliest examples. It starts from the letter here and it goes all the way to
the end. This is the tav which becomes, in Latin, the T. It already looks like a T.
This dates to about a thousand BC. You can also go the other direction. You can
start over here alef, beit, gimel, dalet, you can go both ways. What is this thing
doing here? Who would be using something like that?
It's somebody who's learning how to write. This is a student scribe. There are
a few more like this. So this is a period when there are people who know how to
read and write. It's not illiterate and they're not using the old scripts of the
surrounding civilizations. They're not using Egyptian hieroglyphics and they're
not using cuneiform. This is a new kind of script. It's been around for a while,
but it's not normative and it's not official. It's what the common folk use.
The population density of the heartland where that's colored in white. Shechem and
Shiloh is in the center of the country. This is the archeology speaking here.
These are where most of these settlements are and this coincides with
the biblical text to a large extent. A lot of the descriptions that we have in
Joshua, Judges, and Samuel take place in that area in the biblical text and the
hatched area to the north and the south are less densely populated but there are
settlements there as well. When we look at the oscillations of settlements that
work figured by Finkelstein in the 1980s, we find that there is a fairly low
settlement intensity in the earlier periods in the middle Bronze Age. It goes
way up and then it drops way down. In the Late Bronze Age there's almost nothing.
And then in the early Iron Age period that we're talking about mostly, it goes
way up once again back to the levels of the middle Bronze Age. So there is this
tremendous spurt of settlement circa 1200-1150 BCE and one of the things that
we scholars have tried to answer is what is the explanation for this spurt of
settlement that includes these material culture features that I showed you just
before. Why does this happen? Well, the biblical, traditional biblical
interpretation would be sure, the Israelites crossed the Jordan River and
came into the land and they settled. They couldn't settle other places because the
Canaanites and the other peoples wouldn't let them. So they went to the
old country. That was the narrative until about 30 years ago. This is Mount Ebal,
above Nablus, above Shechem, where Adam Zertal
excavated in the late 70s and 80s, what is clearly a ritual installation, despite
some naysayers. It looks something like this in reconstruction. All around it
there are lots of pits containing burnt and slaughtered animal remains.
All of them are kosher: sheep, goat, cows, no pork, and boar do live in the hill
country here. So that this is it's completely fixated on the taboo, the pork
taboo, it's all kosher and these animals have been slaughtered and they're being
eaten here and there is this what looks very much like a sort of altar or at
least a focusing place where people would gather and carry out ritual meals.
So there's that. At this place of Mount Nebo,
on the other hand, we have earlier material, which is Late Bronze Age,
including a scarab seal from that belongs to Ramses II or Ramses III,
so that would be the time frame, 1250 or 1150, between those dates, together with a
typical Late Bronze Age cooking pot, so this is actually a little earlier. This
is not starting when it you would expect it to start with the entrance of the
land according to the biblical chronology—it's a bit earlier. But there
is this ritual place up there in the hill country where the biblical texts
suggest it should be. Now one of the historical documents that is critical
for our discussion here is the Merneptah stone, which was found in Karnak in Egypt
many, many years ago. And its translation led to the identification of the
earliest mention of Israel that we know of, and we're talking about 1207 BC.
There's Israel right there. The Egyptians didn't really have an "L" so they're
the L sound becomes an R sound and that's led to some difficulty in
argument, but basically that's the word Israel. It starts on the right, Is-ra-el,
and when you have the two figures with the three lines underneath them, that's
what's called an Egyptian, a determinative, that means it's a people, a
group of people. So we know there's a group of people that are called Israel, and they're a group of people and, according to their place in the sequence
of geographical names that are mentioned, it pretty much looks like it's situated
in the central hill country of Israel. As you can see, it's Ashkelon, Gezer
Yano'am, you're going from south to north. If you're looking at it from an
Egyptian perspective, and then Israel. Israel is laid waste and his seed is not.
The Egyptians totally decimated Israel and there's no more Israel. Obviously,
that, it was an overstatement. So if we are going to summarize the various
interpretations of this data for the origins of Israel using the archaeology
in tandem with the text, the earliest interpretation was the
rapid conquest model that is laid out in the biblical text. Scholars like Albright,
Yadin, and most recently Ben-Tor have championed this view that the text
itself shouldn't be doubted and maybe some nuances are off but basically the
narrative in the Bible is pretty much what happened. Later, somewhat later
interpretation, suggested looking more at Bedouins surrounding us and looking at
earlier narratives from the Genesis and things like that, but the Israelite
conquests of the hill country was actually a gradual affair. There was an
infiltration of Bedouin- type elements from the east and the
south that settled in the hill country and this was the German viewpoint that
was adopted also by the Israeli scholar Aharoni. And there was a lot of argument
between these two schools. Later on, starting in the 50s, but especially in
the 60s and 70s with the popularity of Marxist interpretations, Mendenhall and
then Gottwald said actually what is between the lines in the biblical text
and what we're seeing in the archaeology because it's a lot of the finds are
similar to the Canaanite culture in the lowlands, is that this was actually a
peasant revolt and people migrated into the hill country to get away from the
oppressive rulers of the lowlands. And the bible does have memories of this, but
they sort of put a spin on it for political reasons. The 4th theory that
has become much more popular of late is that this wave of new settlements in the
hill country actually represents nomads who always had lived there, but when they
were nomads they didn't leave enough material culture to be able to identify
them archaeologically. And once it was critical for them to establish sedentary
settlements, because of the collapse of empires all around, then they started
building buildings adopting an old kind of pot, the collared rim jar that they
copied from middle Bronze Age ruins and they started making pits and terraces
and these are sedentarizing nomads. And that's why we suddenly see them because
they had to settle down. And this is still, I think now, the most current
explanation that a lot of people go by. One other variant of the previous
two is the ruralizing peasants theory that Larry stager most recently
championed and it makes a lot of sense also. And that is that people who no
longer had access to land, started going into the hills perhaps being encouraged
to do so and started making terraces and pits and this was not about
rebellion so much as just the need to expand the agricultural potential that
was limited in the lowlands. So these are pretty much the five existing theses at
this point in time and if you read through the books that I showed you
before, this is pretty much the narrative you'll get. Right now the last two are
the most popular interpretations of the archaeological data to explain this
rapid establishment to settlements in the hill country. Now we get to the
Egyptians. What about the Egyptians? So let's do just a brief review of how
Egyptian rule administered itself in its conquered territories in its province. It
wasn't actually a colony, it was a province in Canaan. This is our big picture of the
empires of the region at the time. Initially the Egyptians, after
having ejected Asiatics who actually controlled the northern part of Egypt in
the late 16th century BC, they themselves began a program of razzias, raids,
conquest, plunder into Canaan, into the southern Levant. They had a minimal
presence in certain places, probably in places like Gaza, Jaffa, Megiddo perhaps,
but not much beyond that, and the idea was just to plunder. Take a bunch of
cattle, take slaves, take some firewood, and then go back home. And make sure that
the people that are there know that if they don't send olive oil and wine, which
were the big products and the necessary, the necessities, that Egypt required, they
were gonna send another plunder expedition. That was the motif. It worked
sort of, not great. Phase two of Egyptian role, rule, in the 14th century BC was a
period of introversion, the el-Amarna period. I'm sure you've heard lectures
about this here at the Oriental Institute. A period when the king. when
King Akhenaten, adopted a new religion in a political attempt to shift
the power from the Amun priests and their holdings and to recentralize
authority and control with the king. This, and he built a new capital, a place
called el-Amarna, and there's a whole correspondence associated with that,
including letters from Canaan. From those letters that you've seen, the lower right
hand picture, we know that things were falling apart. That Egypt did not have
good control and the petty princes, the vassal kings, warring, were warring
against each other and it was a catastrophe. Akhenaten, Tutankhamun,
were, that dynasty ended. That was the end of the eighteenth dynasty.
Horemheb stages a coup d'etat and a new phase is embarked upon. But I would say
call phase three of Egyptian rule, when Egyptian power is reasserted in the
nineteenth dynasty. And here we're talking about the thirteenth, twelfth
centuries BC. At this time there are two big empires which are the superpowers of
the time who are, for the most part, at a standoff, but they're constantly
jockeying for power and the zone between them is the place of conflict. Various
vassal kingdoms and petty princes are shifting alliances. The Egyptians are
very worried about this and that is when Ramesses II, first Seti I and then Ramesses II, embark on a rearmament program. A new capital is built in the delta at Pi-Ramesses
in the delta area, as you see down on the bottom, as a staging point to
reassert control over the north. And it is essential to bring the southern
Levant, Canaan, under control as well and not have all these brigands and petty
kings fighting with each other because they have to make sure that the Egyptian
crown can maintain its authority in its holdings. And the Hittites are a big
problem. Of course this all ends up with a great battle that takes place at a
place called Kadesh on the Orontes River in Syria.
And according to the inscriptions in Egypt there are several of them, this one
is from the Ramesseum, guess who won? The Egyptians won, of course. But there's also
a Hittite version to the treaty that resulted from this war and, according to
the Hittite version, they won. But the additional text tells us that there are
agreements, the spheres of influence are delineated and wives are exchanged, the
daughters of the kings are exchanged, and marriage ensues and trade relations
ensue and all of this rancor and all of this danger with this treaty recedes. And
everybody knows what their, where their place is,
and things are much better for a while. And this leads the Egyptians then to
make sure that their control over the province of Canaan, Retjenu, as it was
called, at least partly, is secure. And what do they do? They start establishing
footholds, administrative centers, at lots of different places, lots of different
places, throughout the land of Canaan. One of the most important and best excavated
is at Tel Beit She'an. The University of Pennsylvania and then Hebrew University.
The Tel we're talking about, not the classic city below, where we have, for
example, the administrative buildings that are very Egyptian in character,
especially the one on the upper left. That is a typical 13th-12th century
Egyptian administrative building. It actually looks like a big Egyptian house
with a central courtyard, two columns and lots of rooms around it. At Beit She'an we
also have inscriptions of all of the kings from Seti I onwards. So
here we have Seti I, we have a stone, an inscription from Ramesses III,
and they're all there until a certain point in time. So it's very clear—
here's that house once again it's been reconstructed—if you go to Beit She'an
don't go in the summer, but if you go in the winter it's a very interesting visit
with a great view all around. So here is the Egyptian governor's residence and
it's a typical governor's residence and Beit She'an also has an extensive Egyptian material culture, for example, Egyptian
razor blades. They're not razors for shaving the faces [but] for cutting hair, I'm
pretty sure. Egyptian pottery, the key here is that this pottery is not
imported, it's manufactured on-site—in other words, Egyptian potter's, people who
have the motor skills and the knowledge of Egyptian forms and forming, are
resident at Beit She'an. So there are Egyptians at this place of
all different kinds. People providing services and especially soldiers and
administrators. At Tel Dan where I work we have tents of cooking pots, which are
Egyptian. They're totally foreign to the local repertoire and suddenly in the, at
the very end of the Late Bronze Age, circa 1200 BC, we have lots of these
cooking pots, more than any than all the other sites in Israel put together.
Cooking pots of all things, go figure. There's a story here, I don't want to get
into it right now, but it's interesting in and of itself. Governors' residences like the one at Beit She'an are found on in the Gaza Strip at
Deir al-Balah. And here's a model of one at Tel Afek, which is at the source of
the Yarkon River not far from Tel Aviv. Here's a model that the Israel Museum
commissioned a few years ago. There's also a lot of Egyptian elements in the
cult. Here's an Egyptian-style temple at Tel Lachish in the Shfela. You can see
Egyptian-style column bases in the back and that staircase. There's a temple that
is identical to this at Deir el-Medina, the workers' village, in Thebes in Egypt—
identical. And Egyptian religious motifs, like the Hathor fertility goddess motif
with the lotus flowers, are also present in the iconography of Canaanite cult.
Even if we go way far south, just north of Eilat to the copper mines of Timna, we
have a number of cartouches of the symbols of Egyptian kings
engraved in the stone at Timna. Here's one from Ramses III and we go up
to Ramses V here, I believe, or IV and then there are no more. At
Beit She'an and at Deir al-Balah we also have cemeteries with Egyptian-style
coffins. These are typical of the period in Egypt, especially in the Delta area,
but this particular coffin is a bit strange because of the headdress. That
you would not find in a typical Egyptian coffin. That's something weird. And what
most of us think is that it is, in fact, that's a tip, those are the typical
Egyptian coffins that you would find in Deir al-Balah or in the Delta. But this
one looks like that kind of guy. Anybody recognize him? He's probably a Philistine.
That's a Philistine headdress. We know them from wall reliefs in Egypt, where
they're called Pereshtu—Philistines. So here we have an Egyptian coffin with a
guy, with an interred individual that maybe has a Philistine ethnic
identification. There's a some kind of hybridization going on here. This is
something that Louise Hitchcock and Aaron Mayer have written about
extensively and we see this in this coffin. And there's lots of other
examples of similar things. So Beit She'an has this in there too. And this is
already getting to what I want to get at. That it's not just Egyptians, there's a
bunch of hybridization going on here of different kinds. I'll get to that more in
a bit. Let's move north to Tel Dan again, where I excavate. There's a little bird
that belongs to a bowl that looks like this: here's a complete one from Tel
Qasile. Tel Qasile is a site on the Yarkon River right next to the
Mediterranean. It was a Philistine port. It has lots and lots of painted bi-chrome Philistine pottery and it has a Philistine temple in it and it has a
bowl just like this and, lo and behold at Tel Dan one of these bowls exists as
well. Are there Philistines at Tel Dan? At
Tel Dan we also have a seal that's a Cypriot seal. You will never find this
kind of seal in Israel, at least not in the hill country. You might find it on
the coast in one or two cases at Ashdod in a Philistine site. But at Dan we have a
Cypriot-style seal. I think this is probably a seal that replicates a loom
weight, a Cypriot loom weight, and it was used to seal packages of textiles, but that's another thing I don't want to get into right now. These
kind of pithoi, we talked about the collared-rim pithoi. we have lots of them
at Tel Dan, but we have these also in their hundreds, tens of complete vessels
like this. My predecessor, Avraham Biran, called it
the Galilean pithos. But you know what? That pithos form with the broad
mouth and the handles on the shoulders is exactly the same kind of pithos
we find in huge numbers in Cyprus and at Ugarit, on the Syrian coast, and in Tyre. This is a maritime pithos—of a Cypriot type and it's being manufactured
by potters living at Tel Dan in this period. Just
when we have the birds and we have all the other stuff. Here we have a little
figurine head from Tel Dan. This is probably part of what's called an Ashdoda figurine—a Philistine female figurine. You can tell she's female, I
hope. Some people think this is a birthing goddess. A goddess that is
supposed to help women give birth. And that's probably a birthing
stool, which is much better than what we do in hospitals today. We also have a
Mycenaean-style mourning figurine, I wish it was complete, but it's, there's no
doubt, there are all kinds of ritual elements here that go to Greece, that go
to Cyprus, that go to the eastern Mediterranean maritime zone,
at Tel Dan, which is an inland site. We also have this little sanctuary with a
little Holy of, Holy of Holies, with a
model silo sanctuary and a few other ritual items in it. And this looks very
much like a whole bunch of temples that we find on the coast at Tel Qasile, but
also at Cyprus at Enkomi, Kition, Phylakopi in the Greek Peloponnese islands,
the Cycladic islands, excuse me. This is, in my estimation, this is a Sea People
sanctuary. Maybe not Philistine, but it's something
that brings a, that comes to us from the, from the West,
from the maritime zone of the eastern Mediterranean. So why are there so many
elements of Sea People material culture in Egyptian control centers like Tel Den,
like Beit She'an, there's also a bunch of Megiddo. Why are there so many of them
here? And might these be connected to the four-room house in some way, the collared-rim pithoi in the central hill country and these sites that are located in the
central hill country? Now let's remember that the Merneptah stone mentions Israel
as a belligerent force. They are not friendlies. And Merneptah left this
victory inscription as a result of a punitive expedition to reassert
authority circa 1207 BC. So the Israelites that are mentioned here for
the first time are not friendly to the Egyptians—they are dangerous.
And that's part of the key here. And let us then also remember that the markers
of Israelite settlement, those houses and the collared-rim pithoi on the right,
happen at exactly the time when the Egyptians have reasserted their control
after the battle at Kadesh when there are still Egyptians in the Land of
Israel in Canaan. This is when the Israelites are mentioned, the Egyptians
are still there. Now here this is a place to point something out: think about the
biblical text, the story of the conquest of Israel.
Think of Joshua. Think of Judges. Where's Egypt? Nothing, nada, it's missing.
You would think that if it was a story that was contemporaneous with political
and geopolitics, you would, Egypt would be there, but they're not.
Nadav Na'aman, famous Israeli historian, suggests that the biblical texts—the writers, were writing this down 500 years later. They just forgot that the
Egyptians were still there. And what was important was the exodus narrative and
the conquest of the land. They just didn't bother with the Egyptians already
being there. I don't know. I'm not convinced. So there is this contemporaneity that we have to deal with in our interpretation. Collared
green pithoi occur in great numbers not so much not not just in the hill country,
where there are these small fragmented settlements and you have fragments of
collared-rim pithoi, they're found in great numbers in places
like Tel Dan, which was an Egyptian control center, they're found in the
hundreds at Tel Megiddo, excavated by the University of Chicago. You also find
quite a few at Beit She'an, and at Aphek, in Lachish—some of them have gone
unidentified, by the way. The excavators weren't expecting to find collared-rim
pithoi, so when they found pithoi, they were just pithoi—they were not collared-rim pithoi because that didn't fit the narrative. I
got news for you, archaeologists tend to find what they're looking for. So, collared-rim pithoi are found in their hundreds at Tel Dan. And I'm claiming that this
vessel form was actually introduced, not by the Israelites copying an old middle
Bronze Age form, I'm suggesting that they were introduced by the Egyptians. One of
the keys to this interpretation is that their volume is highly consistent. it
doesn't vary in the earlier contexts by more than seven percent. So this is a
standardized form that's being manufactured to a standardized volume in
order to provide, to allow for the provision of someone with standard
quantities. And that's why these vessels are located so much in Egyptian centers
like Tel Dan. Later on, in later levels, the consistency
of the standardization changes. It becomes, the variability becomes 15 per cent. Something happened. This needs to be checked a little bit more, we need more statistics,
but something happened to make the standardization dissipate. I'll get to
that in a second. So if these are Egyptian, why are they in such quantities
in the central hill—highlands? So about an hour ago, we were having dinner in the
Quadrangle Club and David Petraeus was giving a lecture there. And he probably
was talking about his Petraeus doctrine, so I'm going to talk about that right now too. The Egyptians, in order to establish control in this last phase of
Egyptian rule, decided that they needed to inundate the countryside with control
centers. They set up all these Egyptian residences in all these places that we
talked about before. And I just gave you a few of them—they're something
like 27 of them throughout the country. But part of this surge, this inundation,
was to settle the highlands and pacify the locals, the rebellious elements. Who
served in the Egyptian army? Egyptians liked living in Egypt. They didn't want to go
to the provinces. It was an adventure but, you know, you're, you're leaving the
fleshpots. The Egyptians had trouble drafting enough people to serve in their
administrative centers and they learned from hard experience that you could not
trust the locals. They tried that—14th century did not work out well.
What do you do? What did the Romans do? You go to whoever is willing to serve
and you offer payment and a prize at the end. If you are a Cypriot or a Hittite or
a Libyan or a Syrian, and your farm has been doing pretty well, you're not
going to inherit that land if you're the third or fourth son. The oldest
son is going to get it. And what also happens now is a critical event. Starting
around 1300 or so BC, we have a very clear episode of climatic desiccation.
There is climate change. It's real. We see it in archeology, we see it when we drill
cores into swamps and lake beds. We see that agriculture is drying up. There's
less pasture and we see that there is a crisis. Remember, this is a time when the
empires are collapsing. Egypt is contracting, the Mycenaeans
collapse, the Hittites fall—all in the 13th century. There's definitely a climate element going on here. Now we know it for sure because
we've tested in lots of different places and the patterns are recurring
throughout the eastern Mediterranean in the Middle East. So the farms are failing and
young men have nothing to do and they're starving. One of the things you can do if
you're an able-bodied young man is to go to Egypt and serve the Egyptian crown. And
they will send you to Canaan because nobody else wants to go there. You go
serve in an administrative centre in Canaan, be you a Cypriot or a Hittite
or a Syrian, and you're serving there and you're a soldier and you're a man. What
do men need? Wives. And where are you going to get a wife? From the locals. Now
the local people, for them it's not such a bad idea because if you have a local
soldier in your family you have what we call in Israel protectsia. You can
solve problems. If you have an argument with your neighbor, guess who's gonna win
that argument? So, and it's, you know, this is a patriarchal society in the 12th
century BC, 13th century BC, so women are an economic and political tool. So
women, a Canaanite woman, a local Danite woman, let's say, marries a Cypriot
serving the crown at Tel Dan and they have children. Now this guy is called,
he's called Jacob the Cypriot, he's just the Cypriot and his wife is a Danite.
What are their sons and daughters called? What is their attribution? What is their
group identification? They might be Cypriot, they might be just a Danite. They
could be all kinds of things. And this scenario replicates itself over and over
again. That, by the way, is why, in these control
centers like Beit She'an and Tel Dan, most of the cooking pots are local cooking
pots because, usually in traditional societies, anthropologists have done
research on this, about 90 percent of the time in traditional societies with
household modes of production women do the cooking. When it gets industrialized
then men get involved. But if you're finding mostly Canaanite-style cooking
pots in these places where Egyptians control the town, probably it's local
women doing the cooking which, by the way, it's very interesting that at Tel
Dan there's so many Egyptian cooking pots. I don't know what to do with that.
So the Egyptians, all these different people are serving the
Egyptian crown, they're soldiers and, at the end of their tour of duty, say
20 years, they get a reward. And what is the reward? Think of the Roman legions. You get land. And where do you get the land? Not where you want it, you get the land
where they tell you you get it. And the government will give you land where it
needs you to be. They send you to the to the frontier. They send you to the place
where you're needed, as eyes and ears for the administration.
And, as an added bonus, you will also be able to develop the agricultural
potential of the countryside and eventually provide more food and more
trade items for the centers down below and actually even for export to Egypt.
Always keep in mind that the products of the grape and the olive were critical to
Egypt. They could not raise good grape vines and olive trees—they could raise
them, they figured it out at some point, but it wasn't good. It was like, you know, when you buy bad wine and you say why did I buy this? So why did I buy
that Egyptian wine? I could have bought it from Canaan. This was critical
to the Egyptians to be able to have access to these agrarian products. And if
you could expand into the hill country and expand your ability to
provide this, it's a double—it's a win-win situation and for the veterans
and their families as well. So what I'm suggesting is that the Egyptians carried
out an additional surge by giving land grants to veterans who settled the hill
country. The collared-rim pithoi jars were established as a standard measure in
order to provide these homesteading families with start-up materials,
especially wine and oil, and perhaps startup grain, at the beginning.
Eventually the hope was that they would be able to produce the kinds of things
that would make it economically worthwhile. At the beginning, the hill
country did not produce olive oil and wine—not yet. That happened probably at
the end of the 11th century, 10th century, once the terraces started getting built
and once things calm down and once agreements were made. But in this phase,
when the Egyptian agents are settling the hill country, they are mostly
focusing on farming, grain farming, in the valley bottoms, raising, pastoralism, sheep
and goats, textiles, things like that. Later on they move over to the other agrarian
products. So this is my explanation for the settlement of the hill country,
which is distinctly not biblical. The Egyptian rule over Canaan ends probably
in the time of Ramses VI. His inscription, his cartouche, is the very
last one we have of the Egyptian New Kingdom. After that there's a big gap,
until we have others in monumental form, and it would appear that the Egyptians
basically left or abandoned their control, circa 1140 or so BC. My guess is
that those who wanted to leave, left. And the question is, once they left, who's
left? So if you are, let's say, a Hittite and
you've married a local woman and you've had children and they've had
children and they maybe call themselves Hittites
or maybe just Beit She'anites or something like that. You're not gonna go
anywhere—you're gonna stay. If you're an Egyptian, you were an Egyptian soldier,
and you married a local woman, you might think about going back to Egypt but, if
you're a third- or fourth-generation Egyptian, you might not even think of
Thebes or Saqqara or anything else or Pi Ramesses as your home. You're already
home. Where are you gonna go? And in any case, everything's in chaos at this point.
Twelfth century BC is chaos. We have the massive droughts, piracy, the empires have
collapsed. Everybody's looking out for their own
interests. You have nowhere to go—you're gonna stay there. The Egyptians—the
Egyptian cooking-pots appear in stratum 7 and Late Bronze Age, but they continue
all the way down to stratum 4B, circa 950 BC. There were Egyptians there
and they maintained their culinary practices for 200 years. They
maintained a sort of Egyptian identity. These people stayed. Just as a sort of sidebar, the Levites,
in the biblical text the priestly class, the Levites are quite curious and the
Bible gives us all kinds of hints as to who they are.
Moses and Aaron are Levites. The name Moses, the Bible gives us an
explanation for the name: [Hebrew]—to pull out of the water. You know the story
about how Pharaoh's daughter pulls him out of the Nile when he's a baby? But that's what we call an etiological explanation. It's a way of
explaining, well in Hebrew it's called midrashim, but the word "mes" means "son of": Thutmes Rammes, usually there's a theophoric element in the name—the name
of a god. The writers of this text actually didn't know his name. There may
have been a person of that, of Moses's, there maybe really was a Moses of one kind or
another, but all they knew to call him was Mes: Moses. The Levitic
priests, Hophni and Pinchas, those are Egyptian names and so are others are
probably also Kohath, Merari. All these Levitic names seem to be Egyptian and the big one is Miriam. What does Miriam mean? Merely it's a it's a distortion of
Meryamun, beloved of the God Amun. She's also a Levite. So the
Levites have a definite strong Levitic- Egyptian connection. Exactly how that works lots of people are now writing about. It's a hot topic right now so I won't go
into it any more but this, there's an Israelite tribe of priests that probably
came from Egypt. So, who were the Israelites? Some of them were really
Israelites. They're mentioned in the Merneptah Stele. There's a group of
people living in the hill country called Israelites, they're there. But
there are other peoples, too. For example, the Danites are probably the
Danauna, which are mentioned in the mortuary inscription, mortuary temple of
Ramesses III, as one of the Sea Peoples. They're also called Denyen. They may have come from Adana in southern Turkey. There is a Greek tribe called Danaeh. Perseus is a Danaeh. Remember Perseus and Andromeda? Where's the rock of Andromeda in the story? Next to Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. Who's
the most famous Danite? Samson, Samson. Think of Samson. What are his features?
He's really strong. He has long hair. He cavorts with women and Philistines.
What kind of Israelite judge is that? Samson is Hercules. He's a Greek hero. The Danites are Danaoi, they're a Greek tribe that migrated from the coast of
Turkey or Cyprus maybe. And it goes on. We have Egyptians, the Levites, and probably
all kinds of other ethnic groups that assimilated or acculturated. Think about
the biblical texts. Who is the general that David sends into battle to get
killed when he falls in love with Bathsheba? Uriah the Hittite, right? And in
Genesis there are Hittites, it's a guy named Ephron, who Abraham buys the Makhpelah Cave in order to bury his family. He's a Hittite. That's really important in
that story because he's a foreigner and the account of Abraham buying the tomb
plot from Uriah the Hittite—from Ephron the Hittite—is the text telling
us, yeah we were foreigners, we came here later, there were other people here
before us. But look, there's that Hittite guy who was here. He already had fields
and he had a tomb and we bought it with money for a contract. It's legit, it's
legal. He's a Hittite. Where did Hittites come
from? In the 13th century, 12th century, Hittites served the Egyptian crown. They
served in the army and they stayed there and they kept their ethnic identity for
a long time afterwards. He's that Hittite guy. And they were good
in military affairs and that's why Uriah was a general. And we could go on
and on with that but I won't. The Israelite settlement was initiated by
the Egyptians. Once the Egyptians left, things got complicated as they tend to
do. Security was a real issue. It was a struggle to subsist. Remember the drought,
the extended drought, affected Israel as well. The hill country is maybe a little
better off because there's a little more rainfall. This also is immigration and
refugees are a big part of this as well. The people that serve the Egyptian crown
that had stayed after the Egyptian administration left, they may have even
written to their relatives in Cyprus saying you should come here. We're at Tel
Dan. We have this terrific source of water, the source of the Jordan River,
great fields all around us. We're a bunch of warriors here. Join us. We need more
people. Come. And part of the immigration to the land of Israel, including in the
Philistine coastal plain, further south, may well be associated refugees that
came to join their brethren. when they knew there was a place to go. This is how
refugees work. You don't just come when you don't know anything. You have a
relative. Think of all the Hispanic people you know, who have made it good
here and done good things. They came because there was a pioneer, somebody who came 50 years ago, set up shop and then the family started coming. That's the way
migrants succeed in a new country. And it probably is the same in ancient Israel.
Once things start coalescing people are at each other's throats but eventually
they learn to make alliances. And part of all of this is also probably a religious
transformation because you have this big salad of all different kinds of
religious beliefs and cultic behaviors. And they're going to influence each
other and something is going to come out on top. Or at least there's going to be
some coagulation of different kinds of things into something that's a little
more mainstream. And I would suggest that the description in the biblical texts
of ancient Israelite religion, crystallizing at this time, actually
finds its echo in the archaeology as well. And that could be a whole other
lecture. I won't do it now but there's data to support that as well. And I would
also suggest that the book of Judges is a pretty accurate representation of what
the land of Israel looked like circa 1100 BC. The conflict, the charismatic
leaders that come up and then fail or succeed, and that eventually you need to
the nation coalesces in tribes initially, shifting alliances as we said.
Borders become established that are more clearly recognized and kingship is
established first with Saul then with David. Of course Samuel was made sure to
tell everybody are you sure you want a king? It's not always a good idea there's a downside. But they decided they want it and that was probably because
they, it was something that was needed at the time, because there was a big enemy
especially in the south, the Philistines, but again that's another subject. Thanks
very much. And we do have time for a few questions.
We do, OK. So, questions? Aside from grain, grinding grain, and
cooking, women would presumably, because I'd be with the kids most of the time
and suckling them, be the primary transmitters of culture. How would that
fit into your story? Sure, but I would suggest that that is one of those sort
of culture those kind of things that we say and it's not a hundred percent true.
I think that men do transfer culture also, especially if you're a macho guy and
you're a warrior. I mean your kids are gonna say my dad you know, you know And the
dads, you know, they don't talk very much they just go out and do stuff. And the
kids admire them and the mother says why, why, you know? He's not transmitting
culture. I'm actually being sort of serious in my
reply I don't, I don't think it's so, I think it's more balanced than that. Yeah but they were, they were getting things from both sides for sure. And probably they were
speaking the mother's language. And we see that in the archaeology. You saw the
abecedary. Everybody was adopting the Canaanite's language and the script,
those who knew how to read and write Yeah? I have a just A and B portions of
the question. Just in support of your, of you're pointing out that some of the Levi priests probably or possibly had some kind of Egyptian origin. There was a
book called the culture of ancient Egypt written by a professor from here, the University of Chicago, many decades ago. But in that book, which he presents two Psalms from
the Hebrew Psalms and compares them to some songs from Egypt or some writings
in each of it in that the correspondence is just astonishing. The word by word
the similarity so. And the B portion is, could you comment a little
bit about Cupid or master ah the work done on this tel in the, in the Manasa
tribal lands by Ralph Hawkins. Can you comment on that and
how what he found there in Khirbet el-Mastarah with, they couldn't identify the
above-ground structures, but when they dug deep in the trenches they can date them to the Iron Age One and he believes that they're not similar with
things that they found from the middle Bronze Age in that area so that leads
them to conclude that this could support the crossing of Joshua from the Jordan
River as described in Joshua 3:16. Thank you.
As far as the book of the Psalms go this has been recognized already for about 50
60 years. That a lot of, but the thing is that the Psalms may have been a later
addition to the Canon. So that it could be let's say a late Iron Age or Persian
period edition, when people were much more exposed to international languages
and literatures and it was adopted. So it could be a later edition and, at the same
time, it could also be early and that's not a surprise.
As far as the Hawkins excavations, we, Ralph Hawkins and I had a couple
discussions. Some, we were sort of coming at it from a completely different point
of view. It's not—when I point that out in certain places where the destruction
layers don't correspond with the biblical chronology, that doesn't mean to
say that nothing corresponds. There are a number of places, like Lachish, for
example, where there is a destruction layer where it should be in at the end
of the Late Bronze Age. So you're bound to find a few of them or many of them
even, that work with the biblical text. I'm looking at the ones that don't work,
especially those that are particularly prominent. And again when you do the good when you do good work archaeologically, you publish the data and then we can all
look at it and interpret it and have arguments in our conferences—that's the
fun. Professor, I was wondering how the material culture is created. How is the
work organized to make all those pots? And are these, what kind of homes are these? Does everybody have a home like that? And who does the work? Who makes the
swords, who makes the armory, stuff like that? Do you study that kind of thing? We're not a hundred percent sure. It's a good question actually. It seems that most of the work is done by the
extended family. You know, like the Amish build a house and have a barn-raising
ceremony. It's possible that some of that took place. It seems unlikely that
everybody knew how to build a building, a really good building, so probably there's
somebody around there who specializes in building and knows how to at least give
advice. It's—you probably don't hire outside workers to do the building for
you because that is just too expensive. And some places don't have four-room houses also. As far as pottery goes, when you're looking at smaller vessels—bowls, cooking
pots—in traditional societies usually it's women who do that. make the
pots, and this is something that's passed on from mother to daughter. And somebody before said that the woman is usually in the house with the children, which means
that certain activities are more confined to women in traditional
societies and that is cooking, grinding of flour, and taking care of children.
They're in the household, while you're doing these things, and making pottery
from time to time. When you get to the more sophisticated, very large vessels,
then it's specialized. And making collared pithoi requires a lot of knowledge
and experience. As far as we know from petrographic examination of the pottery
through the microscope, there looks, it looks like there are all together about
five centers of production in ancient Israel. And that probably means that
there are specialists who may be men, or maybe not just men, who are making the
pottery for the Egyptian crown and the pots are being sent to various places
wherever they are needed. And we have time for one final question.
Don't have to. I just, I'm just curious, has there been any genealogical studies
of either burials in that area from that time or current populations that can
trace back their genealogy to Cyprus or other parts of the Middle East to
confirm some of the conclusions of DNA? Yeah, so it's just beginning.
You know, in order for DNA to be viable you have to have collagen in the bone.
And if there's no collagen, then you can't do anything with it. There are some
examples of where collagen has been preserved. Here's the big problem with
burial of people. In the early Iron Age people stopped burying their dead. All
the Philistine sites from the 12th and 11th century BC, there are no cemeteries.
So, as my colleague Bill Deaver sometimes says, they died in the Iron Age and they
were buried in the Iron Age 2A. But, but something changed radically, so we
don't have the human bones to be able to analyze
them. And if we do have them, in the rare cases we do, a lot of times there's no
collagen left. One day, a hundred years from now, we'll be in a different place.
We are looking at animals and there has been some really interesting work on
pork, on pigs, from Philistine contexts. And the DNA from pigs in Philistia looks
like it comes from Europe. And in fact most of the pig population in Israel in
the Iron Age. where you do, wherever you have pigs, looks like it has markers for
European pigs. But that's about as much as we can say right now. During the
period of the Egyptian administration, how did they communicate with their
administrators? What language did they use? So we're not a hundred percent sure,
we're pretty sure they were using hieroglyphics on papyrus scrolls. This is
a research problem, my program I'm going to be doing this year trying to figure
out if there was papyrus in Israel that was being used and maybe that's why we
have so few documents because papyrus doesn't preserve. So probably it's mostly
by written missives but we also know that the Egyptians have a function
that's called the Runner—the messenger— who are running from place to place. By
now there's also horses, maybe they're being used, we don't know. And so this
combination of human means of transport and written documents, probably in
hieroglyphics, is what's being used but, as you saw in a couple of the slides, the
alphabetic script is already coming into use, again probably on papyrus, and it's
being used by the common folk and maybe soldiers are doing that. But the
administrators are communicating with Egypt, probably with hieroglyphics. I have
a logistical question. You showed us the hill country, which
looked like it was a mess to go through with rocks and brushwork.
How did they get this stuff from Egypt like those giant pithoi, you could get on
water, but then how did you get the materials over the hills? So, for one
thing, the pithoi were not being manufactured in Egypt, they were local,
they were manufactured locally. For example, in the hill country we know
there's a hill country site. A place where they're making it. From the clay we
can identify it's in the hill country. There's probably another one in Jordan,
in the hills of Jordan. There's another one on the coastal plain. There's one at Tel Dan. So there are centers located as near by as
possible because those jars really are heavy, you're right. As for other things,
probably the roots run at the base of the, of the water courses, at the
gulches, not on the hills and not so much, but not in the middle of the streams, but
at the edge. That's where the trails are today. And probably, and they're using
donkeys, and we're not using horses or mules yet, it's donkeys. So donkeys can
pretty easily get through a trail that goes along the bottom of a slope. Folks,
can we thank our speaker one more time?..
