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Excarnation: Food For Vultures

Unlocking the mysteries of Chalcolithic ossuaries

By Rami Arav

For nearly a century before the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 C.E., Jews, especially in the Jerusalem area, would inter the bones of their deceased in stone boxes, or ossuaries, about 2 feet long and a foot high. The ossuary had to be long enough to accommodate the longest bone in the body, usually the femur. Children’s ossuaries were accordingly shorter. Many of the ossuaries were inscribed or decorated. Hundreds of them have been recovered. Interment in the ossuary involved only the bones and, for this reason, would not occur until about a year after an individual’s death, […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Claire Epstein, “Before History: The Golan’s Chalcolithic Heritage,” BAR 21:06.

2.

See Yonathan Mizrachi, “Mystery Circles,” BAR 18:04; Mattanyah Zohar, “Unlocking the Mystery of Rogem Hiri,” BAR 19:04.

3.

See Rami Arav, Richard A. Freund and John F. Shroder, Jr., “Bethsaida Rediscovered,” BAR 26:01.

4.

See Molly Dewsnap, “Chalcolithic Treasures,” sidebar to “Before History,” BAR 21:06.

5.

See also Michael Balter, “Discovering Catalhoyuk,” Archaeology Odyssey 08:03.

6.

See Edward L. Greenstein, “Texts from Ugarit Solve Biblical Puzzles,” BAR 36:06.

Endnotes

1.

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books, 2010), p. 5.

2.

I wish to thank the excavator of these sites, Michael Freikman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for sharing this information.

3.

Mattanyah Zohar, “Rogem Hiri: A Megalithic Monument in the Golan,” Israel Exploration Journal 39 (1989), pp. 18–31.

4.

Gerald S. Hawkins, Stonehenge Decoded (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967); Alexander Thom, Megalithic Sites in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).

5.

Claire Epstein, The Chalcolithic Culture of the Levant (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 1998), p. 334.

6.

Rivka Gonen, “The Chalcolithic Period,” in Amnon Ben Tor, ed., The Archaeology of Ancient Israel (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), p. 68.

7.

Epstein, Chalcolithic Culture, pp. 334–337.

8.

James Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).