Mycenaeans Were There Before the Israelites

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Dan II; A Chronicle of the Excavations and the Late Bronze Age “Mycenaean” Tomb

Avraham Biram and Rachel Ben-Dov

(Jerusalem: Hebrew Union College, Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology, 2002) 248 pp., $48 (available from the publisher, 13 King David St., Jerusalem 94101, Israel)

Nearly 20 years ago, BAR published an interview with Avraham Biran on “Twenty Years of Digging at Tel Dan” (July/August 1987). The interview features a wonderfully politically incorrect photo of Biran smoking a glorious cigar. At the time Biran was 77 years old, director of Hebrew Union College’s Nelson Glueck School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and, he assured his interviewer, ready to call it quits at Tel Dan. Twenty wonderful seasons, filled with great finds and amazing adventures, and now it was time to stop digging and concentrate on publication. Fortunately Biran had a change of heart: He went on digging; just as important, he published what he found. And it is worth pointing out that if Biran really had called it quits in 1986 we would not have the “House of David” inscription—the first reference to David or his dynasty ever found outside the Bible (the inscription’s three fragments were found in 1993 and 1994).^a

The first volume of the Dan excavation’s final report appeared in 1996 and chronicled the dig seasons from 1966 through 1992. Now Dan II covers the 1993 through 1999 seasons. In his preface to the new volume, David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College, writes, “The present stage of the excavations at Tel Dan, the longest running excavation in Israel, has now been concluded.” But who knows? Even if excavations were to be renewed they would not be led by Biran. Now in his mid-90s, the tireless Biran retired only recently. (If citizenship were a matter of nationality at birth, Biran would be a citizen of the Ottoman Empire!)

Biran’s own chronicle of the seven seasons of excavation covered in Dan II is, admittedly, rather brief (only 30 pages). It will be of interest mainly as a record of the findspots of the three fragments of the “House of David” inscription. The main part of Dan II is instead devoted to Rachel Ben-Dov’s detailed account of the excavation of a Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.E.) “Mycenaean” tomb, discovered by accident during the 1969 dig season, together with specialized studies by 046six other authors on the various materials from the tomb, followed by Ben-Dov’s own conclusions.

This is a very professional publication, a delight to read and a pleasure to use. Everything is here, in one volume, even the inventory numbers assigned by the Israel Antiquities Authority to every catalogued item (and there are 440 of them, including pottery, bronze vessels, bronze weapons, bone and ivory objects, glass and glazed wares, stone vessels, jewellery, whorls, buttons and beads).

The tomb is the richest Late Bronze Age tomb ever excavated in Israel—and, in many respects, the most interesting. When it was discovered in 1969, the tomb, technically Tomb 387, was christened the “Mycenaean” tomb because of the wealth of imported Mycenaean pottery it contained—28 pots in all. They are published here in exemplary fashion, with excellent drawings. No other tomb 047in Israel has produced such evidence for contact with the Aegean world. (The only parallels are several tombs in the “Persian Garden” cemetery at Akko, with 18 Mycenaean vases, published by Vronwy Hankey in 1977.¹) Pride of place among the Dan tomb objects must go to the magnificent chariot krater, certainly the most famous object found in the tomb and a vase that has already been widely discussed and illustrated (a splendid color photograph appeared in the BAR interview mentioned above). Such kraters belong to what is known as the Pictorial Class of Mycenaean pottery and are most commonly from Late Bronze Age Cyprus. Pictorial pottery is not common in the Levant, and chariot kraters are unusual. They have appeared at about a dozen sites, from Alalakh to Gaza, usually in very fragmentary condition, whereas the Dan example is almost complete.

In Cyprus such large pictorial-style kraters, technically known as amphoroid kraters, are almost always found in tombs. It has often been argued that the chariot examples depict the deceased being conducted to the tomb—a sort of funerary procession. At Ugarit pictorial pottery is known both from tombs and settlement contexts, but elsewhere in the Levant they were seldom placed in tombs (they are not found in Egypt). Thus the presence of such a chariot krater in the Dan tomb represents a Cypriot tradition. Yet there are only pieces of Cypriot pottery in the tomb. There is also an example of a curious class of pottery known as a Wall Bracket, closely associated with Cyprus but known from elsewhere as well and, at Dan, made of local clay (see photo on next page).

As luck would have it, while Biran was excavating Tomb 387 at Dan in 1969, American excavators working at Gezer began the excavation of Cave Tomb 10A, another very rich Late Bronze Age tomb, but about a century earlier than the Dan tomb. The Gezer tomb was published as Gezer V in 1988. Unlike the Dan tomb the Gezer tomb had a wealth of Cypriot pottery—54 vases in all, including a bull figurine. Only Tomb 216 at Lachish, with its 67 Base Ring vessels, has a greater corpus of Cypriot wares. The Gezer bull figurine now has very close parallels in finds from the Cypriot site of Kalavassos Ayios-Dhimitrios. But the Gezer tomb produced not one sherd of Mycenaean pottery. Like the Dan tomb, the Gezer tomb had a wealth of bronze weapons and implements, a total of 103, but no evidence for contact with the Aegean world, save for the curious clay coffin or sarcophagus that the excavators of Gezer thought had connections with Late Minoan I Crete and could indicate the presence of resident Minoans at Gezer in the late 15th century B.C.E., which is most unlikely.

The key to explaining the differences between Cave Tomb 10A at Gezer and the stone-built Tomb 387 at Tel Dan is comparative chronology. The Gezer tomb, dating to the late 15th century B.C.E. and extending into the early 14th century in its upper layers, is earlier than the great Mycenaean expansion into the eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. The Tel Dan tomb, from the late-14th century B.C.E. (and for the date see below), comes from the time that marks the height of Mycenaean commercial expansion. That expansion was centered around the island of Cyprus. Cyprus was famous throughout the second millennium B.C.E. as the main source of copper for the eastern Mediterranean world. Known as the land of Alashiya, Cyprus is frequently mentioned as a source of copper in the texts from this period, especially in the Amarna Letters from the mid-14th century B.C.E. When the 048Mycenaean palace economy underwent its great international expansion in the 14th century, following the Mycenaean takeover of the island of Crete, the Mycenaean need for metals increased accordingly. To make bronze one needs copper and tin. We still are not sure where the tin came from, but the copper certainly came from Cyprus. This is the great age of the international copper trade, a trade that shipped raw copper in the form of so-called oxhide ingots (because they are shaped like an oxhide.) The Uluburun ship, which sank off the southern coast of Turkey in the late 14th century B.C.E., was carrying a cargo of over 350 such ingots, as well as ingots of tin.^b

The Late Bronze Age economy was based upon barter. Coinage as we know it today was not invented until the seventh century B.C.E. One could weigh out amounts of silver, as bullion, but daily transactions were done on a barter basis. If the Mycenaeans wanted Cypriot copper they had to exchange something for it, and one of the things they used for this purpose was their pottery. The Mycenaeans made fantastic pottery—some of the best ever produced. Just drop a Mycenaean sherd on a hard surface; it has a distinctive ring that marks pottery of very high quality. Compared to the dreadful stuff being produced in the Levant at this time, Mycenaean pottery represented high-quality luxury ware. The Cypriots, whose own pottery was fairly good and was widely exported, especially before the mid-14th century B.C.E., loved Mycenaean pottery and imported large quantities of it. The Egyptians, who did not make great pottery, also became very fond of Mycenaean wares and imported them in considerable quantities. But, like the peoples of the Levant, the Egyptians preferred the closed shapes, the vases that served as containers, for perfumed ointments and unguents and similar products that, as we know from the Linear B texts, were also specialities of the Mycenaean palace economy. Only in Cyprus was there a demand for the large open shapes, the bell kraters and the large amphoroid kraters. These were, for the most part, used as offerings to the dead, imported in order to be placed in a tomb.

But was the “Mycenaean” pottery found on Cyprus really 049Mycenaean, or was it a local, Cypriot imitation of Mycenaean ware? This question represents a scholarly debate that has gone on since at least the 1930s. In the 1960s a group of scholars at Oxford University, led by Hector Catling (who was to become the director of the British School at Athens for many years), believed they could use the chemical composition of the clay in the pottery to answer the question. Thus was born a major research project that, eventually, expanded over the entire Mediterranean world. The results were interesting but always controversial. The archaeologists tended to be very skeptical of the conclusions proclaimed by the scientists. There now seems to be general agreement that chemical analysis, done by a proper technique such as neutron activation analysis (NAA), gives excellent results when working with Mycenaean fine wares.

Chemical analyses of the Tel Dan krater were published in the early 1990s. The conclusion was that the Dan krater was an import from the Argolid in southern Greece, and that it probably came from the region of Berbati. I would argue that this conclusion is still valid today (this view has the support of some of the leading scholars in the field, especially the German scholars Hans Mommsen and Joseph Maran). Back in the late 1930s, the Swedish archaeologist Ake Akerström excavated at Berbati a Mycenaean pottery workshop that produced pictorial-style pottery. Unfortunately he did not publish the results of his excavation until 1987, and this report seems to be one of the few important items of bibliography not known to Rachel Ben-Dov.² I believe the Dan krater was indeed made at Berbati but was most likely exported to Cyprus as but one item sent in exchange for Cypriot copper. So far so good, but how did the krater end up at Tel Dan?

What we seem to be dealing with here is a trilateral trade network: the Aegean, Cyprus and the Levant. How did it work? Given the lack of sources one can only speculate. The best explanation, in my opinion, is one published more than 30 years ago by the late Vronwy Hankey, who published most of the Aegean pottery found in the Middle East. Since the article appeared in a little-known journal (Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph), published in Beirut in 1970, it is best to quote the relevant passage in its entirety (vol. 46, fascicle 2, pp. 20–21):

Except for Tell el Amarna [in Egypt], all sites in the south-eastern Mediterranean seem to have imported far more Cypriot Base-Ring II and White Slip II than Mycenaean III pottery. The explanation for this seems to be that the best and the bulk of the Mycenaean exports went to Cyprus. The empty cargo space was then loaded with Cypriot goods for onward trading. When these were sold the ship turned 050round with a small cargo for the Aegean and a large cargo for Cyprus. This in turn was off-loaded in Cyprus and a full cargo of copper taken to Greece.

Hankey, of course, knew nothing about the Uluburun shipwreck, discovered only in the mid 1980s, but her description has a remarkable semblance to the cargo carried by that ship, assuming that the Uluburun ship had just left Cyprus and was on its way to Greece when it went down off the coast of Turkey. Hankey wisely left open the question of the nationality of the ships engaged in this trilateral trade: were they Mycenaean, Cypriot or Levantine, or perhaps a mixture of all three? In the case of the Uluburun ship scholars are still trying to answer that question.

So how did the great chariot krater and the 27 other Mycenaean pots end up in Tomb 387 at Tel Dan? I think it came as part of this regular trade, but on special order. Tomb 387 was no ordinary Late Bronze Age tomb. Everything about it was unusual. We cannot even be sure of the final shape of the tomb, nor does it have anything to do with any other structure at the site. It was built in a special pit, dug for that purpose, and has no stratigraphic association with any other excavated remains at the site. The tomb can only be dated on the basis of its contents. 051Ben-Dov, relying upon an old study by Vassos Karageorghis published in 1971, says that the Dan chariot krater is early Late Hellenic IIIA2 (1375–1300 B.C.E.). This dating would now be seen as too early; it has to be regarded as transitional IIIA2/IIIB1 (1375–1300/1300–1225 B.C.E.) and put in the late-14th century B.C.E. In other words it is contemporary with the Uluburun shipwreck.

The Dan tomb was used for multiple burials, but it is not clear just how many individuals were buried in the tomb; there are as many as 40 skeletons but only 30 skulls. Taking 30 as the minimum number of individuals buried in the tomb, there were 19 males, four females and seven of undetermined sex. Sixteen of the males seem to have been adult warriors, and this would explain the great number of bronze weapons placed in the tomb. Is this a family tomb, as Ben-Dov suggests? The male-female distribution strikes me as making up a very odd family. One skull (the report does not say which one) indicated that the individual had undergone the surgical operation known as trephination, which involved drilling holes in the skull, which, it was believed to relieve pressure on the brain. (In this case the patient, seems to have lived to tell the tale, and his skull healed.) In Tomb 387 are we dealing with a series of separate burials, made over the course of some time? Rivka Gonen, in her study of burial patterns in Late Bronze Age Canaan, has already suggested that all the bodies were placed in the tomb at one time, something that would be in keeping with the extraordinary nature of the tomb itself. Ben-Dov suggests that the tomb must have been robbed in antiquity, because some of the grave offerings were found incomplete. This seems most unlikely: Why would the robbers have left so much precious material behind?

Inside the tomb the grave goods were found lined up along the interior stone walls of the chamber. And they were arranged according to material: metal objects, vessels and weapons in one place, stone objects in another, bone and ivory together, and glass and glazed ware together. This cannot be the work of tomb robbers. To my knowledge such an arrangement inside a tomb is without precedent. We do not understand the sequence of events that led to this remarkable burial. We probably never will.

What can be done to further our understanding of Tomb 387 at Tel Dan? I would begin with DNA analysis, preferably on the teeth of the 30 skeletons. Those who specialize in ancient DNA studies have found that teeth are the best source for mitochondrial DNA and, because mitochondrial DNA is inherited only via the mother, it is a good way to trace genetic lineage. Such DNA information could tell us about the relationships of all the individuals buried in the tomb, perhaps even give some hints as to where they came from. This would be a good start in our efforts to unravel some of the mysteries of the “Mycenaean” Tomb at Tel Dan.

Dan II; A Chronicle of the Excavations and the Late Bronze Age “Mycenaean” Tomb Avraham Biram and Rachel Ben-Dov (Jerusalem: Hebrew Union College, Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology, 2002) 248 pp., $48 (available from the publisher, 13 King David St., Jerusalem 94101, Israel) Nearly 20 years ago, BAR published an interview with Avraham Biran on “Twenty Years of Digging at Tel Dan” (July/August 1987). The interview features a wonderfully politically incorrect photo of Biran smoking a glorious cigar. At the time Biran was 77 years old, director of Hebrew Union College’s Nelson Glueck School of Archaeology in Jerusalem […]