Why Were Hundreds of Dogs Buried at Ashkelon?

Home > Magazines > BAR > May/June 1991

This is part II of a three-part article. Part I appeared in the last issue (“When Canaanites and Philistines Ruled Ashkelon,” BAR 17:02). Part III will appear in the next issue (“Eroticism and Infanticide at Ashkelon,” BAR 17:04). Ancient Ashkelon, now quietly nestled beside the Mediterranean in the south of Israel, is shaped like a giant 150-acre bowl, with the sea wearing away at much of the western half. The rim and sides of the bowl are formed by the mammoth Middle Bronze Age glacis, or rampart, that once protected the city. Inside the bowl are buried at […]

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Footnotes

Ashlars are well-cut masonry in the shape of a cube.

We have not yet assigned site-wide strata numbers to the various phases within local grids (100 meters by 100 meters). Phase numbers apply only within each grid. The phase numbers are not necessarily the same from grid to grid, although eventually we may determine they are part of the same stratum.

An amphora (sing., AM-fo-ruh) is a large storage jar.

The Book of Isaiah was written by different prophets at different times. Chapters 1–39 are pre-Exilic; that is, before the Babylonian Exile. The remainder (chapters 40–66) is post Exilic; it is attributed either to an anonymous Second Isaiah (deutero-Isaiah) or, in the opinion of some scholars, chapters 40–59 to Second Isaiah and chapters 60–66 to Third Isaiah (trito-Isaiah).

Endnotes

Pseudo-Scylax, Periplus; see Menachem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1984), vol. 3, p. 10.

Pompeius Trogus-Justin, Book XIX. i.10.

Greek Anthology, transl. W.R. Patton, Loeb Classical Library (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917), vol. 2, p. 117, poem 211.

Personal communication from Professor Amihai Mazar.

Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 45ff.

Personal communication from Professor Richard Frye.

After the original carvings on both sides of the ivory comb were made, the edges of the comb were, for some unknown reason, pared off. Dr. Abbas Alizadeh, associate director of the Leon Levy expedition, has restored the motifs on the basis of contemporary parallels from ancient Persia in the drawings which he produced. Dr. A. Eran staff metrologist, identified the weight as one karsha, a Persian unit equal to 10 shekels.

Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historia (Library of History), transl. C.H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1933), Book 1.83.2; 84.5; 83.5–6.

For a general survey of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean healing deities, such as Gula and Asklepios, see Hector Avalos, “Illness and Health Care in Ancient Israel: A Comparative Study of the Role of the Temple (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1991), chs. 1–2. Dr. Avalos translated the neo-Assyrian text.

10.

Diodorus, Bk. 1.83.2.