Another View: Don’t Be So Quick to be Disappointed, David Ussishkin

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In the November/December issue of BAR, David Ussishkin expressed his disappointment at what he thought to be the disappearance of two royal Israelite king burials^a that I had identified in the July/August issue.^b I want to reassure him and other BAR readers that there really are tombs below King Omri’s palace at Samaria.

I will deal first with Ussishkin’s comments regarding Tomb A. Ussishkin expects this ninth-century B.C.E. Israelite tomb to resemble eighth- and seventh-century B.C.E. Judahite tombs (complete with a burial shelf, a Hathor headrest and a bone repository below the burial bench). It does not.

Very clear, well-documented differences distinguish Israelite and Judahite tombs of an earlier period from a later period.¹ Strangely enough, the closest parallels to Tomb A are recorded by Ussishkin himself in Jerusalem’s Silwan Necropolis;² they may possibly date back to the ninth century B.C.E. There, despite the lack of features that Ussishkin deems so important at Samaria, he had no hesitation in identifying them as tombs.

Ussishkin expected to find traces of human remains and grave goods in Tomb A that could be studied by the excavators. Tombs, if they are located at an abandoned site and are more or less intact, can bring joy to archaeologists. However, tombs located in a dynamic city continuously inhabited from the Iron Age through the Classical period and then again until modern times are unfortunately doomed to be robbed, not to mention possibly remodeled and reused.^c

Tomb A was clearly robbed in antiquity; there is a small entrance hole in its ceiling apparently made by tomb robbers (some of the Late Bronze Age tombs in Ugarit were broken into in the same way).³ This small aperture was incorrectly interpreted by Ussishkin as an original, additional entrance. But Tomb A only had a single horizontal entrance that led, via a passage, directly to the tomb chamber.

Ussishkin agrees with me that the many rock-cut cisterns and installations that pierce the summit of Samaria predate the founding of the Israelite capital. But Tomb A is not one of them. The entrance to Tomb A is cut into the face of the scarp that was fashioned to support the Israelite palace, and the location and design of the tomb clearly shows that it was hewn at the same time as the palace scarp. Furthermore, the cutting of the scarp damaged many of those earlier rock-cuttings— providing additional proof that the scarp and the entrance to Tomb A postdate those rock-cut installations (none of which resembled rectangular rock-cut caves, as mistakenly thought by Ussishkin).

There should be no difficulty in understanding the function of Tomb A. It was built at the same time as the palace, it resembles the earliest tombs in Jerusalem, and its style and location within the palace parallels contemporaneous Assyrian royal tombs. In fact, Tomb A follows the line in Isaiah 14:18, “All the kings of the nations reposed, each one in his own house.” Who else but one of the Omride kings could be buried within the palace confines?⁴

Regarding Ussishkin’s comments about Tomb B, the alleged phantom tomb, Ussishkin correctly gives due credit to the excavation architect Clarence S. Fisher. Fisher was a meticulous draftsman who produced valuable work for the Harvard Expedition to Samaria, as well as for the 071Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago’s expedition to Megiddo. However, Fisher’s work was not always published as meticulously as he recorded it. This is apparent in the Megiddo I publication and to a much lesser extent in the Samaria publication.

For example, at Samaria a monumental Israelite building that existed at the same time as the palace, recorded correctly by Fisher and the excavators, was mislabeled as a much later building on the final published plan. This publishing error led to the virtual disappearance of the building from the archaeological record of the earliest Israelite city. In addition, the many cisterns appear haphazardly on different plans; some are recorded on just one plan while others are recorded on a number of plans. The same appears to be true of the two rock-cut tombs which I discussed in my article. Tomb A appears on three separate plans: on one plan it is unnamed, on another plan it is called a cistern, while on a third it is called a tomb. Tomb B appears on only one plan, where it is called a tomb.

However, Ussishkin’s main problem regarding Tomb B appears to be his misunderstanding of the drawing conventions used by Fisher. There are two important sections published by Harvard: a west-east section, G-H (reprinted in BAR), and a north-south section, A-B. On these section drawings, Fisher used a dotted line to denote underground features, such as the cisterns, or to show reconstructed elements, such as the surface of the Roman forecourt. Also Fisher, as noted by Ussishkin, deviated slightly on either side of the section line in order to incorporate certain pertinent elements, but he did not use the dotted line to show deviance from the section line, as erroneously thought by Ussishkin. On Section A-B, in order to clarify the situation, Fisher deviated just over 16 feet (5m) from the section line along quite a long stretch of the section. Fisher carefully recorded this deviation on Section A-B in the archived plan as well as on the published plan. Yet Ussishkin would have us believe that on Section G-H Fisher deviated from the section line by 33 feet (10 m), while failing to record that fact!

Finally, with regard to Tomb B, Ussishkin bemoans the fact that he is not familiar with any tomb chamber whose entrance is at a higher level than the floor of the tomb chamber. Actually, this is invariably the situation when one is dealing with “below-family-house” burials as in Ugarit or the contemporaneous royal “below-palace” burials at Assur and Nimrud. Those burials are accessed from above, while at Samaria, Tombs A and B are accessed from the side via an entrance cut in the palace scarp. According to the Harvard excavation report, the palace scarp is 13 feet (4m) high in front of Tomb A and the interior height of the tomb is 13 feet (4 m); therefore, the threshold of the 20-foot-long entrance tunnel is level with the tomb chamber. On the other hand, the scarp is only approximately 11 feet (3.5 m) high in front of Tomb B and therefore the threshold of its 40-foot-long entrance tunnel is shown to be at a higher level than the tomb chamber. Very possibly the entrance tunnel was never cleared out completely, which is why a “?” appears over the short flight of steps shown halfway along the entrance tunnel, and Tomb B is altogether poorly documented.

Ignoring similarly styled cave tombs and “below-palace” burials, Ussishkin admits to having difficulty in offering an alternative explanation, but is this reason enough to dismiss my findings? I think not.

In the November/December issue of BAR, David Ussishkin expressed his disappointment at what he thought to be the disappearance of two royal Israelite king burialsa that I had identified in the July/August issue.b I want to reassure him and other BAR readers that there really are tombs below King Omri’s palace at Samaria. I will deal first with Ussishkin’s comments regarding Tomb A. Ussishkin expects this ninth-century B.C.E. Israelite tomb to resemble eighth- and seventh-century B.C.E. Judahite tombs (complete with a burial shelf, a Hathor headrest and a bone repository below the burial bench). It does not. Very clear, […]