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Theresa Goell Dies—Memorial Fund Established

Six colossal, headless statues rise from Mount Nemrud on the edge of the high Anatolian plateau in southeastern Turkey. At this remote tomb-sanctuary called Nemrud Dagh, Theresa Goell excavated with Dr. Friedrich Doerner from 1953 through 1973. Goell died on December 18, 1985, in New York City at the age of 84.

At Mt. Nemrud, she and Doerner uncovered the imposing tomb-sanctuary of the Hellenistic king Antiochus I who ruled from 64 B.C. to 32 B.C. when much of southeastern Turkey was part of the kingdom of Commagene, a buffer state between the Roman empire on the west and the powerful Parthian empire on the east.

The tomb of Antiochus I is a burial mound some 500 feet in circumference atop the flattened summit of Mt. Nemrud. Its stoneworks, including the six colossal statues whose heads lie upright on the plain beneath them, led the way to a detailed analysis of the long-neglected history of Commagene—a history influenced by both the Greco-Roman and the Persian/Parthian civilizations.

Goell was born in Brooklyn and was a graduate of Radcliffe College. She studied architecture and archaeology at Cambridge University in England and was a student at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

A lifelong Zionist, Goell moved to Palestine in the 1930s where she joined the staff of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), which later financed her excavations at Nemrud Dagh. While in Palestine, she worked as an architect, designing more than 200 buildings in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa.

At the time of her death, Goell had nearly completed the first volume of her excavations. Before and after her death, Dr. Donald Sanders worked on the volume dealing with the archaeology, epigraphy and geology of Nemrud Dagh. Subsequent volumes are planned, but private funds collected by Goell for this purpose are nearly exhausted.

The American Schools of Oriental Research has set up the Theresa Goell Nemrud Dagh Memorial Fund. Contributions to the fund will be applied to the cost of the final preparation of the first volume manuscript and its publication.

Gifts should be sent to ASOR, 4243 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Contributions are tax-deductible.

Inch Named Executive Director of American Institute

Dr. Morris Inch has been named the new executive director of the American Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem.

Inch, currently a professor of theology at Wheaton Graduate School, Wheaton College, Illinois, will assume his new post on June 1, 1986. He is a former dean of 010students and academic dean at Gordon College in Massachusetts, and a past departmental and divisional chairman at Wheaton College.

The American Institute serves some 100 associated schools of higher education in the United States and Canada, and provides both undergraduate and graduate courses. It also offers semester- and year-abroad programs, as well as two-year programs in Hebrew, Middle Eastern studies, and in the historical geography of ancient Israel. Approximately 500 students annually attend the school, which boasts some 5,000 alumni.

The American Institute was founded by the late Dr. G. Douglas Young. He was succeeded as executive director by Dr. George Giacumakis, a member of BAR’s Editorial Advisory Board. Dr. Peter Veltman, dean emeritus of Wheaton College, has been serving as the interim executive director and dean of the Institute.

Byzantine Church Silver Exhibited at Walters Gallery

An opulent hoard of sixth-century Byzantine church silver will be reunited—for the first time since its discovery—in an extraordinary exhibit at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland. “Silver Treasure from Early Byzantium” will be on display from April 17 through August 17, 1986. The exhibition, says its curator, Dr. Gary Vikan, the assistant director for curatorial affairs/medieval curator at the Walters, reunites the four great ecclesiastical silver treasures of Byzantium: the Hama Treasure, named for the city in northern Syria where it was purportedly discovered, and now in the Walters Art Gallery; the Riha Treasure at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., and the Abegg Stiftung, Bern; the Stuma Treasure, mostly in the Archaeological Museum, Istanbul; and the Antioch Treasure, most of which now resides in the Metropolitan Museum.

The collection is comprised mainly of precious vessels designed for use in the Orthodox liturgy chalices, plates, lamps, great processional crosses, and candlesticks. Altogether, “Silver Treasure from Byzantium” includes nearly 90 objects from some 20 museums and private collections from around the world.

Perhaps the most famous piece on display will be the Antioch Chalice from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The chalice, 011believed by some to be the Holy Grail from which Christ and his apostles drank during the Last Supper, is actually a sixth-century ceremonial vessel. Also on exhibit will be the Homs Vase from the Louvre, a 17-inch-high eucharistic vessel that is arguably the finest surviving example of metalwork from the early Byzantine period.

Thanks to the careful detective work by the exhibition’s guest curator, Dr. Marlia Mango of Oxford University, it now appears that the four treasures were once part of a single great silver collection that was buried in the eighth century A.D. The hoard was unearthed by treasure-hunters in 1908 outside the small town of Kurin near Aleppo in northern Syria. Subsequently, the precious pieces were divided up and sold to a few dealers on the international art market.

At the height of its power, the Byzantine empire included most of the Mediterranean world and parts of Europe; it lasted for over a thousand years, from 330 A.D. to 1453 A.D.

As the first and wealthiest Christian empire, Byzantium lavished its finest and most sumptuous art on the Holy Church. Procopius, a sixth-century historian, recorded that the sanctuary of the Hagia 012Sophia—the great basilica built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I (523–567 A.D.) in Constantinople—alone contained 40,000 pounds of silver.

Silver was an integral part of the Byzantine economy and was exchanged for gold at a set rate. Churches treated their silver pieces as a sort of liquid capital; it could be melted down in times of war or civil unrest for ready cash or held on to for centuries as a visible reminder of the church’s wealth. Because of its portability most of the silver vessels fell victim to plunder and were subsequently melted down.

Sadly, very little Byzantine silver survives today. Only what was secretly buried at the time and later rediscovered—like the treasure at Kurin—escaped this fate.

As part of the exhibit, a historically accurate Byzantine altar and sanctuary will be constructed in the exhibition gallery to allow museum-goers a chance to see the silver vessels in an authentic setting. An audiovisual presentation will guide visitors through the exhibit and give valuable historical and archaeological background information.

Participants in this summer’s Biblical Archaeology Society Vacation Seminar at Johns Hopkins University will enjoy a special tour led by Gary Vikan.

The exhibition will coincide with the 17th international Byzantine Congress, to be held August 3–6, 1986, at Dumbarton Oaks and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The exhibition will also serve in May as the setting for an international scholarly conference, “Ecclesiastical Silver Plate in Early Byzantium.”

The Walters Art Gallery is located at 600 North Charles Street in downtown Baltimore. It is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Guided tours of the exhibition will be conducted every Wednesday at 2 p.m. Tours for special groups may be arranged in advance by calling the education Department at (301) 547–9000, extension 232. For general information, call the Walters Art Gallery at (301) 547–9000.

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Essay on Early Bronze Age Wins BAR Fellowship to Jerusalem

Richard Chute of Pomona, California, is the winner of BAR’s first Undergraduate Biblical Archaeology Essay Contest. His prize is a $1,500 traveling fellowship to Jerusalem.

Chute’s essay, “An Examination of T. L. Thompson’s Analysis of Early Bronze Age IV/Middle Bronze Age I Syro-Canaan,” deals with a classic archaeological “puzzle”: What brought the Early Bronze Age to an end?

According to the judges—Dr. Lawrence Geraty, president of Atlantic Union College, South Lancaster, Massachusetts; Professor Keith N. Schoville, Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin; and Dr. Kevin G. O’Connell, S.J., chairman of the Department of Religious Studies, John Carroll University, University Heights, Cleveland, Ohio—Chute’s essay is a “clear presentation … with a discriminating use of sources and fresh comparisons of analogous situations in both historical and extant societies. It offers a convincing argument for an ecological explanation of the EB IV/MB I destructions.”

In his essay, Chute advances Biblical historian T. L. Thompson’s revolutionary theory that the end of EB IV may have come about as a direct result of a climatic shift.

Thompson and Chute contend that a drying trend near the end of the Early Bronze Age rendered many formerly habitable sites unlivable due to a lack of water. The arid conditions led to widespread famine and drought, dramatic declines in population, abandonment of large, normally inhabited areas in Syro-Canaan, and the centralization of populations around stable water resources.

For Chute, 24, who graduated in February 1985 from Pitzer College in Claremont, California, Thompson’s model answered many questions left unanswered by the other theories. An environmental studies graduate, Chute is particularly interested in the interaction between the natural world and human history.

“Other cultures—both ancient and modern—have been undermined by the consequences of ecological disasters,” he 011says. “Ancient cuneiform records from Mesopotamia show that increased salinization of croplands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the second millennium B.C. resulted in disastrous drops in agricultural yields. The salinization was a result of over-irrigation; mineral salts from the river water leached into the soil and destroyed its arability. Famine and political weakness followed.”

Chute points to the present-day “desertification” of sub-Sahara Africa as an example of the kind of catastrophe that can overwhelm societies and cultures when ecological conditions change suddenly.

The winning essay was originally a paper for a course in Near Eastern archaeology.

“I was required to take several anthropology courses as part of my environmental studies major,” he says. “I decided to take an archaeology course to help satisfy the requirement. I’m glad I did; it was fascinating.”

Chute plans to continue his studies in anthropology and has applied to the graduate schools at the Universities of Michigan and Arizona, among others.

He intends to use his $1,500 fellowship to Jerusalem to volunteer at an archaeological dig site in the area.

Honorable mentions in the essay contest were awarded to Rachel Hallote of New Rochelle, New York, for her essay, “The Development and Use of the Palestinian City Gate from the Bronze to the Iron Age,” and to Lee Burchfield of Birmingham, Alabama, for “The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser.” The judges called Hallote’s essay a “detailed look at an important phenomenon of every city in Biblical times.” All agreed that Burchfield’s “Black Obelisk” was a “thorough treatment of an important discovery for Biblical archaeology.”

Theresa Goell Dies—Memorial Fund Established