Books in Brief

010

Enthusiastic How-To

Archaeological Adventure in Israel, a Practical Guide

Arnold J. Flegenheimer

(Roslyn Heights, NY: Roth, 1986) 136 pp., $9.95, paperback

Guides to archaeology range from field manuals reflecting an excavation’s digging methodology to large volumes of color photography intended to entertain visitors to your living room. But the genuine tyro finds the field manual too technical to be useful and the pictorial panorama more entertaining than informative.

What an amateur attracted to archaeology seeks is a book that excites his interest, raises the current level of his knowledge, and provides useful information for moving forward. Arnold Flegenheimer and his helpers have tried to do just that, to meet those needs of a reader newly infected with the allure of archaeology.

Archaeological Adventure in Israel, a Practical Guide is written with the irrepressible enthusiasm of a lay archaeologist whose personal involvement in archaeology has taken him far beyond his armchair. Presented in a straightforward and simple form, this book lives up to its title by being a handy, practical guide that can be easily inserted in your travel gear. Especially intended for those who are primarily interested in digging in Israel, the guide displays the perspective of an author who has been an active participant in several excavations in Israel. In Flegenheimer we have a knowledgeable dig veteran who wishes to be practical in his advice and who will therefore discuss even such matters as the curative power of Albright Institute tea and the relative superiority of American-made, versus Israel-made, shirts.

As a practical guide, the book tries to reduce the mysteries of archaeology to comprehensible segments, to remove the anxieties of archaeological ignorance, and to instill the confidence that results from having an accurate guide. The book provides highly specific information, which increases its usefulness for the reader, but also increases the need for more frequent revision. If the guide proves successful, Flegenheimer will have to consider new editions soon.

“If this book has served its purpose,” Flegenheimer says, “it has inspired the reader to plan to join a dig within the foreseeable future.” All of us who believe that archaeological field activity is a very important way to become personally involved in the recovery of our past hope that this book will have that effect on its readers.

Pioneer’s Story

In the World of Sumer: An Autobiography

Samuel Noah Kramer

(Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 1986) 253 pp., $37.50

This is the story of Samuel Noah Kramer, and of the recovery of Sumerian literature. The two stories are intimately connected, and in this book they are virtually equated. That is as it should be, for if any living individual can be said to embody the progress of a given humanistic discipline, it is Kramer. His story is, in fact, the story of modern Sumerology, particularly of its literary component. But in this book Kramer does more than weave his reminiscences together with the “rise and progress of Sumerology” (to paraphrase E. G. Wallis Budge’s 1925 history of Assyriology). He also sheds light on some of the great pioneers, such as Jules Oppert, who as long ago as 1869 identified “Sumer” as the ancient name of the country,¹ and George Smith, whose publication of Sumero-Akkadian bilinguals from the library of the seventh-century B.C. Assyrian king Assurbanipal gave “the first inkling of the existence of a Sumerian literature [that] reached the modern scholarly world.”²

Kramer touches on some non-literary aspects of Sumerian civilization as well, but he does not provide in any substantial measure (as Miguel Civil points out in his introduction) those details of his personal life that do not bear directly on his scholarship. With certain exceptions, one also looks in vain for those contributions to Sumerology, even to the recovery of Sumerian literature, that were not somehow attributable to him, his teachers, his colleagues or his students. We are thus presented with neither a complete autobiography nor with a total history of the field, but with a genial amalgam of the highlights of both.

The bibliography at the end of the volume lists a staggering total of two hundred “works by the author,” including thirty books and monographs and not counting reviews and review articles. The new work has a history of its own, partially told by Jack Sasson in the preface to the extensive extracts from it that he presented in the second Kramer Anniversary Volume.³ Other fascinating clues to the origin of the various chapters are scattered through the book itself. The earlier chapters were clearly written in the 1970s,⁴ the later ones in the 1980s.⁵ Given this composite character, the volume should have commanded the services of more careful editors to smooth out certain inconsistencies. So, for example, the first law-code is attributed to Ur-Nammu on page 108, but on page 240 it is probably to be assigned to Shulgi (both attributions, be it noted, were first demonstrated by Kramer).⁶

But the occasional inconsistencies, and some typographical lapses, are minor matters, which the reader will readily take in stride. What counts is that Kramer has covered a rich diversity of subjects in fifteen stately chapters, including his early years in Russia and Philadelphia from 1897–1930; his archaeological field work as epigrapher to the excavations at Tell Billa (ancient Shibaniba) and Fara (Shuruppak) from 1930–1931; his bitter-sweet association (see especially page 50) with the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, where he learned Sumerian from Arno Poebel and edited the Sumerian literary texts copied by Edward Chiera, from 1932–1937; his unremitting labor to copy the rest of the Sumerian literary corpus from Nippur, preserved in the museums of Istanbul, Jena and, above all, Philadelphia; and his elucidation of Sumerian literary texts from other sites, preserved in other collections, including Moscow’s Pushkin Museum, London’s British Museum and Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. (He could have added the Yale Babylonian Collection, 011whose extensive holdings of Sumerian literary texts he was the first to catalogue in a systematic way.) In addition, he tells of his wanderings after “retirement,” from 1968–1973.

Throughout the book, the personal record is accompanied, indeed thoroughly overshadowed, by the unfolding narrative of the scholarly insights sought and attained in this single-minded quest to recover the world’s oldest coherent body of belleslettres. Younger Assyriologists can only stand in awe of the perseverance, the resistance to distractions of any kind (including the “theories of fellow academics”) and the dogged cheerfulness that characterize the exemplary career of this nonagenarian. Other readers will be fascinated by the guileless interweaving of what might be called “my life and work.” As Kramer himself puts it (p. 228):

“Rare indeed is the scholar … whose learning is deep and whose interests are broad; who assembles with patience and discrimination the multiform relevant concrete details, penetrates their contents, and comes Up with a cogent synthesis that is stimulating and challenging.”

Although he is describing his fellow Sumerologist Thorkild Jacobsen, Kramer surely aspired to these high ideals himself. His autobiography is proof, if any were needed, that he succeeded.

Excavation Reports

Excavation reports rarely come to the reader’s attention and rarely provide easy reading. But they do contain all the details about the finds at various sites, and so may be of interest to readers who wish to probe more deeply. Therefore, BAR will occasionally publish short notices of recent excavation reports.

Shechem I: The Middle Bronze II B Pottery

Dan P. Cole

(Winona Lake, IN: Published for the American Schools of Oriental Research by Eisenbrauns, 1984) 203 pp., plus 49 plates and 32 figures, plans and sections, $30.00

This volume represents the first of the long-awaited final reports from the Drew-McCormick-Harvard excavations at Biblical Shechem (Tel Balatah) conducted by G. Ernest Wright over the decade from 1957 to 1966. Dan Cole’s study focuses on the ceramic evidence from four strata of occupational materials at Shechem within the Middle Bronze II B period (c. 1750–1650 B.C.). Cole detects a difference between the vessel types and shape nuances that are characteristic of early MB II B and those that are common in the latter part of the century-long period. (The importance of this can be appreciated by noting that Ruth Amiran, in her Ancient Pottery of the Holy Land, felt forced to treat MB II B and II C as one period, without distinguishable separations, on the basis of the meager materials published from other sites.) Drawing upon his refinement of the ceramic chronology, Cole concludes his report by reviewing the published pottery evidence from other sites in Palestine and notes a heretofore-undetected pattern of partial abandonment of minor sites in the more exposed and vulnerable regions during a portion of the MB II B period.

While fairly specialized in focus and likely to be purchased primarily by research libraries and persons involved in ceramic studies, this report also represents a tribute to the very distinctive contributions made by the Shechem excavations under Ernest Wright’s guidance. It was at Shechem that Wright combined the tight stratigraphic controls that Kathleen Kenyon had recently introduced at Jericho with his concern (inherited from his mentor, W. F. Albright) for extensive saving and close analysis of the ceramic remains for the purpose of dating. Cole’s study of minor, pottery style changes, during four Shechem building strata within MB II B, would have been impossible without the careful separation of the strata in the field and the conscientious saving, recording and drawing of sizable samples of the sherd materials. The procedures Wright initiated at Shechem in this regard have become standard at other projects since then, but they were innovative at the time.

Among the factors delaying the Shechem excavations’ publication program was the untimely death of Ernest Wright in 1974. Edward F. Campbell, Jr., of McCormick, however, has assumed leadership over a revised schedule for publishing the reports being prepared by members of the staff. There now are realistic hopes for publication of at least three additional volumes in the near future: Joe Seger’s study of the Middle Bronze II C pottery, James Ross’s report on the Middle Bronze strata in Field VI (where several phases of what Wright called a “courtyard temple” were uncovered), and a general account of the excavation’s structures, stratigraphy and objects to be pulled together by Campbell and Darrell Lance. The last-mentioned volume will replace the quite out-dated popular account, Shechem: The Biography of a Biblical City (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), written by Wright before the excavations were concluded.

Gezer IV: The 1969–71 Seasons in Field VI, the “Acropolis”

William G. Dever, with the assistance of H. Darrell Lance

(Jerusalem: Annual of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology, 1986) 2 Vols., 275 pp. plus 120 plates and 25 plans, $65.00. Available from the Israel Exploration Society, P.O. Box 7041, Jerusalem, Israel 91070.

This is the third volume to appear in the final publication series on the ten-year program of excavations at Tell Gezer, sponsored by Hebrew Union College between 1964 and 1974. It provides a summary report of the 1969–71 excavation results from Field VI on the northwest summit of the mound, where strata from the Middle Bronze II A period (c. 1750 B.C.) through the Hellenistic era were identified. Major attention is given to the Stratum 6 and Stratum 5 house-complexes, which represent Philistine occupation of the site in the 12th–11th centuries B.C., the Iron I B period. The study reviews the stratigraphy, pottery and objects and provides a brief historical summary for each stratum. The text volume concludes with special studies on Field VI scarabs, on flint caches, and on neutron activation analysis of selected pottery. The plate volume supplements the text with a generous representation of both pottery and object finds, along with a full selection of photographs, detailed plans and section drawings.

Enthusiastic How-To

Archaeological Adventure in Israel, a Practical Guide

Arnold J. Flegenheimer

(Roslyn Heights, NY: Roth, 1986) 136 pp., $9.95, paperback