Books in Brief
The Antiquities of the Jordan Rift Valley
Rami G. Khouri
(Amman, Jordan: Al Kutba, 1988; distributed in the U.S. by Solipsist Press, P.O. Box 544, Sebascopol, CA) 157 pp., $23.00
Ever since my first volunteer days lugging baskets of dirt and washing pottery, I have had an archaeological fantasy that, unhappily, I cannot indulge. I want to go back in time and live in the ancient Biblical world just to see how people really existed. Did all those garbanzos and lentils we find in excavations actually taste good? Did their houses have windows? Although we can never do this, Rami Khouri’s book allows us to do the next best thing: to immerse ourselves almost totally in the archaeology of one region of the Biblical world.
Khouri is a Jordanian journalist who has been covering archaeological developments in his country for over 20 years. It is clear that he loves both his country and its ancient remains. Indeed, he founded Al Kutba Publishers primarily to present the archaeology of Jordan in a popular, educated way for tourists and students.
This book significantly contributes to fulfilling that purpose. Khouri has sifted through hundreds of technical archaeological reports to compile a wealth of information so far unparalleled for Jordan in popular literature. While he writes for laypersons, he does not spare the specifics. This is not a glib guidebook for bored tourists. He assumes an audience with a strong archaeological interest, one that savors details and delights in relatively complete summaries of the finds.
The book covers all major archaeological sites on the Jordanian side of the Great Rift Valley from the mouth of the Yarmuk River in the north to Aqabah in the south. The sites are divided by geographical regions: the Jordan valley in the north, the Dead Sea Valley in the center and the Arabah in the south. In all, Khouri describes 61 sites and 9 small, discrete areas of sites. Visitors can reach almost every site easily with a normal, two-wheel-drive car.
Khouri plays no favorites with time periods, giving as much importance to the Stone Ages as to the Bronze Ages, as much to the Roman as to the Islamic periods. Not all the sites he lists are excavated, but for those that are (34 of them), he provides an excellent bibliography of the most important or readable technical articles.
Khouri accurately reports the results and views of the archaeologists. From time to time, the book gives contradictory interpretations and explores differing archaeological questions brought to the remains by archaeologists. This approach allows us to get involved not only in the ancient world, but in the scholarly debate itself.
Like any good guidebook, the information Khouri gives is concise and detailed. But unlike most guidebooks, he also gives much fuller descriptions, descriptions that can be used with pleasure even by scholars. Khouri not only speaks about what can be seen, but describes remains that are no longer visible on site and objects that may be viewed in the Amman Archaeological Museum.
The book contains a balanced discussion of the problem of the Cities of the Plain and the excavations on the southeastern shore of the Dead Sea; that is, do Bab edh-Dhra‘, Numeira and other Early Bronze Age sites in the area equal Sodom, Gomorrah and the other cities in Genesis 14 and 19? He concludes, along with the excavators, that the evidence so far neither proves nor disproves the existence of the Cities of the Plain in that locality.
Khouri observes that Biblical Eloth/Elath should be located at Aqabah on the eastern side of the gulf rather than at Eilat on the western side. He offers as evidence the similarity of the name of ancient Aqabah—Ayla—to the Biblical name.
Moreover, he suggests that the copper mines at Feinan, halfway between the Dead Sea and Aqabah, lend support to identifying Biblical Eloth with today’s Aqabah; Feinan contained the greatest copper mines in the region. Khouri reports an estimate that there are 150,000–200,000 tons of copper slag at Feinan. In contrast, the ancient mines at Timna (on the western side of the Arabah, southwest of Feinan) produced only about 2,000 tons of slag. It’s likely that the copper ore would have been shipped from an ancient port on the eastern, rather than the western, side of the gulf.
The book’s most significant inconvenience is its lack of cross-references between the 100 illustrations and the text. The unnumbered illustrations are clumped together in the center of the book on unnumbered pages. Although the book’s maps are good, it would have been useful to provide map coordinates for the sites, especially for those that are a bit difficult to locate or are not well known. In addition, large sites with more than one or two subsites, like Pella or Feinan, should have individual plans locating the individual sites.
I hope Khouri will follow this book with three others like it covering the antiquities on the plateau, one for the region north of the Zerqa (Jabbok) River (Gilead), a second for the central plateau (Ammon and Moah) to the Wadi Musa (River Arnon) and a third for the region to the south (Moab and Edom). Good news! He has already begun with several small booklets, also published by Al Kutba,a on such sites as Petra, Amman, Jerash, the desert castles and Um Qeis.
Excavations at Tel Michal, Israel
Edited by Ze’ev Herzog, George Rapp, Jr., and Ora Neghi
Publications of the Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv Univ. 8
(Minneapolis Univ. of Minnesota Press/Tel Aviv Sonia and Marco Nadler Inst. of Archaeology, Tel Aviv Univ., 1989) 462 pp.
Excavations at Capernaum, Vol. 1, 1978, 1982
Vassilios Tzaferis
Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1989), 234 pp., plus 14 plans
These volumes, providing final reports on their respective seasons of excavation work, add witness to a new generation of archaeological scholarship dedicated to more prompt publication of the final results of field research. Both are technical presentations of basic data and both represent team approaches to excavation and publication processes. Beyond this they invite little comparison.
The Herzog volume reports on work between 1977 and 1980 at Tel Michal, on the Mediterranean coast of Israel and within the southern boundaries of the city of Herzliya. The Tel Michal project was part of the larger Expedition to the Central Coastal Plain initiated by the Tel Aviv University Institute of Archaeology. Thus, from the outset the research design for investigations at Tel Michal embraced a broad regional and environmental focus. This is fully reflected in the report’s table of contents, which outlines 36 separate chapters. These include introductory discussions of the geographic setting and settlement history of the region; reviews of the 17 occupation phases (from Middle Bronze II A, 2000 B.C., to Early Arab, 1400 A.D.) identified at the tell; and specialist reports on a wide range of artifact and sample groups, along with some additional studies on the geology of the site and region.
The volume is illustrated throughout with figures presenting architectural plans and drawings of pottery and artifacts; pages 407–453 provide 84 black-and-white photographic plates. The report concludes with two appendixes listing excavated loci and acknowledging project participants. This report will be very useful to professionals and serious students of Syro-Palestinian archaeology, historical geography and ancient culture, but it will not attract the lay reader.
The Tzaferis volume provides a report on excavations conducted between 1978 and 1982 at Capernaum, Khirbet Tell Hum, on the north shore of Lake Tiberias in Israel. This work represents the first scientific investigation of that portion of the ancient settlement at Capernaum that is on property owned by the Greek Orthodox Church. It accordingly provides important data correlary to those reports produced by the still-continuing work on adjacent Franciscan-owned portions of the site (see V. Corbo, S. Loffreda et al., Cafranao I–IV [Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing, 1972–1975]).b The area investigated provides data relating to settlement from the Late Byzantine period (c. 650 A.D.) to the advent of Crusader invasions (c. 1050 A.D.). The volume is organized in ten chapters, the first four of which report on architecture, pottery and small finds. Chapters 5 to 7 provide numismatic studies, respectively treating coins in bronze and silver, a special hoard of gold dinars and the sgraffiti found on some of these. The final chapters discuss site identification and literary evidence and provide a brief historical summary. The volume concludes with a detailed bibliography and is accompanied by 14 unbound plans contained in a back-cover pocket.
The volume is very attractively designed and is introduced with eight plates of color photos. It is well illustrated throughout with black-and-white photography and with line drawings of excellent quality. The design, however, somewhat belies its contents. While the book is artistically quite beautiful, it is not a popular work. Its reports are of a wholly technical character and a general reader, who might be attracted by the for mat, will likely find the contents disappointing. Professionals, however, will find that the report provides a good resource for help in further understanding the political and cultural transitions in the settlement history of the southern Galilee in the second half of the first millennium A.D.