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Anyone who tells you that archaeologists don’t gossip is a liar.
I had dinner recently with Trude Dothan, the world’s leading authority on the Philistines. She was in Washington for a conference on art; joining us were BAR contributing editor Suzanne Singer and Trude’s colleague, Miriam Rosen-Ayalon. Mimi, as her friends call her, is an authority on Islamic art.
I won’t repeat any of the gossip, but one of the things we talked about over glasses of heartwarming Merlot was the dozens of bullae that have recently surfaced on the antiquities market. Bullae are little pieces of clay impressed with seals that once assured that ancient writings, usually on papyrus, had not been tampered with. Some of these seal impressions are quite extraordinary—we know of several bullae that had been made by seals belonging to King Hezekiah of Judah, who lived in the eighth century B.C.E., to his father Ahaz, to the commander of the army and to high court officials.
Where did they all come from? Of course none of us knew. But we speculated. Almost none of the known bullae were found in legal archaeological excavations. The exception was a hoard of 51 bullae recovered in the City of David by the late Yigal Shiloh. Perhaps, someone suggested, the others were stolen from an excavation before they became known to the director. But, given the large number of these recovered bullae, this seemed unlikely. Another possibility is that they were found by looters in an illegal excavation. But why could the looters find them and not the archaeologists? Bullae are indeed difficult to identify. They are deucedly hard to see in the excavated dirt.
Another suggestion is that they were found by scavengers in the dumps of legal excavations. One story is that shoeboxes full of such discarded dirt are sold to locals for a shekel or two, and they examine the contents of the shoebox with practiced eyes and hands to locate the treasures that then come onto the antiquities market.
Why is it that the looters find such extraordinary things—of all kinds—and the professional archaeologists less often do? Someone noted that about six Bar-Kokhba coins (from the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome, 132–135 C.E.) have been found in excavations, but there are about 60,000 of such coins on the market.
Where did the bullae come from—Jerusalem, or elsewhere? One rumor is that they come from somewhere around Hebron. “Everything comes from Hebron!” Trude said disbelievingly. She recalled that when the extraordinary anthropoid (human-shaped) coffins she eventually published first came onto the antiquities market, they too were said to have come from around Hebron. When she carefully examined them, she found grains of seacoast sand on them. Finally, they were traced to Deir el-Balah in the Gaza Strip. She doesn’t place much confidence in the rumors that the bullae come from Hebron.
It was a most enjoyable evening. More than that: We had a lot of fun. But we didn’t come close to solving the mystery of where these hard-to-find bullae come from.
Anyone who tells you that archaeologists don’t gossip is a liar.
