Inside BAR

004

In about 1000 B.C. David, king of Israel, marched his army up a steep hill called Jebus by its occupiers and, on the summit, captured the Fortress of Zion, the citadel that the Jebusites had built several hundred years earlier. The 15-acre site then became known as the City of David. The name has survived for three millennia; it still refers to the same rocky spur, the most ancient Jerusalem.

In search of this earliest Jerusalem, Israeli archaeologist Yigal Shiloh has been excavating the City of David since 1978. Shiloh discovered a settlement dating back 5,500 years—far older than any previously discovered remains. He also uncovered part of the base of the Jebusite Fortress of Zion, as well as a tenth-century B.C. monumental stepped stone structure five stones high that supported the royal-administrative center of David and Solomon, and remains from many other layers of civilization. In “The City of David After Five Years of Digging,” BAR editor Hershel Shanks shares the often-spectacular findings of the City of David excavation team, recently published by excavator Shiloh.

Shanks’s book, The City of David, written before Shiloh’s excavations began, is a concise history and walker’s guide to the Biblical and archaeological history of this most ancient area of Jerusalem and is still widely read and referred to.

Nitza Rosovsky, born and raised in Jerusalem, draws on her extensive travel experience in Israel and neighboring countries to present “Traveling Companions—A Guide to Guidebooks.” Her lighthearted history of guiding and guidebooks is followed by no-nonsense descriptions and ratings of 21 different guides to Israel, Egypt and Jordan. If you want to know which book tells you public bus numbers, recent archaeological discoveries, or where to find the best falafel, turn to “Traveling Companion: A Guide to Guidebooks.”

Now assistant curator of exhibits at the Harvard University Semitic Museum, Rosovsky is the author of Jerusalemwalks (Holt, Rinehart and Winston) and frequently writes for The New York Times and The New Republic. Her family has lived in what is now Israel for more than 200 years: one side settled in the Galilee in the late 1770s; the other immigrated to Jerusalem in 1876.

Scholars’ Corner, a “New Analysis of the Crucified Man,” updates a discovery by Vassilios Tzaferis reported in “Crucifixion—The Archaeological Evidence,” BAR 11:01—the only excavated remains of a victim of crucifixion. In this issue, a reevaluation of the evidence, which includes bones still pierced by a large nail, leads Joseph Zias, an anthropologist, and Eliezer Sekeles of the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School to propose a quite different theory of how the victim was positioned on the cross.

Two shipwrecks, one resting squarely atop the other, lie on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea south of Haifa. Even more surprising than their position is their ages the two ships sank almost 1,600 years apart, one in the second century B.C., and the other in the 15th century A.D. In “Ancient Seafarers Bequeath Unintended Legacy,” Osnat Misch-Brandl describes the perils of ancient navigating that sank ships on the average of every 300 feet along Israel’s coast. She also illustrates real sunken treasure retrieved by state-of-the-art underwater archaeology and currently on display at Jerusalem’s Rockefeller Museum—coins, bracelets, silversmiths’ tools, bronze candlesticks and even several wooden ribs from a Mameluke ship.

Born at Kibbutz Gvar-Am in Israel, Misch-Brandl studied archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she now works at the Institute of Archaeology. A specialist in the Canaanite period, she serves as curator for the Israel Museum and has excavated at Athienou on Cyprus and at Tel Batash, Israel.

Professor Jacob Neusner, Brown University’s prolific and internationally known Judaic scholar, has long been controversial. He has come under particularly heavy scholarly fire since the 1982 publication of his translation of the Palestinian Talmud. In “The Neusner Phenomenon—Personality and Substance,” editor Hershel Shanks sorts out the issues and responds to the criticism with a substantive overview of Neusner’s immensely significant, pathbreaking scholarship that has nevertheless been subjected to important and perhaps valid criticism.

Nominations are now open for the 1986 Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Awards. In this issue are announcements of rules and the nine different categories covering popular and scholarly writing in Biblical archaeology and Bible.

In about 1000 B.C. David, king of Israel, marched his army up a steep hill called Jebus by its occupiers and, on the summit, captured the Fortress of Zion, the citadel that the Jebusites had built several hundred years earlier. The 15-acre site then became known as the City of David. The name has survived for three millennia; it still refers to the same rocky spur, the most ancient Jerusalem.