Inside BAR

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“Gaul hath three parts,” Julius Caesar declared in his memoirs, and now we can say that Ashkelon, too, hath three parts—not the actual city that sits on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, but the series of articles about it that Lawrence E. Stager has been writing in our pages. In the first two installments, Stager led us through the city’s history under the Canaanites, the Philistines and the Phoenicians. He brings his sweeping narrative to a close with an account of the Roman, Byzantine and Islamic eras, a period of more than a thousand years that began with the construction of monumental public buildings and impressive statuary and culminated in the defensive destruction of the city by the famed Moslem general Saladin. As its title, “Eroticism and Infanticide at Ashkelon,” implies, this final chapter examines, among other things, two aspects of ancient life that reveal the contrasting attitudes of Romans on the one hand and Christians and Jews on the other to fundamental questions of human behavior and the value of life—questions that are still very much with us today. Related to this, we print the results of our readers’ poll and some of their widely divergent opinions on whether or not to publish the oil lamps from Ashkelon decorated with erotic scenes.

Stager, Dorot Professor of the archaeology of Israel at Harvard, director of the Harvard Semitic Museum and head of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, will be digging again at Ashkelon this summer.

“Rolling the bones” once meant what it said. In the days before dice were made of plastic and bones were only something the family dog disposed of, dice were commonly made of bone. Indeed, bone was a strong, light and easily carved alternative to wood handles for knives and other implements, needles, buttons and more. Recent discoveries of comparatively large quantities of carved bone artifacts at Ashkelon have greatly advanced our understanding of the ancient art of bone carving, as Paula Wapnish describes in “Beauty and Utility in Bone—New Light on Bone Crafting.”

Wapnish received her Ph.D. in ancient Near Eastern languages from Columbia University, where she combined zoology with studies of ancient cuneiform texts. She has worked in Israel at Ashkelon and Tell Jemmeh since 1982 and has studied sites in Turkey, Lebanon and Iran. The co-author of Animal Bone Archaeology: From Objectives to Analysis (with Brian Hesse, Taraxacum, 1985), she is currently analyzing animal bones from nine sites in Israel to determine the changing patterns of diet and animal exploitation from the Late Bronze period through the Iron Ages. Wapnish teaches in the history department of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Not all archaeological discoveries are made in the field, nor even in the laboratory. Sometimes discovery requires only the mind of an acute reader who can make connections no one else ever noticed. Tsvi Schneider was such a reader, and his recollection of something he had read in a BAR article enabled him to identify with near certainty a seal impression made from the seal of Ezra’s grandfather, Azariah. In “Six Biblical Signatures—Seals and Seal Impressions of Six Biblical Personages Recovered,” Schneider details his new identification and places it in the context of all the other identifications of Biblical figures whose names have been present in four seal impressions and two seals.

Schneider is assistant librarian and slide archivist at Hebrew University’s Institute of Archaeology, in Jerusalem. A native Canadian, he received his Master of Library Science degree from the University of Western Ontario. Although he had no formal archaeology experience when he arrived in Israel in 1974, Schneider has since participated in excavations at Tel Mevorakh, Hazor, Yoqneam, Batash, Qassarwit and the City of David.

From electronic bank machines to programmable wristwatches, the computer revolution has affected almost every aspect of contemporary life. It should not be surprising, then, to learn that this revolution has also led to a profound change in the way archaeologists study the past. Harrison Eiteljorg, II, in “Reconstructing with Computers,” describes how this powerful new tool can help excavators with record-keeping, as well as with comparing how an ancient site may have appeared at different times—even giving the archaeologist a chance to take an imaginary flight over the site.

Eiteljorg established the Center for the Study of Architecture, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in 1987 to create a computerized data base of important archaeological sites and architectural monuments around the world. He received his Ph.D. in classical archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania and has excavated in Italy, Greece and Gordion, Turkey.

It was the last place in the world where anyone would expect to discover something new: a famous archaeological site that has been well dug and developed into a tourist attraction visited by thousands of people every year. Yet archaeologists and tourists alike had missed something at Herodium—until Dan Rodriguez spotted a glint of gold from the piled earth of an old excavation. In “Herod’s Lady’s Earring?” BAR assistant editor Michael T. Shoemaker recounts Rodriguez’s serendipitous discovery and presents an expert’s comments on the find.

“Gaul hath three parts,” Julius Caesar declared in his memoirs, and now we can say that Ashkelon, too, hath three parts—not the actual city that sits on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, but the series of articles about it that Lawrence E. Stager has been writing in our pages. In the first two installments, Stager led us through the city’s history under the Canaanites, the Philistines and the Phoenicians. He brings his sweeping narrative to a close with an account of the Roman, Byzantine and Islamic eras, a period of more than a thousand years that began with the construction of […]