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Royal Cities of the Biblical World

Joan Goodnick Westenholz, ed.

(Jerusalem: Bible Lands Museum, 1996) 334 pp., $95

In this elegantly produced, lavishly illustrated catalogue for the Bible Lands Museum’s current major exhibit, Jerusalem—A Capital for All Times, Royal Cities of the Biblical World (running through December 31, 1996), readers will find a collection of concise, well-written essays on the archaeology and history of eight important cities of the ancient Near East. Although the roster of ancient capitals included here is clearly not meant to be exhaustive (Mari and Thebes are two obvious omissions), this catalogue, edited by Joan Goodnick Westenholz, chief curator of the Bible Lands Museum, presents an eclectic survey of recent archaeological excavations and historical interpretations relating to major urban sites throughout the region.

The Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem, home to the vast collection of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean antiquities assembled over a lifetime by art dealer Elie Borowski and his wife, Batya,^a has occasionally been subject to criticism by opponents of antiquities dealing for its display of many unprovenanced or illegally excavated artifacts.^b Yet there is hardly a hint of mere antiquarian aestheticism or possessive connoisseurship in this book. Even though the exhibit is based primarily on selected objects from the museum’s collection (grouped with specially commissioned models of the various ancient capitals), the contributors to this volume offer a wide range of political, cultural, social and economic perspectives that far transcend the exhibited artifacts.

While this catalogue might have benefitted from a more general introduction highlighting current theories about ancient urbanization (the introduction by Moshe Weinfeld presents only Biblical material on the nature and significance of ancient capital cities), the contributions on specific cities often combine a detailed description with additional articles on wider themes. Thus, after reviewing basic finds from the Third Dynasty of Ur, Joan Goodnick Westenholz and Marcel Sigrist offer a highly readable survey of the history, culture, economy and religion of the neo-Sumerian empire. Likewise, Jak Yakar’s introduction to the archaeology of the Hittite capital of Hattusha is followed by David Hawkins’s essay on the city’s royal library and archives and the history of the Hittite empire.

Two particularly important Egyptian capitals are represented. Ian Shaw’s chapter on the royal city of Akhenaten provides an account of the politics and personalities of the XVIII Dynasty along with a detailed description of the various quarters of the city of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten (c. 1352–1336 B.C.E.), which were excavated in the early decades of the 20th century.

The chapter on Tanis in the eastern Delta by Philippe Brissaud sheds light on the often-neglected third intermediate period (1070–712 B.C.E.), when Egypt’s decline as a regional power made way for the growth of independent kingdoms in the Land of Israel. Brissaud’s description of the long history of excavation at Tanis and the recent dig at the Temple of Amun includes material rarely presented to the general public.

The period of the great Iron Age empires of Mesopotamia and Iran is covered in three chapters. The site of the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh, with its citadel on the mound of Kuyunjik, is presented by John Russell, with an added excursus on Assyrian culture by Giovanni Lanfranchi. In the chapter on Babylon, Joan Goodnick Westenholz 067presents the history and exploration, while David Weisberg offers an essay on the culture of the neo-Babylonian empire. Jean Perrot and Daniel Ladiray deal with the Achaemenid capital of Susa, and Irit Ziffer provides a historical, architectural and aesthetic survey of Achaemenid art.

Jerusalem is, of course, the centerpiece of this exhibit and catalogue. Although it ranks far below any of the other ancient capitals in sheer size and architectural grandeur, Jerusalem’s continuing, living legacy is far more pervasive than any of the rest. Concluding the volume, Dan Bahat and Gila Hurvitz present a history of the exploration of Jerusalem from the 1860s to the 1990s, with Bahat also offering a summary of the literary and textual sources for Jerusalem’s history through the end of the First Temple period.

Royal Cities of the Biblical World is a fascinating, up-to-date survey of recent excavations of important Near Eastern sites—complete with spectacular illustrations, many in full color. Though intended as an exhibit catalogue, it is a valuable reference work. In providing a wider historical and cultural context for the artifacts presented in the exhibition, it is a publication of which any museum in the world, public or private, could be justifiably proud.

The Sea of Galilee Boat

Shelley Wachsmann

(New York/London: Plenum Press, 1995) 420 pp., $24.95

Fieldwork in archaeology is usually laborious, repetitive and exhausting. Sometimes it is even downright boring. There are moments of high adventure, but they occur far less frequently than the general public thinks. While the potential for an exciting discovery is always there, the actual dosage of drama or romance is usually small and often passes unnoticed, only to be realized in retrospect. By and large, archaeologists go about their job of adding incrementally to our understanding of the past without much fanfare. Finds that jolt conventional thinking or capture the popular imagination are rare.

But they do happen.

One such discovery occurred in Israel on January 24, 1986, along the western shore of the Sea of Galilee near Kibbutz Ginosar. The Middle East had been suffering from a long drought. The level of Israel’s great inland sea had dropped dramatically, revealing vast expanses of the bottom that had not seen the light of day for centuries, perhaps millennia. Two brothers from Kibbutz Ginosar, Yuval and Moshe Lufan took advantage of these unique conditions to explore the newly exposed mud flats. Their dream was to spot traces of an ancient ship or boat, a find that would be a first for this Biblical lake.

Amazingly, they found precisely what they had been seeking—a boat dating approximately to the time of Jesus.

It is hard to keep secrets in Israel, and the Lufans’ discovery of the Galilee boat was no exception. Rumors about the find spread rapidly throughout the country, fanning the popular imagination. It was variously identified as the “Jesus Boat” (a craft associated with Jesus’ activities on this lake), a Turkish treasure ship purported to have been bombed by the British during World War I, or some improbable permutation of the two.

A blizzard of international attention blanketed the Sea of Galilee. News media from around the world, drawn by the irresistible appeal of an artifact called the “Jesus Boat,” joined the hordes of Israelis who descended daily on the site. Fortunately, Shelley Wachsmann, then the underwater archaeologist for the Department of Antiquities (now the Israel Antiquities Authority) and currently a marine archaeologist with the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, received authorization to take charge of this important find before the frenzy of publicity completely foundered any hope of a scientific study of the boat.^c

The story of the excavation, refloating and early preservation of the ancient hull—taking place in the days following Wachsmann’s first involvement—reads like the strained, fantastic plot of a Hollywood archaeology movie, with improbable events and a huge, unlikely cast of characters. The excavation was nonstop; too much happened at too many levels, with so many people needing to make contributions; too many improvised solutions had to work just right. The dramatic round-the-clock rescue of the Galilee boat, as rising waters threatened the exposed hull (yes, the drought broke just as the excavation began!), seems just too farfetched.

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As incredible as it seems, however, this scenario is not fiction. I know from others who worked on this project that Wachsmann’s extraordinary excavation happened as he tells it here.

The recovery of the Galilee boat provided the raw material for a first-rate, factual adventure story by anyone’s standards. And that is precisely what Wachsmann offers. He recreates the excitement of the boat’s excavation in such a vivid, immediate way that one feels personally involved in the unfolding drama.

Picture this scene: the excavators encase the ancient hull in polyurethane in order to float it from where it was found to a specially constructed conservation pool at the nearby Yigal Allon Center of the Kibbutz Ginosar. Wachsmann and his team lift the entire package into its new home and chip away the protective coating, taking pains to re-immerse the hull in fresh water each night to prevent further deterioration before final preservation (with polyethylene glycol) can begin. But suddenly, while the timbers sit in their new bath, “little red wormlike larvae” infest the water surrounding the boat like some Biblical plague. This biological attack proves not to be harmful to the artifact itself, but the tiny creatures produce a decidedly unpleasant environment for those working in and around the hull.

While the professional staff debates the pros and cons of various chemical treatments to remove the insects—along with the potential risks of increasingly waterlogged wood—Moshe Lufan, one of the boat’s discoverers, devises his own ecologically correct solution: One night he introduces three large goldfish into the tank, and the mosquito larvae quickly disappear. The fish, responding well to the dining opportunities afforded by their new surroundings, carry out their responsibilities efficiently and solve an unforeseen problem quickly without doing damage to the fragile hull. Has any major archaeological find ever before had goldfish as guardians? I think not.

This episode, and there are many more like it, underscores the divergent thinking and creative improvisation that marked this entire project. But I will let Wachsmann tell his own story. All I will say is that his fast-paced, colorful narrative presents the team’s archaeological effort as scientific detective work—as a series of unique challenges that had to be met quickly and ingeniously if the boat was to be saved.

Everything about the book works well. It is easy to start but very hard to put down. The reader is transported back to those action-filled weeks in the winter of 1986 when the Galilee boat first reappeared after two millennia beneath the water. Prepare to be swept into the tension of an unprecedented excavation, in which time is the enemy and every decision is crucial and usually irreversible. As archaeologists work to free the boat, they are surrounded by a changing cast of curious or greedy people, who wait beyond the demarcating barriers, looking to ransack the site if given the slightest opportunity. Meanwhile, outside the zone of archaeological activity, rising water levels threaten to reclaim the fragile, newly exposed hull that for centuries has been protected by the bottom mud.

Whether managing this engrossing adventure on site or retelling it here, Wachsmann never compromises his archaeological standards. The scholarly rigors of recovering, preserving and understanding a new body of data are never evaded. Happily, neither is the popular appeal of such a compelling story. Simply stated, this work is the most successful presentation of an archaeological discovery to the general public that I have read in a long time. Wachsmann sets a high standard for archaeologists who want to bring their fieldwork to a general audience. His book is a pleasure to read; it is good science, and it is just plain fun.

Sepphoris

Eric Meyers, Ehud Netzer and Carol L. Meyers

(Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992) 63 pp., $14.95 (paperback)

Zippori

Ehud Netzer and Zeev Weiss

(Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1994) 72 pp., $16 (paperback)

Sepphoris (Zippori in Hebrew) is a site on a hill in lower Galilee, about three miles north of Nazareth, rising more than a hundred yards above the valley floor. It is a fine defensive location for a fortified city. The site controlled a major road junction in antiquity, the intersection of the north-south Via Maris with the east-west highway that connects Ptolemais-Akko, on the Mediterranean, with Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee.

Even though Sepphoris is clearly visible from Nazareth and was for many years the major city of the region, it is not mentioned in the New Testament. This was not an oversight: The ministry of Jesus took place in the small towns and villages of Galilee, not in its cities. Sepphoris only became an important center of Jewish learning when Judah “the Prince” and the Sanhedrin moved there in about the beginning of the third century C.E.—as Judah was completing the codification of the Mishnah, the core document for rabbinic Judaism.

Modern excavation at Sepphoris began in 1985 with a team from the University of South Florida headed by James F. Strange and—simultaneously—a Duke University and Hebrew University joint expedition led by Carol and Eric Meyers and Ehud Netzer. In 1990 this double excavation doubled again: A team from Tel Aviv University under Tsvika Tsuk began to dig, the Florida team continued its work, and the joint expedition became two joint expeditions—one for each university, with the Hebrew University excavation now led by Netzer and Zeev Weiss. (The South Florida team has a site on the World Wide Web; its home page address is http://www.colby.edu/rel/Sep94.html. The Hebrew University team is working on a Web page of its own.)

We have limited archaeological evidence from Sepphoris from the Iron Age (1200–586 B.C.E.) and the Persian (530–332 B.C.E.) and Hellenistic (332–37 B.C.E.) periods. But then Josephus picks up the story. In about 57–55 B.C.E., the Roman proconsul of Syria, Gabinius, divided Jewish territory into five districts, with a Roman council for each; the council for Galilee was located at Sepphoris. Later, as a consequence of the city’s participation in an uprising following the death of Herod the Great in 4 B.C.E., Roman forces sacked and burned Sepphoris and sold its inhabitants into slavery. Afterwards, Herod’s son, Herod Antipas (4 B.C.E.–39 C.E.), inherited the city, rebuilt it and restored its fortifications. Under the Herodian kings, Sepphoris’s character changed as well: The population was now mixed, both Jew and gentile, and the city sided with Rome (and against Josephus) during the First Jewish Revolt (66–70 C.E.), when the Romans marched into Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple.

During the second century C.E., Sepphoris was given the Roman name Diocaesarea, “[city] of Zeus and Caesar.” But its Jewish quality was also strengthened by the influx of refugees from the Second Jewish Revolt (132–135 C.E.) and particularly by the growth of the rabbinic community.

Although the site contains a fine Roman theater from the late first or early second century C.E., the most spectacular “Roman” find is a third-century villa with a central triclinium, or reception and banquet hall, paved with some of the best-executed mosaics yet discovered in Israel, depicting more than a dozen vivid scenes from the life of the popular Greek deity Dionysos.

More than 30 mikva’ot (Jewish ritual baths) have been excavated. Rabbinic tradition recounts that the city contained no fewer than 18 synagogues at the time of Rabbi Judah. The Hebrew University team excavated a later synagogue in the northern area of the site. Its carpetike mosaic floor depicts familiar themes: the Torah shrine flanked by menorahs; the wheel of the zodiac, with the 074central image not the sun god in his chariot (as might be expected from the parallels at nearby Hammath Tiberias and Beth Alpha) but the sun itself; and Biblical scenes, including the Akedah, “the binding [of Isaac],” that profoundly disturbing account from Genesis 22 of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son. (What is it that made the symbolism of the Akedah so important to congregants at Sepphoris and Beth Alpha in the sixth century and to those in Dura-Europos in Syria several centuries earlier? The Akedah occurs prominently in synagogues in all three locations.)

Jewish, pagan, Roman, “rabbinic”: Whose city was Sepphoris? And does Sepphoris—or Nazareth, or perhaps Beth Alpha—represent antiquity’s “real” Galilee? In rabbinic tradition Sepphoris is an important place, but surprisingly, it isn’t mentioned in the earlier Christian texts, even those that have much to say about Galilee. Nonetheless, there was great diversity here (rabbis or Christians appearing on the scene, Roman legions withdrawing) for an area so compact (in parts of lower Galilee, only 30 miles separate the Sea of Galilee from the Mediterranean).

The recent excavations add a necessary balance to the traditional picture: Ancient Sepphoris was more diverse than rabbinic literature would allow and more important than Christian literature wishes to suggest—as visitors to the new archaeological park, which provides an attractive setting to the ruins, will quickly gather. (And these archaeologists are masters of the topic: Eric and Carol Meyers and Jim Strange have been digging up the Roman period in Galilee for a quarter century.) Until final publication by the various excavation teams, these two pamphlets (and the Web sites!) are essential. Sepphoris discusses the joint-expedition discoveries through the 1990 season, with emphasis on the Roman villa. Zippori gives a more general picture and provides an account of the work done after 1992, as the site was being developed for tourism. Of the two, Sepphoris has greater technical detail and more exciting finds. Zippori has brighter color plates and more of them, but its prose is sometimes vague—and my copy, at least, was badly bound; most of the pages have by now become detached from the cover.

Both publications may be recommended to anyone who wishes a more complete picture of an area of the Greco-Roman world with a religious complexity and an importance that cannot be denied. Zippori would be the more useful guide for visitors to the park today, while Sepphoris is the better reference work.

Royal Cities of the Biblical World

Joan Goodnick Westenholz, ed.

(Jerusalem: Bible Lands Museum, 1996) 334 pp., $95