The Forum
016
An Impatient Reader
On reading the
My problem now is that I don’t want to wait another three months for the summer issue to come. How long will it be before you print six magazines a year, like your sister publication Biblical Archaeology Review? So increase the subscription rate a little—I’ll pay, I’ll pay!
Portland, Oregon
This issue is currently under discussion. See the Editors’ Page in this issue.—Ed.
Cancel My Subscription
You have the audacity to call your publication Archaeology Odyssey, implying that you support the historicity of Homer, whose works have inspired and instructed the Western world for millennia.
Instead, I find articles—in the Premiere Issue, no less—that dispute not merely the blind bard of Chios’s authorship of the epics, but even his very existence. I am not interested in the opinions of unwashed barbarians!
I strongly suspect that many of your writers—Zeus, preserve us—probably even most of them, don’t even believe in the Olympians.
Cancel my subscription immediately!
Minneapolis, Minnesota
We suspect that Mr. Posch is joking. He is taking off on the cancellation letters in our sister magazine, Biblical Archaeology Review, from readers who take offense at articles that do not regard the Bible as literally true in all details—Ed.
At Your Service
I like your presenting the pros and cons of the Elgin marbles (“Lord Elgin’s Marbles,” AO 01:02). Next, you’ll get the Russians to return the Trojan gold to Berlin.
017
Will you have articles on the Etruscans?
West Palm Beach, Florida
We’re one step ahead of you. See “The Etruscans: Mastering the Delicate Art of Living.”—Ed.
Repatriate the Elgin Marbles to the Pagans
The British claim a legal right to the Elgin marbles?
Sorry, the plunderings of 19th-century imperialists do not look so legal to us anymore. The Greeks claim that the marbles are theirs? Where did they get the idea that culture is hereditary?
When I lived under Mediterranean skies 25 years ago, there was no such campaign to repatriate the Elgin marbles. Greece was under a military regime then. What, return the great artifacts of ancient Greek democracy to the modern Greek dictators? Better to leave them in a democratic land!
What are the Elgin marbles, culturally speaking? They are idols from a temple. Their significance is religious. Never mind Turkey or Britain or Greece. Return the Elgin marbles to their rightful owners. Give them back to the pagans!
Westmont, Illinois
Horrified by Antiquities Ads
While I applaud your magazine’s efforts to promote awareness of an important ethical issue within the field of archaeology (“An Odyssey Debate: The Elgin Marbles,” AO 01:02), I was horrified to see an advertisement for an art dealer gracing the inside cover of your magazine! Trade in ancient antiquities and the looting which procures such objects are two of the most important ethical issues facing archaeologists today. To accept advertising dollars from a company whose primary purpose is so antithetical to that of professional archaeologists is unconscionable.
Cincinnati, Ohio
Hershel Shanks replies:
We accept ads from antiquities dealers because we do not believe that banning antiquities dealers or refusing to allow them to advertise is an effective way to stop or even curb looting. On the contrary, it is counterproductive because it gives the often self-righteous people who plump for this solution the warm, fuzzy feeling that they are doing something about the problem of looting, when in fact they are simply ignoring it.
We are all against looting. Efforts to catch the looters should be intensified and looters locked up in jail.
But there is much more that can and should be done—or at least tried. Unfortunately, these things are not even considered by the one-note johnnies who do nothing but inveigh against antiquities dealers and anathemize collectors. The subject is a complicated one and we hope to explore it at length in future issues—including by inviting leaders of the opposition to express themselves in our pages. I recently delivered a talk entitled “How to Stop Looting” at a conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls (many of the scrolls were looted) held at the New York Public Library and sponsored by the Dorot Foundation. The conference papers are to be published and may provide the occasion 018for further discussion in Archaeology Odyssey.
The Mystery of the Seven-Day Week
In your Premiere Issue, the Origins piece (William W. Hallo, Origins: In One Era and Out the Other, AO 01:01) discussed the development of calendars based upon the month and the year. Well, what about the week? How far back does it go, and how many cultures around the world invented a seven-day week?
In Jewish culture, the week was related to the seven-day creation story. What other justification for a seven-day period would other cultures have, since there is no seven-day cycle in nature? Why not a five- or ten-day week, for example, based upon the number of digits on our hands? Or a six-day week, which could conveniently be divided into two- or three-day periods?
Ray, Michigan
William W. Hallo replies:
The seven-day week indeed has no natural basis, not even in the phases of the moon. Repeated attempts to find it among peoples of the ancient Near East have yielded no firm results. At most one can suggest a possible antecedent among the Old Assyrian colonists in Anatolia (Turkey) in the 20th century B.C.E. But this did not endure. Nor did other ancient Near Eastern cultures employ a week in the sense of an unbroken succession of seven-day cycles. The sabbatical idea in all its ramifications seems rather to be a genuine Israelite innovation. Its exact date of origin is hard to pin down, but it became the basis for much social as well as religious legislation.
The nearest thing to a natural heptad, or group of seven, may be the Babylonian conception of the “seven planets”—that is, the sun and moon, and the five planets the Babylonians were able to identify. These were rearranged by the Greeks in the order: Sun-Venus-Mercury-Moon-Saturn-Jupiter-Mars. Around the first century B.C.E., beginning perhaps in Egypt, where the 24-hour-day had a long history, these hours were correlated with the seven planets in their Greek order (Sun-Venus-Mercury-Moon-Saturn-Jupiter-Mars) in such a way that each planet was assigned to every seventh hour of the day, so that, after every 24 hours, a new planet began the new day. (See my chart in Hebrew Union College Annual 48, 1977, p. 17; reprinted in Frederick E. Greenspahn, ed., Essential Papers on Israel and the Ancient Near East [New York: New York Univ. Press, 1991], p. 324.) The Christian week combined this “planetary week” with the older Jewish conception of the sabbatical week to provide the calendaric standard for most of the world to this day.
The Statue of Liberty, Too
Maryl Levine (Recent Finds, in Field Notes, AO 01:02) tells us that restorer Christian Echmann has identified the original technique used to sculpt the copper statues from Egypt’s 6th Dynasty. She might have mentioned that the Statue of Liberty was also sculpted by hammering sheets of metal—though on a much larger scale, of course. I suppose the technique is valid even today.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Let’s Hammer This Out
The last paragraph of the Spring issue’s Recent Finds (see Field Notes, AO 01:02) begins, “Echmann has also been able to identify the original technique used to sculpt the statues [in the Egyptian Museum].” The original press release, by Professor Reiner Schtadelmann of the German Institute of Archaeology in Cairo, says that “The surprising discovery was that the figure was cast and not hammered.” Which method of construction is correct?
Jerusalem, Israel
Maryl Levine replies:
According to Christian Echmann, of the Romisch-Germanisch Zentralmuseum in Mainz, Germany, there have been a number of theories about how the copper statues in the Egyptian Museum were made. But the most current analysis indicates that there was no copper casting.
Copper sheets were cut to the sizes needed for the various sections of the body. Then the sheets were heated and hammered into the shape of the body parts. Sections of the body were attached to other body sections with copper nails, which are visible today.
Phantom Mummies?
In her review of The Complete Pyramids (“Architecture of the Afterlife,” AO 01:02), Ann Roth writes that the pyramids are “huge, geometric structures with mummified bodies inside”—which is simply not true. The one reported case I know of regarding the Giza pyramids was a hoax, planted with the intention to glorify and legitimize the researchers’ work. There is no evidence that a mummy or sarcophagus was ever found in the pyramids of Giza. As far as we know, the upper chambers of the Great Pyramid were not penetrated until Caliph Al Mamoun of Baghdad entered them in 820 A.D. and opened the upper chambers, which had been intact until then. And he found no mummies or sarcophagi.
Lake Matthews, California
Ann Macy Roth replies:
Though no mummified human remains of Old Kingdom date have 019been recorded in the three major Giza pyramids, such remains have been found in several of the 18 other Old Kingdom royal pyramids. Human remains from this early time are quite rare, but enough survive to make it clear that mummification of a sort was generally practiced among the elite, and to make it reasonable to suppose that the kings who were buried in the Giza pyramids were mummified.
Mr. Brown is wrong about sarcophagi. Large granite sarcophagi still lie in the burial chambers of Khufu and Khafre, and another sarcophagus was removed from the burial chamber of Menkaure by its discoverers. That these burial chambers had to be forced open in medieval and modern times does not mean, as Mr. Brown believes, that they were not robbed in antiquity.
The view that the Giza pyramids were not tombs is frequently argued by those who propose silly and sensational explanations for them, claiming that they were markers of buried treasure, or alien landing beacons, or star maps. That they are tombs can be shown by their location in an extensive cemetery, full of other tombs (some with intact burials); by their place in a long sequence of pyramid development, including earlier pyramids in which mummified remains have been found and later pyramids inscribed with funerary texts; and by the fact that they contain sarcophagi, shaped and placed like others in which people were buried. And it can be shown by textual sources, such as the later Harper’s Song, which tells us that “The gods [that is, dead kings] who existed in earlier times rest in their pyramids.”
The Road Not Taken
I loved the geographical joyride of “In Pharaoh’s Footsteps,” AO 01:02, retracing Thutmose III’s and General Edmund Allenby’s campaigns at Megiddo.
But the map is incorrect. First, the scale is off by a factor of ten.
[Mr. Chilcott is correct: The legend should have read 15 miles and 20 kilometers rather than 150 miles and 200 kilometers.—Ed.]
Second, your map labeled the northern pass as the “Abu Shusheh Pass.” Nope. The true Abu Shusheh Pass is not on your map and should have been. It enters the Plain of Esdraelon halfway between Yoqneam and Megiddo, near what today is called Tell Shush. While the initial surge to the plain of Esdraelon by Allenby’s forces was through the Musmus Pass, additional forces—the 5th Cavalry Division—followed immediately through the Abu Shusheh Pass. These forces never came near Yoqneam, as the map and article incorrectly indicate.
Perhaps author Eric Cline took the words of Thutmose’s officers too literally. They called attention to only three passes leading across the Carmel foothills to the plain, but in fact there were numerous routes. Scholarly opinion identifies the northern pass—the one misnamed on your map—as the road not taken by Thutmose. Nor was it taken by Allenby.
Imperial Beach, California
An Impatient Reader
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