School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
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ItemAll the Cherethites, and all the Pelethites, and all the Gittites (Samuel 2:15-18)’ - An Up-to-Date Account of Minoan Connections with the Philistines(Ugarit-Verlag, 2018)The ethnonyms Cherethite and Pelethite, and associations of the Philistines with Caphtor in the Old Testament point to a Cretan origin for them in literary tradition. This tradition, combined with the well-known Philistine production of Mycenaean style pottery, has been criticized by those reluctant to simplistically associate pots with peoples. Additional categories of evidence indicating an Aegean origin for the Philistines are well rehearsed. This contribution reviews the current state of understanding of the specific links between the Aegean and Philistia with regard to recent research, and with special reference to Crete. I briefly discuss ritual action, contextual analysis, architecture, administrative practices, inscriptions, and methodology. Using a transcultural approach, it is proposed that some aspects of Minoan culture survived in Philistia, embedded among other cultural components associated with the Mycenaeans, Cypriots, Anatolians, and Canaanites.
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ItemThe Legacy of the Sea Peoples: Raiders, Pirates, or Explorers [Interview given to James Blake Wiener](Karwansaray, 2019)An interview on the Sea Peoples as pirates with commentary on the recent study of Philistine DNA. In this interview, James Blake Wiener speaks to Professor Louise Hitchcock – one of the world’s leading experts on the Bronze Age Mediterranean and the ancient Aegean – about the Sea Peoples and their legacy in reshaping the ancient Eastern Mediterranean.
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ItemProfessor Louise Hitchcock Interview with Aidan Prewett(Political Animal Press, 2019)An examination of the role of crowds in the Bronze Age as related to crowd psychology.
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ItemThe Late Bronze Age at Tell es-Safi/Gath and the site’s role in Southwestern Canaan(De Gruyter, 2019)The Late Bronze Age in the Levant is a period of much interest to archaeologists, historians and biblical scholars. This is a period with intense international relations, rich in ancient sources, which provide historical data for the period, and is a crucial formative period for the peoples and cultures who play central roles in the Hebrew Bible. Recent archaeological research in Israel and surrounding countries has provided new, exciting, and in some cases, groundbreaking finds, interpretations and understanding of this period. The fourteen papers in this volume represent the proceedings of a conference held at Bar-Ilan University in 2014 (with the additional of several invited papers not presented at the conference), which provide both overviews of Late Bronze Age finds from several important sites in Israel and surrounding countries, as well as several synthetic studies on the various issues relating to the period. These papers, by and large, represent a broad view of cuttting edge research in the archaeology of the ancient Levant in general, and on the Late Bronze Age specifically.
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ItemThe Chronology of the Late Bronze (LB)-Iron Age (IA) Transition in the Southern Levant: A Response to Finkelstein’s Critique(University of Arizona, 2019)The question under discussion is whether the dates of the Late Bronze (LBIIB)-LBIII (Iron IA) transitions in three sites in the southern Levant, namely Megiddo, Tell es-Safi/Gath and Qubur el-Walaydah occur at the same time, as has been proposed by Israel Finkelstein in his article in 2016 in Egypt and Levant. Here we respond to Finkelstein’s comments. We add some new data, clarify the issues that were raised, and conclude that the Late Bronze (LBIIB)-LBIII (Iron IA) transitions occurred at different times in northern and southern Israel.
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ItemTomorrow Never Dies: Post-Palatial Memories of the Aegean Late Bronze Age in the Mediterranean(Peeters, 2019)The oldest words for future in Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew, Hittite, and ancient Greek can be translated as the back of the day or that, which is behind you. Thus, the future has always been conceived in terms of its relationship to the past. Although the act of remembering the past may lead to remorse and trauma, it can also create a sense of stability through nostalgia, identity maintenance, and belonging. One of us (Hitchcock under submission) has proposed that the Late Bronze Age collapses not from any one catastrophe, but that its social and political structures could not withstand the multiplicity of the changes confronting it. Drought, famine, disease, earthquakes, piracy, and popular uprisings may have all been suggested as being among these changes. Thus, it became necessary for the Late Bronze Age to develop or transform into something else. This transformation was neither peaceful, stable, short-termed, or uniform in character. Yet communities that survived these collapses clung to certain symbols (e.g. horns of consecration), ritualized practices (e.g., feasting, fragmentation, and ruin cult), and ways of life (e.g. curation of architecture) – and in some cases invented behaviors seemingly relating to the past - to preserve some stability in a sea of change. The result is that the preserved remnants of the past provided continuity with the past while forming a gradual transition to the future. Our paper considers how the social memory of what it meant to be Minoan, Mycenaean, and even ‘Mycenoan’ in the transition to the Late Bronze Age was hanging by a thread. Using examples from the Aegean, Cyprus and the ‘Sea Peoples’, we also examine the struggles to find meaning and purpose in the remnants of the Late Bronze Age as the concept of collective and self-identity gradually undergoes a transformation to the great civilizations of the Iron Age.
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ItemCuration in the Bronze Age Aegean: Objects as Material Memories(Peeters Publishers, 2019)The Minoans appear to have placed a special and even ritual premium on curated objects that stimulated memory, such as heirlooms and antiques. Some imported Old and Middle Kingdom Egyptian objects, for example, were curated by the Minoans for centuries before deposition, often in tombs. Minoan stone bull’s-head and relief rhyta – never found intact, and with pieces always missing – appear to have been intentionally smashed, with pieces given to witnesses as mementos of the occasion; some of these pieces were curated for generations before being deposited in ritual contexts. In the same way, antique Minoan objects were sometimes curated into the Mycenaean period, as exemplified by Neopalatial vessels found in LM III contexts, or by the fragments of Minoan stone bull’s-head rhyta found in LH III contexts on the mainland. This practice of curation, however, is not specific to the Aegean; it is in fact common to a large number of cultures, both ancient and modern. Two LH IIIA2/B alabastra found at Ugarit, for example, had been curated there for nearly a century before the city’s destruction. Fragments of animal-headed cups were curated in Philistia, only to be deposited later in ritual contexts. The tomb of Tutankhamun contained a number of curated objects, including a lock of hair from his grandmother Tiye, and travertine vessels from the reign of his great-great-great grandfather Tuthmosis III. Among the Samburu of Kenya, antique Venetian trade beads—prized for their exoticness and distance-value—have been passed down through generations of women at their weddings as symbols of fertility and abundance. The Haya of Tanzania curate the clothing of a deceased head of household; the clothing is subsequently worn by his successor as a means of transferring power to the new generation. After libations at a shrine, the Aymara of Bolivia curate and display the empty libation vessels next to the effigy of the deity, where they serve as reminders (both to the deity and to future visitors at the shrine) of the piety of those who poured the libations – a practice that may very well echo the curation of countless offering vessels at Minoan extramural sanctuaries. In this paper, we explore a wide array of such cross-cultural and ethnographic evidence for curation. Our aim is to illuminate the range of potential meanings that this practice had in the Bronze Age Aegean, and the spectrum of potential ways in which this practice was intended to stimulate Minoan and Mycenaean memory.
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ItemTechnological Insights on the Philistine Culture: Perspectives from Tell es-Safi/Gath(Penn State University Press, 2019)More than a century of study of the Philistines has revealed abundant remains of their material culture. Concurrently, our understanding of the origins, developmental processes, and socio-political matrix of this fascinating culture has undergone major changes. Among other facets, Philistine technology has been discussed, but in our opinion, a broad view of its importance for understanding Philistine culture is still lacking. The more than twenty years of excavation at Tell es-Safi/Gath, one of the central sites in Iron Age Philistia, offers an opportunity to review a broad range of technologically-related evidence from this site, and from this to offer a current interpretation of Philistine technology within the broader picture of the Iron Age and the processes, mechanisms, interactions, and identity politics of this culture.
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ItemTell it in Gath: Studies in the History and Archaeology of Israel: Essays in Honor of A.M. Maeir on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday(Ugarit-Verlag, 2018)Festschrift for Prof Aren M Maeir
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ItemPirates of the Crete-Aegean: Migration, Mobility, and Post-Palatial Realities at the End of the Bronze Age(Society of Cretan Historical Studies, 2018)Our recent research has used historical accounts of piracy to briefly examine pirate leadership, pirate culture and social organization, feasting activities, and studies of pirate geography to propose an interpretive framework for understanding the migration of the Sea Peoples as, inter alia, pirate tribes who plundered some of the great centers of the Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age. We suggest that as Mycenaean control over trade routes collapsed with the destruction and/or eventual abandonment of the Mycenaean palaces, Crete became particularly vulnerable to piracy, because of certain geographical and topographical features that characterized its coastlines. Unless defended, rocky coastlines, natural harbors, promontories, and river valleys were susceptible to piratical activity, as we shall discuss. Historical records indicate that piracy resulted in a desolation of coastlines, as coastal settlements and coastal plains might be attacked at night, with villages burnt and pillaged, and fields devastated. Inhabitants of such areas were motivated to move to defensible places further inland. Such abandonment and movement to defensible areas characterized early Iron Age Cretan settlements, such as Karphi, Kavousi, Kephala-Vasiliki, Chalasmenos, Monastiraki, Thronos-Kephala, and many others, which were relatively inaccessible from the surrounding landscape and represent only a fraction of the total. Our paper considers the role of piracy at the end of the Bronze Age in influencing migration, new realities, social practices, and changes in the cultural environment and social organization of post-palatial Crete. We also explore the idea that just as certain areas of Crete were geographically suitable for seeking refuge from pirates, other sites in Crete became similarly suitable hideouts for pirates.
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