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The Probable Inventors of the First Alphabet:
Semites Functioning as rather High Status Personnel in a Component of the Egyptian Apparatus
Christopher Rollston
Introduction:
For some time, there has been discussion about the social status of those that developed (“invented”) Alphabetic Writing (i.e., elites or non-elites). Therefore, the nuanced discussion between O. Goldwasser (2010 and BAS web site) and A. Rainey (BAS web site) is the continuation of an old (and important) debate. Rainey contends that the inventors of the alphabet were sophisticated Northwest Semites that knew the Egyptian writing system. Goldwasser argues that the “inventors of the alphabet could not read Egyptian, neither Hieroglyphic nor Hieratic.”
As an Ausgangspunkt for these comments of mine, and to facilitate understanding for those not familiar with the data, I should like to reiterate certain factors that have formed the basic contours of the entire discussion for some time: (1) Non-Alphabetic Writing (i.e., Mesopotamian Cuneiform and Egyptian) is first attested for the terminal chronological horizons of the fourth millennium BCE. (2) The alphabet was invented once and this arguably occurred during the early second millennium BCE. All alphabets derive, in some fashion, from this original alphabet. (3) The script of the Early Alphabetic inscriptions is modeled on (certain aspects of) the Egyptian script, as Egyptologists have noted for some time (e.g., from Gardiner to Darnell). (4) The language of the Early Alphabetic inscriptions is Northwest Semitic, *not* Egyptian (e.g., ba‘lat).
§ Read the rest of this entry…
Cynthia Rufo is archiving more than a century of archaeological records and photos. Photo by Vernon Doucette.
BU Today (Boston University) is announcing that ASOR (The American Schools of Oriental Research) is opening its archaeological archive in Boston to the public.
Included in its collections are diaries of archaeologists; rare photos of various excavations, including Qumran in the West Bank, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered; and miscellanea, like a reproduction of an 1873 sultan’s permit for a dig in Palestine.
Be sure to make use of the archive when you are in the Boston area.
The American Schools of Oriental Research archive is open to the public, by appointment, at its headquarters, 656 Beacon St., Monday through Friday between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Access is free. Those interested should contact archivist Cynthia Rufo at 617-358-4428 or at asorarch@bu.edu. A description of the collections can be found here.
ASOR is pleased to announce that BASOR 358 (May 2010) has now been posted online at Atypon Link. This issue (and 3+ years of back issues) is available to BASOR online subscribers and members who have chosen an online subscription as part of their membership.
You may access the table of contents for free here (members and subscribers will have complete access):
http://www.atypon-link.com/ASOR/toc/basor/358/may+2010
The issue contains articles by Bradley J. Parker and Jason R. Kennedy, Jonathan S. Greer, Marcus Rautman, and Jodi Magness.
As a reminder, the last 3+ years of ASOR journals are available to ASOR members who have chosen an online subscription on Atypon Link. For details on ASOR membership and how to get access to BASOR, JCS, and NEA, please see the following URL:
http://www.asor.org/updates/atypon-online.html
Posted by Michael Homan
On Wednesday, November 18th, from 9:00 AM – 2:00 PM, members of the American Schools of Oriental Research will be volunteering at Holt Cemetery in Mid-City New Orleans.
Graves at Holt Cemetery on a rainy day in Mid-City New Orleans.
We will be working with
Save Our Cemeteries to record the current condition of Holt Cemetery. This includes surveying individual graves and their markers, along with taking photos in order to establish a record of the current state of the cemetery. The data we collect will then be compared to photos taken prior to the 2005 levee failures and can serve for future restoration work.
R.I.P. A.B. Hyman
Unlike other cemeteries in New Orleans where the dead are housed in above ground vaults, the remains of the deceased at Holt Cemetery are buried below ground. The graves are often marked with simple markers, such as writing on bricks or pieces of wood.
This “potter’s field” cemetery was established in 1879 as a place of interment for the city’s impoverished, and it is named after Dr. Joseph Holt, who was a member of the New Orleans board of health.
Buddy Bolden Grave Marker
Perhaps the biggest mystery surrounding Holt Cemetery involves the location of it’s most famous burial: jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden, credited by many as the individual most responsible for this great American invention. Bolden was buried in plot C-623, though records of the location of C-623 have long been lost.
Thus far 14 members of ASOR have signed up, and if you are interested in joining us please email Kelley Bazydlo. (Note: you do not need to be a member of ASOR to volunteer).
You can see more photographs of Holt Cemetery taken today in this Flickr set. Also, if your hotel is already booked for check in on November 18th, ASOR members who are interested in volunteering are more than welcome to stay at my house the night of November 17th. I’m located within walking distance from Holt Cemetery and the street car line which will take you to the Astor Crowne hotel in plenty of time for the opening session. Write to me here.
Contributed by Eric Cline.
Mea culpa. For more than a week now, I have remained silent, simply rolling my eyes amid news reports that Randall Price is going in search of Noah’s Ark this coming summer (www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,486684,00.html; dated 2 Feb 2009). Eighteen months ago, in Sept 2007, I published an op-ed in the Boston Globe which, in part, chastised my fellow archaeologists for not deigning to comment on such stories, or the outlandish claims that usually come from such expeditions upon their return (www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/09/30/raiders_of_the_faux_ark/; dated 30 September 2007). And yet here I have been for eight days, sitting on my hands with my mouth clamped firmly shut, doing nothing.
Noah's Ark Resting on top of Mt. Ararat. A note to the naive and gullible: this image was photoshopped.
But I’m not alone. In fact, only one archaeologist has spoken out so far (though to be fair, the non-archaeologist ‘biblioblogger’ Jim West did draw attention to the story on February 1st [
jwest.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/oh-and-price-is-also-looking-for-noahs-ark/]). Robert Cargill, of UCLA, posted comments on his Facebook page a few days ago: “’tis the season for pseudoscientific fundamentalists to venture out into the world and attempt to prove things that are sure to yield no results, lots of press, and raise lots of dollars in the process.” Amen, Brother Cargill—I couldn’t have phrased it better myself.
Price is the newly-appointed executive director of the Center for Judaic Studies, which opened in Fall 2008 at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. He has a Master of Theology degree in Old Testament and Semitic Languages from Dallas Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founder and President of the World of the Bible Ministries, whose stated goal is “to provide service to the Christian community by clarifying biblical truth through an increased understanding of the original context of the Bible which is Israel and the Middle East” (www.worldofthebible.com, last accessed on 10 February 2009). Their website also states: “We believe in the total verbal, plenary, unlimited, and inerrant inspiration of Scripture (Old and [sic: missing word; probably New] Testaments), and in it’s [sic] complete sufficiency and authority for faith and practice” (www.worldofthebible.com/message.htm, last accessed on 10 February 2009). (By the way, is it just me or does anyone else inherently mistrust a website with grammatical mistakes and missing words? Can’t they afford a proofreader?)
Price is what archaeologists and biblical scholars refer to as a biblical maximalist—i.e. someone who sees the Hebrew Bible as infallible and authoritative. As Price says in his book The Stones Cry Out: What Archaeology Reveals About the Truth of the Bible (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1997), “My perspective comes from a high view of the Bible (what is called by archaeologists the “maximalist position”), which believes historical corroboration with the archaeological record is both possible and preferable” (Preface, page 13). Price’s personal beliefs are nobody else’s business, except when they impact the so-called archaeology that he is ostensibly practicing, in which case they are everybody’s business.
But, back to my main point. Price is going looking for the Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey. Numerous amateurs and pseudo-scientists have searched in this region before, because Genesis 8:4 says that the Ark “came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.” However, as the Fox News report says, “For centuries, expeditions have set out to find Noah’s Ark but have been unable to find any concrete evidence, beyond that of an unwavering faith, to support its existence.”
Indeed, as I noted in my book, From Eden To Exile (Washington DC: National Geographic, 2007), ancient writers such as Josephus in the first century CE were already wondering where the Ark might be found and modern expeditions have been searching for Noah’s Ark without success since at least 1876. In large part that may be because Mount Ararat and the “mountains of Ararat” are not necessarily the same place; Mount Ararat was only given that name a few centuries ago and may have no connection whatsoever to the biblical account.
So why does Price think he can find the Ark now? According to Fox News, the new evidence that Price has, upon which he is basing his entire expedition, is that “A Kurdish shepherd told them that he had seen the ark, and even climbed on top of it, when he was a boy.” Is this good archaeological methodology? Hardly. As someone who claims to be a professional archaeologist, Price should know better than to base an entire archaeological expedition simply on the word of a Kurdish local who claims to have climbed on the Ark as a youth.
According to Fox News, during a preliminary trip last September, Price and his colleagues “found the spot…but it now is covered by an estimated 60-foot-deep pile of boulders.” Question: if it is covered by 60-feet of boulders, how can they see anything yet? They may have gone to the spot where the Kurdish shepherd took them, yes, but that in itself means absolutely nothing. One hopes, at the very least, that they are planning to do a bit of remote sensing before trying anything more. And yet, the expedition is also clearly guilty of a priori conclusions, as so many such groups are. One team member already told Fox News, “there will be discovery. The only thing that’s holding us back is to finance the machinery that we need.” This is no way to run an archaeological expedition. I can hardly wait to read the press release from the team when it returns from its mission…and chuckle over the excuses for why they didn’t find anything.
In all seriousness, we cannot let these media items just go by uncontested, even if it is much easier to let them slide through and hope that they fade quietly into the night. They don’t…and they won’t.
Next up: British rocket scientists who have found Sodom and Gomorrah. Yeah, right.
This blog entry represents the personal opinion of Eric H. Cline and is not necessarily held by all members of the American Schools of Oriental Research.
Later Note: Robert Cargill has now published the full text of his blog entry on Price’s Quest for the Ark at:
bobcargill.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/yet-another-ark-quest-randall-price-liberty-university-and-pseudo-scientific-religious-fundamentalism/
Contributed by Kelley Bazydlo
We are happy to announce that the Call for Papers and Sessions for ASOR’s 2009 Annual Meeting is now on ASOR’s web site (link). This year’s meeting will be held at the Astor Crowne Plaza in New Orleans from November 18-21, and you can find full information about registration, travel, and accommodations on ASOR’s web site (link). We encourage you all to pre-register and book your rooms today.
The Annual Program Committee has worked hard to develop a diverse offering of sessions. We are still able and eager to accommodate some new sessions, so if you have a new session that you would like to propose, please do so. The deadline for new session proposals is Friday, February 6, 2009. For those who would like to present papers, make sure to review the “List of Sessions for 2009” (check again after February 15 for newly approved sessions that will be posted then) and begin submitting your abstracts for review and inclusion in the 2009 annual meeting. The deadline for submission of abstracts is Sunday, March 1, 2009.
On behalf of Elise A. Friedland and Andrew M. Smith II, this year’s Program Committee Co-Chairs, I thank you for considering becoming a part of the academic program. Please do not hesitate to contact me (asormtgs@bu.edu) should you have any questions or comments. I look forward to seeing you this November in New Orleans.
Contributed by Sarah Harpending, American Center of Oriental Research
Mohammed “Abu Ahmed” Adawi has spent more than 40 years cooking for archaeologists in Jordan and Palestine. He began as a laborer at the dig in Jericho with Kathleen Kenyon in 1956. By 1960 he was cooking at ASOR in Jerusalem under then Head Chef Omar Jibrin. Abu Ahmed learned his basic techniques on the job, but he recalls that Omar could be secretive about his recipes.
Abu Ahmed preparing a Thanksgiving feast in 1982.
He first served as a cook at an excavation site in 1961 when Paul Lapp invited him to cook at Iraq al-Amir in Jordan. Without previous experience cooking outdoors, he says he just copied what he had seen Omar doing at the center and it usually worked. While they didn’t have the equipment of a regular kitchen, he was able, using a primus stove, to prepare the traditional repertoire such as roast beef, roast chicken, and stews for the dig crews. The roasts he would brown in a pan, then add water and cover the dish, leaving it to finish “roasting” slowly on low flame. Abu Ahmed noted that serving this kind of good simple food in the remote areas where they were digging really made people happy.
Abu Ahmed notes that food fads have come and gone, (low fat, high carb, no carb…) but that he has not changed his style because he really likes the old fashioned recipes for hearty food. More and more frequently the ACOR residents will ask Abu Ahmed to prepare traditional Arabic dishes, which he does, although he balks at dishes such as rolled grape leaves or stuffed vegetables, because these are very time consuming and they demand many hours of preparation.
Abu Ahmed relies on the library of cookbooks given to him over the years by women such as Meredith Dorenemann (Rudy Dornemann was the first Annual professor director of ACOR), Vivian Van Elderen, Sue Sauer and Linda McCreery. That said, he likes to read food magazines and doesn’t mind to try new recipes occasionally.
Abu Ahmed cooking in the ACOR kitchen, 2009
One of the desserts that Abu Ahmed is best known for at ACOR are his date bars, which are indeed heavenly – sweet, moist, and sticky. He shares the recipe below:
ACOR DATE BARS
Makes 3 dozen bars. Preheat oven to 400˚ and prepare a 13×9 inch baking pan.
Date Filling:
dates 3 cups cut up
sugar 2 tbs
water 1 ½ cups cook for 10 minutes, stirring, until thickened. Set aside.
Cookie Mix:
butter ½ cup
shortening ¼ cup
brown sugar 1 cup cream together with a mixer.
Flour 1 ½ cup
Salt 1 tsp
Baking Soda ½ tsp
Oats 1 ½ cups Mix into butter mixture, stirring lightly
Press half the cookie mix evenly into the greased pan. Spread all the date filling on top. Cover with the second half of the cookie mix, pressing it flat by hand.
Bake 25 minutes, cut up the bars in the pan while they are still warm.
Contributed by Thomas E. Levy, Stephen Savage and Chaitan Baru
Over the past five years, there has been a synergy of archaeological research that focuses on the application of information and digital technologies for advancing research and public outreach. One of the centers of this confluence of archaeology and computer science is researchers working in the Mediterrean lands. As part of an effort to foster a community of shared archaeological research – that takes advantage of the ever growing mass of digital data including settlement patterns, artifact collections, photographs and other materials, the MedArchNet (Mediterranean Archaeology Network) was established last year as an effort to create a cyberinfrastructure for archaeology around the Mediterranean basin. MedArchNet will be a series of interconnected digital archaeology atlases for different parts of the region delivered on a Google Earth plaform. The first ‘node’ is the DAAHL – Digital Archaeology Atlas of the Holy Land (http://daahl.ucsd.edu/DAAHL) which already has thousands of sites from Israel, Jordan and Palestine available. MedArchNet – DAAHL is an ASOR sponsored project and we are excited by our partnership with Oystein LaBianca, the new chair of ASOR’s Committee on Archaeological Policy. Working together with CAP and the excavation directors, we hope to bring the more than 60 ASOR affiliated excavation projects into DAAHL to help promote collaborative research and getting these projects known to the general public in the United States and around the world. A few days before the November 2008 ASOR meetings in Boston, around 30 archaeologists from Jordan, Israel, Norway, the UK, Italy, and the USA gathered in San Diego for 3 intensive days to launch the MedArchNet project. Below is an article by Tiffany Fox about the meeting and its goals.
First International MedArchNet Workshop Paves the Way for Online Archaeological Community
San Diego, CA, Dec. 10, 2008 — Together with their counterparts abroad, archaeologists and computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego are one step closer to creating a seamless, highly detailed online network that links temporally diverse archaeological sites around the Mediterranean region.
Representatives from 14 international universities and several non-governmental agencies held a recent workshop at the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) to discuss the future of the Mediterranean Archaeology Network (MedArchNet). When complete, MedArchNet will serve as the most up-to-date source of data for Mediterranean archaeological sites dating from remote prehistory to the early 20th century.
The workshop brought together key researchers who control the archaeology settlement pattern datasets for Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula — the areas (along with Southern Lebanon and Syria) that comprise MedArchNet’s first node, the Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land (DAAHL). Funding for the workshop was provided by the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN), Equinox Publishing Ltd (London), the Cotsen Intitute of Archaeology at UCLA and the UCSD Judaic Studies Program.
CISA3 Associate Director Tom Levy, co-principal investigator on the project, says the most exciting aspect of MedArchNet is the prospect of creating 'portal science' for the archaeology community working in the southern Levant.
Professor Tom Levy, associate director of Calit2′s Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3) and co-principal investigator on the project, says the most exciting aspect of MedArchNet is the prospect of creating “portal science” for the archaeology community working in the southern Levant.
“For us, this refers to establishing an online community of archaeological researchers who can share large datasets by being members of the cyberinfrastructure,” he remarks. “For researchers working in the Mediterranean lands which have seen so much turmoil throughout history, ‘portal science’ allows us to transcend borders, work closely together, and examine large datasets such as ancient settlement information (including the whole range of artifact assemblages from pottery to coins) that would be impossible using traditional methods. What was most valuable about the workshop was that for the first time we were able to bring an international group of some of the best archaeologists working in Israel, Jordan and Palestine in one room — and for two solid days — who have all expressed willingness to in-put and share data in DAAHL.”
Collaborating with Levy as PIs on the project are Arizona State University Affiliated Professor Stephen Savage, who is director of the Geo-Archaeological Information Applications (GAIA) Lab, and Chaitan Baru, division director of science research and development for UCSD’s San Diego Supercomputer Center. Savage says the team plans to fashion DAAHL (which already contains 17,000 archaeological sites) as a “database without borders” that could eventually be expanded to include archaeological sites in Egypt and beyond.
“DAAHL will function as an entrepot into the larger datasets available to researchers,” he elaborates, “but in a way that will facilitate cross-border research and cooperation. Since the current international borders in the Middle East were drawn in the 1920s following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, it follows that the archaeological periods in the DAAHL are best studied from a regional perspective that is not restricted to resources located in only one modern nation state. The DAAHL is designed to do just that.”
Representatives from 14 international universities and several non-governmental agencies held a recent workshop at UCSD's Calit2 to discuss the future of MedArchNet.
Once DAAHL and MedArchNet are fully established, they will represent robust tools for “mining” stories and narratives of archaeological research in the Mediterranean lands. Data (including high-resolution 3-D and multispectral images of artifacts) will be stored in a secure central facility, accessed and displayed over the Internet by way of a Google Maps/Google Earth interface, and visualized via emerging technologies such as museum-quality HIPerSpace tiled display walls. MedArchNet will also provide both OpenContent data and drill-down capabilities to access archived digital photographs and other digital collections that might require more limited access.
Professor Aren Maeir of the Institute of Archaeology at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University says that as the project progresses, he will “try to gently cajole, push and even drag more Israeli archaeologists to join the program.”
MedArchNet is an excellent combination of cutting edge — or even ‘bleeding edge’ — technology and archaeology, in which true inter-regional cooperation can be manifested,” he enthuses. “It will make archaeological knowledge, on may levels, accessable and understandable in a truly digital medium, and will provide an excellent resource for teaching.”
In addition to school teachers, the network will be made available to everyone from travel agents to public policy makers and state-of-the-art researchers, and could eventually serve as a model for similar cyberinfrastructures in other cultural areas of interest, such as anthropology.
“In terms of world cultural heritage, I think the MedArchNet cyberinfrastructure will provide an important model for other regions in the world,” Levy says. “Once we have it up and running, scholars, researchers, government administrators and the public will see how powerful a tool it is not only for archaeological research, but for all realms of material culture from all periods of time and all places where people are interested in world cultural heritage. For example, we are very interested in partnering with the National Folklore Support Centre for India in Chennai. They have thousands of interviews and videos dealing with traditional culture in India. The same cyberinfrastructure that we are building for MedArchNet could be adapted to the needs of our colleagues in India.”
Arizona State University Professor Stephen Savage, a so-PI on the project, says MedArchNet will serve as a beacon to scholarly cooperation and contact and will contribute greatly to the political stability of the region and the world at large.
“In the meantime, MedArchNet will be of tremendous benefit to archaeologists in the Middle East, especially now that the project has secured crucial funding from WUN and the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), the umbrella organization for North American archaeologists working in the Middle East.
Explains Levy: “Now that ASOR has sponsored MedArchNet/DAAHL, we are working closely with Oystein LaBianca, the new chair of ASOR’s Committee on Archaeological Policy (CAP), to invite the directors of the more than 60 North American archaeological research projects to join, participate and contribute data. This is especially important because ASOR CAP affiliated projects undergo a peer-review process to insure that their research designs, data collection methods, and publication plans are of the highest academic standard. By bringing ASOR affiliated projects to MedArchNet/DAAHL, we will have an unusually robust database for archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean.
While Levy acknowledges that “the only way to maintain excellence in the research is to have experts involved,” he also notes that facilitating such a large collaboration poses inherent challenges. Several of those challenges were discussed during the workshop, with some participants expressing concern about the sheer number of archaeological sites involved, and others pointing out that not all archaeological sites are currently marked on Google Earth. Still others called into question the possibility of establishing effective editorial quality control, while some warned that the “the politics of map-making” and the difficulty of interpreting data on different scales would complicate the effort. Also posing some controversy was a discussion about the establishment of a common working language — not an easy feat among researchers who span a multitude of nationalities.
“MedArchNet will work like a kind of ‘switchboard’ for directing people to different kinds of archaeological data and projects throughout a given region,” Levy points out. “Because so many scholars and institutions have spent their life-times and tremendous resources on carrying out archaeological research in a given area, one of the biggest challenges is to develop protocols and assurances to maintain the ‘brand’ those individuals and institutions in relation to their research and output. Insuring ‘brand recognition’ and copyright for all those contributing to MedArchNet/DAAHL is an issue we are working on now.”
The next step for Levy and his team will be to collect small DAAHL-related datasets from the scholars who attended the workshop, which include representatives from the University of Bergen, Israel’s Tel Aviv and Bar-Ilan Universities, the University of Sheffield and Jordan’s Friends of Archaeology organization. The workshop participants will also be asked to contribute a short research paper about their work in relation to MedArchNet for publication in a book to be published by Equinox.
“This will add a great deal to our existing database and demonstrate how approximately 30 researchers can work together,” Levy says. “The book will serve as another ‘gateway’ to MedArchNet. At the same time, we are applying for funds from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and other sources to build this cyberinfrastructure project. I’m pleased to say that the Institute for Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP) has already pledged a significant sum to help us build the first digital atlas node outside of the southern Levant — one for the Aegean region. So we will be extremely busy over the next year.”
The Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land (DAAHL), which already contains data for 17,000 archaeological sites, will be the first node in MedArchNet.
Aside from the immediate benefits to the archaeological community, Savage says he expects that MedArchNet will also promote peace and understanding in the region.
“As the project expands beyond the initial Holy land Node, we envision these benefits spreading around the Mediterranean, which is still the scene of ethnic and religious conflict,” he remarks. “Because of its emphasis on building archaeological datasets without borders, MedArchNet and DAAHL will serve as a beacon to scholarly cooperation and contact. By doing so, we can contribute greatly to the stability of the region, and hence, to the world at large.”
Related Links
Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land
Worldwide Universities Network
American Schools of Oriental Research
Global Moments in the Levant
Institute of Aegean Prehistory
Equinox Publishing
CISA3
Media Contacts Tiffany Fox, (858) 246-0353 , tfox@ucsd.edu
§ December 31st, 2008 § Filed under ASOR § 3 Comments
Welcome to the ASOR blog. This blog is meant to facilitate ASOR’s mission “to initiate, encourage and support research into, and public understanding of, the peoples and cultures of the Near East from the earliest times.”
For comments and questions, contact Eric Cline, Michael Homan, or Sarah Whitcher Kansa.
