Callousness among the Ruins

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Ruins of Palmyra's Arch of Triumph destroyed by ISIS (photo taken March 27, 2016)

On March 27, 2016, the Syrian army recaptured Palmyra from ISIS. By the next day, news headline after news headline trumpeted the liberation of its ancient remains and assessed their status: Damages to Palmyra Ruins in Syrian Recapture Less Than Feared, Experts Say (Guardian). Retaking Syria’s Palmyra Reveals More Shattered Antiquities (AP). 80 Percent of Ancient Palmyra in ‘Good Shape’: Syrian Expert (Middle East Eye). Archaeologists and other scholars shared before and after photos of the damage on social media.

What might not have been clear if you followed the news stories and photographs is that there is also a modern town of Palmyra (Arabic Tadmur) adjacent to the ancient site, with tens of thousands of inhabitants. 

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And here in microcosm is an unsettling problem/trend of the entire war: media outlets and academic interest have obsessed over ISIS’s treatment of antiquities, often at the expense of dealing with their human victims. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have died in the war; millions are refugees, millions more internally displaced. But they are muted in our coverage.

We can name the sites that have been looted and damaged: Palmyra and Apamea and Mari – the Temple of Bel, the Arch of Triumph, the Great Mosque of Aleppo. But the Syrian dead are nameless.

There is one important exception to this: Khaled al-Asaad, an archaeologist beheaded by ISIS at Palmyra last year. Why is al-Asaad unique? Because (for academics) we can relate to his field and his interest in the ruins of Palmyra? Or perhaps for another reason. It has been reported that ISIS murdered al-Asaad because he refused to reveal to them the location of antiquities that had been hidden for safekeeping. Perhaps we care about al-Asaad because he made the same calculation of the value of monuments versus human (Syrian) life that we do.

This is a morbid thought – but is it wrong? Consider al-Asaad’s “obituary” in the Daily Mail, written by popular historian Tom Holland. Obituary is Holland’s own word, but I place it in quotes because this is a very unusual example of the genre. Al-Asaad is not mentioned until the eighth paragraph. There are three paragraphs on his death, only one and half on his life – and eight on the history of Palmyra. The piece focuses on that history and its loss at the hands of ISIS. Al-Asaad simply becomes a character within that tragedy – not the real al-Asaad, but an idealization, a “martyr for civilization” as the headline proclaims. Al-Asaad does not speak for himself; instead we speak for him. “We know Khaled al-Asaad felt” that the destruction of Palmyra’s ruins is blasphemy. “He must have anticipated what his fate would be” after transporting Palmyrene artifacts safely out of the city. That ISIS was killing an ideal “was something al-Asaad himself surely appreciated.”

In short, this is an obituary where the deceased barely appears, and when he does he serves as a ventriloquist’s dummy for our own thoughts.

On the other hand, if we actually listened to Syrians themselves, we would find that their relationship with their cultural heritage is much more varied and complex. We would hear that al-Asaad was just one of a network of thousands of employees of Syria’s Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums, archaeologists and others, that has worked to protect artifacts from ISIS and the Syrian army and various rebel groups alike. And we would hear the archaeologists themselves describe the role that Syrian citizens have played, in preventing ISIS from causing further damage at Palmyra, for instance.

But there are other responses to the monuments, too. Recently, Kanishk Tharoor provided a glimpse in his opinion piece “Life Among the Ruins” for the New York Times. Significantly, Tharoor discussed how these monuments have been a part of the daily lives of the people living in Syria. One voice in that piece belongs to Syrian archaeologist Salam Al Kuntar, currently at Penn: as Al Kuntar says, “I have a special love for Palmyra because the Temple of Baal is where my mother was born.” That is, for so many the monuments are not just archaeological data to be studied or romanticized symbols of civilization, but a very tangible part of everyday life. As it happens, the ancient site of Palmyra itself was continuously inhabited right into the twentieth century. Modern mudbrick houses were built among the ruins of the classical city. 

"Palmyra (Tadmor). Native village among the ruins of Temple of the Sun" (i.e., Temple of Bel). c. 1900-1920.

Matson Photograph Collection, via Library of Congress

The inhabitants abandoned the site only in the 1930s, moving to a new town next to the ruins in order to clear the way for French excavations of the ancient site. This reveals as presumptuous the idea that these ruins are owned equally by all of us as part of world heritage. The livelihood of many Syrians depends on these monuments, too: tourism is an important part of the local economy – or at least it was before the war.

Other voices belong to the people of Al Rafid, a village near Quneitra in southwestern Syria. The SMART News Agency posted a video that appears to show villagers dismantling a medieval building in order to rebuild their homes. This is a normal process: archaeologists continually find evidence for how stone is reused again and again at sites. And in the current situation, it feels a little hollow to lecture people about preserving the past when they need to literally rebuild their lives.

Instead of staking presumptuous claims to these monuments, or muting the Syrian victims of the conflict, perhaps we should take a moment of silence. For the dead. For the displaced. And for those who remain, carrying on with their lives.

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And now, those of you who wish are free to return to mourning lifeless stone.

Eating Our Young

Francisco Goya, Saturn

Museo del Prado, Madrid

 

It should’ve been a proud moment.

There was my name on the cover and the title page, for contributing a chapter to the new volume: Ashkelon 5, by Yaakov Huster. Inside, the editors’ preface praised my work in helping to put this volume out.

It should’ve been a proud moment, but it wasn’t. It was one of anger and sadness. As it happens, I had co-authored the entire volume.

I had been invited by Huster, the original author, to write the book with him when he was unable to complete it on his own. I also had a short-term editing contract to work on Huster's contributions to the volume. However, after two years of delays from my co-author, and the refusal of the editors of the series, Daniel Master and Lawrence Stager, to pay me for my editing work for more than a year after it was completed, I was forced to withdraw from the volume, taking my authored work with me. At that point, the series editors claimed (falsely) that they owned my authored work, and simply announced that they would use it without my permission and without crediting me – all in the same email in which they tried to shame me for not being grateful for all they'd done for me over the years.

In short, my former Ph.D. adviser and a former fellow student had stolen my work.

Why had they done this? On one level, Master needed to justify the way he had overseen the project. He had paid $60,000 to Huster to write the book when the book was, in Master’s own words, clearly beyond him. It seems that I was the obvious scapegoat. An example: after my co-author disappeared from contact for a year, Master told me that I was at fault for having overestimated my ability to keep in touch with Huster.

But there is another reason why Master and Stager did this: simply because they could. One person I talked to after these events expressed sympathy with me for being “Ashkelon'd”. That is, those familiar with the Ashkelon project and its directors are well aware of a long line of people who have been victimized by them. Over the course of these events I also realized that the Harvard Semitic Museum, the institution behind the Ashkelon project, had for years been falsely claiming copyrights of contributions to earlier volumes, including my own, despite the fact that contributors had not signed any forms transferring copyright, as required by law. Nor was this the only time my work had been plagiarized. In his 2010 book Philistine Iconography, David Ben-Shlomo reprints nearly verbatim an earlier article that we had co-authored on Philistine figurines, without any acknowledgment that he had done so and, to my knowledge, without permission of the copyright holder (in this case the journal had had us sign forms transferring copyright). This means that all of the ideas I had contributed to that article were passed off as his. In addition, Ben-Shlomo stole ideas from my then-unpublished dissertation, including the identification of a new figurine type. There have been no consequences to my knowledge for any of these actions.

All of the above, remember, is what has happened in a single, relatively brief career. What if we extrapolate from that to academia more generally? What if we look at even more serious issues such as sexual harassment and abuse? Just over the last few months, we have seen revelations of sexual misconduct concerning high-profile scientists such as Jason Lieb (University of Chicago), Christian Ott (Caltech), and Geoffrey Marcy (Berkeley). Judging from these and other examples, abuse and exploitation are an epidemic in the academy.

This leads me to perhaps the most disheartening thing about my own story: No one seems to care. While those I've confided in have expressed sympathy, almost no one called it what it is – theft and exploitation – and insisted that it must stop. Instead, I was repeatedly encouraged, by junior and senior scholars alike, to keep quiet about the incident and move on. I debated with myself at length before writing down my experiences. It is as if we all view such abuse and exploitation not as an outrage, but as an unfortunate but inevitable – even necessary – part of the scholarly process. A rite of passage into academia, perhaps.

Maybe it has always been this way. Consider the case of David Robinson and Mary Ross Ellingson: Robinson was a prominent classical archaeologist in the early to mid-20th century who stole his student Ellingson's work, publishing her master's thesis and part of her doctoral dissertation under his own name. Alan Keiser, who wrote a book about the case (Archaeology, Sexism, and Scandal), has discussed how much indifference he met when trying to find a publisher. As one reviewer wrote, “what you are dealing with here is part of the unwritten history of classical archaeology. Best to leave it unwritten.”  There, an incident in the distant past, involving figures long dead, is wished to be left in the past. Here, we are dealing with a recent episode involving figures still prominent in the field, but the response is the same. In the recent cases of sexual harassment and abuse, the initial reaction of faculty and administrators was to cover up and ignore the incidents. It appears that we are simply never supposed to discuss these matters.

And so it seems that academic ethics run on an honor system – but that honor system is routinely violated. What do we do then, when the system is a failure? Or is it a failure? The honor system ends up entrenching the power of senior figures; perhaps it is designed to do so. Senior scholars are less likely to suffer a violation of the system, because of the power they wield in it; and if they do, their prominence and influence will help balance any negative consequences. What about for a junior scholar, who does not have such a network to help them? Who has trouble fighting back (and is in fact encouraged not to do so) – who is most vulnerable to mistreatment? What if the people doing the victimizing are your own mentors? Where can you turn then?

In these cases, silence is not enough. We cannot simply stand by while these incidents happen, because this will only allow them to happen again and again – unless we are fine with the continued exploitation and mistreatment and abuse of the very students we are supposed to be promoting. By allowing such things to happen, over and over, we are failing in our most basic responsibilities: nurturing our own students, the very future of our profession. Will our own fields survive in this time of threat to the humanities? And if they do, what wreckage are we leaving in them? I look at this situation again and again and come to the same conclusion:

We are failing.

What We Know about the New Hezekiah Sealing

At a press conference last Wednesday (December 2), Eilat Mazar of Hebrew University announced the discovery of a royal sealing of Hezekiah, king of Judah (late 8th-early 7th centuries BCE). The sealing came from her excavations in the Ophel (immediately south of the Temple Mount), in Jerusalem in 2009, though it was only found in sifting in 2010. News of the find has quickly spread, not only through the press conference itself but an accompanying press release and a series of articles in Israeli and international media.

The sealing has naturally attracted a great deal of interest, but perhaps even a greater amount of confusion. After having a few days to digest the initial reports and analyses, I think it’s a good time to summarize what we know and try to clarify some of the basic issues.

The sealing

(I will provide only a brief summary here. For more details on the text and imagery see George Athas’s useful post on the contents of the seal.)

The object is a bulla (or sealing), formed by impressing a seal into a wet piece of clay. Bullae were typically used to seal documents and containers; in the case of this object, there are impressions on the reverse from cords used for tying up the document. The face (obverse) of the impression includes an inscription in two lines, along with two symbols: a winged sun disk (a common ancient Near Eastern motif), and an ankh (an Egyptian symbol of life).

The reading of the inscription, made by Mazar’s epigrapher Reut Ben-Aryeh, is as follows:

lḥzqyhw ’[h]

z.mlk.yh[dh]

(belonging) to Hezekiah [son of] Ahaz king of Judah

The letters in brackets at the end of each line are reconstructed, as the left edge of the sealing was broken off. However, there is no question of the reading: we have identical sealings – that is, impressions from the same seal – that turned up on the antiquities market in the 1990s. The word ben, “son (of)”, was omitted from the seal, but we have many other examples where it is missing from patronymics. Its absence is often attributed to lack of space.[1]

The archaeological context

This may be the area of greatest confusion.[2] First, it is important to note that there is no question about the provenance of the find: it comes from an ancient dump in a controlled excavation – Area A of Mazar’s excavations in the Ophel, from 2009. As it comes from a controlled excavation, there is therefore no question that the object is genuine. However, the heading of the press release is incorrect in stating that the object was found in situ (that is, noticed in the ground). It was found in dirt removed and sifted offsite, at the Emek Tzurim sifting facility operated by Gabi Barkay and Zachi Dvira of the Temple Mount Sifting Project. Sifting is a standard archaeological practice, generally used to catch things that might be missed by the eye during the course of excavation. (This bulla is just over a centimeter long.) As has been reported previously, a number of excavations in Jerusalem do not conduct their sifting on-site but send their dirt to Emek Tzurim to be sifted there; Mazar’s Ophel dig was one of these.

The context of the sealing is also clear: it comes from an ancient dump, probably dating to the 7th century BCE. Robert Cargill has suggested that there is an “obvious stratigraphic problem” in excavating an ancient dump. It is a discard context, not a use context, so we certainly lose information about how the object was originally used, or where. We cannot be confident, like Mazar, that the sealing was dumped from an adjacent building that she has designated as “royal”. But discard contexts are perfectly good archaeological contexts. (In fact, most artifacts in excavations found in dumps and fills rather than use contexts.) They are still part of the life-cycle of an object, and we can learn much from them, as archaeologists have come increasingly emphasized over the last few decades. So there is nothing inherently wrong with the context, and no stratigraphic problem here.

Significance

Taylor Prism with Sennacherib's Annals, including his campaign against Hezekiah

(Wikimedia Commons, photo by David Castor)

The sealing tells us nothing new about the political history of Judah. We already had confirmation of Hezekiah’s existence and reign at this time from Assyrian records. We also learn little about epigraphy (study of the text) and iconography (the imagery). The sealing is merely a data point; the true value lies in the accumulation of many such points of data. These allow us to do things such as track changes in motifs or names on seals over time. The significance of this individual bulla is therefore limited. Maybe in the future we can do more with developing techniques of analysis, but we are not there now.

There is one sense in which the sealing has a great deal of importance, however: in its emotional value, for those invested in seeing the Bible come to life. Mazar has often exaggerated the significance – specifically the biblical significance – of her discoveries: she has in the past announced finding David’s palace, the tunnel David used to conquer Jerusalem, and Nehemiah’s wall around the city. In this case the exaggeration is not so extreme, as this clearly is the seal impression of Hezekiah king of Judah. But she has gone beyond this. Ilan Ben Zion of the Times of Israel quotes her as saying that the discovery “strengthens what we know already from the Bible about [Hezekiah]” and that it is “the closest as ever that we can get to something that was most likely held by King Hezekiah himself.” Thus Mazar dramatizes the find and exaggerates what we can reasonably say – that it must have been used by Hezekiah himself, when she cannot provide a convincing argument for this. Mazar further speculates that the ankh (a symbol of life) indicates that the seal was made after Hezekiah’s recovery from his life-threatening skin disease in 2 Kings 20 and Isaiah 38. This is a problematic case of starting with the assumption that the biblical texts are fundamentally historical (a problematic way of reading the Bible). It is also a remarkable case of the positivist fallacy in archaeology, the idea that what is observable (in the archaeological record) is historically significant or matches our textual sources. Even if we assumed for the moment that the accounts of Hezekiah’s reign in 2 Kings, Isaiah, and 2 Chronicles are straightforward historical narratives, they still provide us with relatively little information on his entire reign and life. It is extremely unlikely that any particular artifact we find (like the sealing and its design) would relate directly to an event in the biblical account.

Ethical issues

Many questions about ethics have been raised in connection with the find. Cargill among others has questioned the timing of the announcement, but there is nothing unusual here. The answer is in fact contained within the press release: first, while the artifact was found in 2010, the current reading – identifying it as the seal of Hezekiah king of Judah – was made more recently (“Only this year”, according to the Times of Israel). Second, the announcement was made on the same day that the first volume of the final report on Mazar’s Ophel excavations (with the full scholarly publication of the sealing) was published. In this respect, I believe Mazar is to be commended for saving the announcement until the full publication of the seal. Archaeologists often make sensational announcements quickly, before complete publication of the data; this means that scholars cannot fully evaluate the claims made. That is not the case here.

I have tried to indicate above how Mazar has exaggerated the importance of her finds and their connection to biblical texts. This problem is magnified by her excavation’s connection with Herbert W. Armstrong College, an unaccredited institution of the Philadelphia Church of God in Edmond, Oklahoma. For the college, the Bible is the Word of God and the foundation of their educational system. Their video about the bulla, linked by the online press release, dramatizes the discovery as proof of this belief, of the convergence of “science” and the Bible.

These connections are further underlined by the Israeli government’s use of the sealing. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a statement (available on his Facebook page) shortly after the announcement: in it he refers to the seal as evidence of Jerusalem as “our eternal and undivided capital” – turning the ancient bulla into a modern political statement projecting Israeli claims over East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the Herbert W. Armstrong College video appears embedded in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announcement, and a still is used by the State of Israel’s official Twitter account in its announcement of the find.

Impression of King Hezekiah's royal seal discovered in Jerusalem: https://t.co/rWnVHBcTN6 #Archaeology pic.twitter.com/WufT9rnGJI

— Israel ישראל (@Israel) December 3, 2015

Given the political claims, it is not surprising that the dig’s location in East Jerusalem has also been the subject of discussion. While this issue was not raised in the Israeli news articles, others – such as those from the Daily Beast and CNN – commendably tried to address the ethics of excavation in this contested area. They correctly point out that archaeology has been used to privilege Jewish claims to East Jerusalem over Arab ones, especially at the City of David site (which is contained within the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan). Especially noteworthy is the role of the Ir David Foundation (also known as Elad), which has as its explicit goal the Judaization of East Jerusalem (including replacing Arab residents with Jewish by buying, or claiming to buy, Arab homes and renting them to Jews. Elad funds digs in the City of David and operates archaeological parks, in which the Jewish history is emphasized while Arab history is minimized or ignored.

Mazar’s dig, however, is not within the City of David but in the Ophel, north of Silwan and away from Palestinian residential areas. Nor is it funded by Elad (although Elad does fund the Emek Tzurim sifting facility where the sealing was found). Mazar has also conducted excavations in the City of David, however, and in the past these were funded by Elad; Mazar had a public break with Elad in 2011 over a disputed excavation.

At the same time, the excavation and the bulla cannot be divorced from their larger context. As we have seen, the Israeli Prime Minister himself has made use of the seal for nationalist aims. And the Ophel is part of a chain of parks in development stretching from the Temple Mount to Silwan. As a group this chain does impinge on Palestinian residents, and the Ophel like the other parks focuses on the Jewish history of the region.

Beyond all of this, digging in East Jerusalem involves an additional problem. While Israel has annexed East Jerusalem, this action is not officially recognized by other countries; internationally, East Jerusalem is seen as part of the West Bank, which is considered occupied territory. As a result, for the international community Article 5 (“Occupation”) of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict would be in force. Under Article 5, an occupying power is required to respect “cultural property” (which includes archaeological remains). An occupying power is allowed to take certain steps to protect cultural property, steps which reasonably include salvage archaeology, but the conditions under which it is allowed under are restricted: these include military threat and collaboration or consultation with authorities of the occupied country. Because it is questionable whether these conditions are met by Mazar’s dig, the status of her excavation under the Hague Convention appears to be problematic. Again, Israel maintains it is not an occupying power in East Jerusalem, so in the Israeli understanding these conditions would not apply; but the international understanding is different, at least officially.

Conclusion

The sealing is a nice addition to our Iron Age corpus from Israel and Judah. There is no question of its genuineness. Based on what we currently now, the bulla is of limited historical value, however. It does have a great deal of value to those who are emotionally invested in the Bible – for religious or nationalist reasons – and in seeing it as a fundamentally historical document.

Now that the dust has settled after the announcement, we can move beyond confused claims and idle questions and start to have a more productive critical discussion about archaeological finds from Jerusalem and their many meanings.

*Thanks to Thomas Bolin, Morag Kersel, Matthew Suriano, and Laura Wright for discussion and suggestions. Of course, the opinions expressed here are not theirs but mine alone.

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[1] For example, see Yigal Shiloh, A Group of Hebrew Bullae from the City of David, Israel Exploration Journal 36 (1986), p. 31. (Note that 6 out of 30 bullae listed by Shiloh here are missing bn before the patronymic.) This point was also made by Athas.

[2] The issue has been so misunderstood that even the scholars appear to be confused. An article (dated December 3) in the Daily Beast by New Testament scholar Candida Moss of Notre Dame originally claimed that “[t]he material is being sifted from piles of dirt removed as part of Palestinian construction in the area.” This is a reference to the Temple Mount Sifting Project, which is sifting piles of dirt removed from the Temple Mount and dumped in the Kidron Valley to the east. On this basis, Robert Cargill, an expert in Second Temple Judaism at the University of Iowa, is quoted saying that the stratigraphy of the find is “compromised.” But as I discussed above this is not the case. The claim appears to be based on a misunderstanding of the statement on the discovery in the press release. But the statement is quite clear, and corroborated by a post from the Temple Mount Sifting Project. The Daily Beast’s error is a serious one, directly contradicting Mazar’s statements about the origin of the sealing; it essentially implies – by all appearances unintentionally – that Mazar was lying about the sealing’s provenance.

Within a day the Daily Beast article was changed, with the mistaken claim removed; it now reads “The material is being sifted in the same sifting facility as another archaeological project that sifts through piles of dirt removed as part of Palestinian construction in the area.”  However, there is no apology for the error or any acknowledgment of the change. And the other language (about compromise, as well as questioning of legitimacy) remains, now making little sense.