All right, good evening, thank you for
waiting, and welcome to this very filled
and exciting lecture, the David A. Kipper
lecture on ancient Israel. This has been
an exciting lecture series. Please join
us next year during the academic year
starting in October for another amazing
series of lectures. This one will focus
on a lot of the OI work and faculty
Research Associates and the jobs they're
currently doing here so it'll be a very
interesting and fun way to explore the
Centennial. And if you are not a member,
please do join us. Next year we have a
host of Centennial programming that you
will get first announcements of, you'll
get discounts on, and some very special
members-only events, so please do join us
next year for our Centennial. And now
please welcome the director of the OI, Christopher Woods.
Thank you Matt, and good evening. I'd like
to welcome you all to this, this year's
David A. Kipper ancient Israel lecture,
which is now, by tradition, our final
lecture of the academic year. Thank you
all for coming out tonight and I would
like to begin by expressing our profound
gratitude on behalf of all of us at the
Oriental Institute to Barbara Kipper and
the Kipper family; so really
their wonderful support of our annual
David A. Kipper ancient Israel lecture
series, which began in 2013. This lecture
series really markedly expands the OI' s educational offerings focused on
ancient Israel and, at the same time, it furthers our goal of convening leading
scholars in the archaeology, philology,
and history of the ancient Middle East. This is our seventh Kipper lecture, but
it's important to point out that the
Kipper family's support of the OI
doesn't begin and end with this lecture
series; rather they've been steadfast
supporters of the OI for years. We were
honored to have included the late David
Kipper among our advisory council
members and we all remain deeply
grateful for the leadership shown by the
Kipper family in creating and developing
the Kipper Family Archaeological Discovery Center in 2008, which allows
visiting schoolchildren to experience
the thrills of archaeological excavation
in a simulated dig. It is now my great
pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker,
Dr. David Ilan, who is the director of
the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical
Archaeology at the Hebrew Union College
in Jerusalem. David also holds a faculty
position at the Hebrew Union College and
has taught at Tel Aviv University, Hebrew
University, and Johns Hopkins University. David received his BA and MA degrees
from the Hebrew University and his
PhD from Tel Aviv University, writing his
dissertation on the
Northeastern Israel in the Iron Age I:
Cultural, Socio-economic, and Political
Perspectives. David has really
extensive fieldwork experience, having
excavated, among other sites, at Tel Arad
and Megiddo and at Tel Dan, where he's
served as a director of excavations
since 2005. David specializes in mortuary
archaeology, religion, and ritual in the
Chalcolithic period, the middle Bronze Age,
and the early iron age of the southern
Levant. His co-author of
Dan One History
of Excavation: The Neolithic Settlement
the Early Bronze Age Levels and the
Middle Bronze Age Tombs, published in
1996 and of 2014 the Bronze Age
cemetery at Ara, as well as really
scores of articles including quite a
number co-authored with our own York
Rowan. Now these studies really cover an
impressive range spanning in topic from
mortuary customs from the Chalcolithic
through the Iron Age, to ritual
and ideology, to issues of society and
climate change, material and tool culture,
ceramics, chronology and beyond. David is
also editor of the Nelson Glueck School
of Biblical Archaeology Journal. Now in
tonight's talk, How Ancient Israel Began:
A New Archaeological Perspective, David
will present a new and radical
proposal based on his research at Tel
Dan for the origins of ancient Israel.
And so, without further ado, please join
me in welcoming this year's David A.
Kipper speaker, Dr. David Ilan.
Thank you very much, 
Dr. Woods, thank you very much Barbara Kipper,
for making this happen so you can all
attend for free. And I also want to just
thank the Oriental Institute because
it's a great honor to be here. This is
one of the top three institutions
for the study of ancient Near Eastern
Studies in the world. So it's a great
honor to be here. I don't know if you
know that. So we're going to talk about
how Israel began. Origins are something
that for some reasons seem to occupy our
our attention quite a lot in the world.
We're always looking for the beginnings
of things and I'm most of us are sophisticated
enough to know that origins are
complicated things in messy and you
usually can't find one source of
anything. It's usually a big mishmash. So
pretty much that's the conclusion that
we'll arrive out today. So, thank you. But still
I think I have a certain story to tell,
that's what archaeologists do if you
didn't know it already. We take little
bits of data, pieces of a puzzle, and then
we connect dots and make a story. And
then, ten years later, somebody comes
along and creates a completely different
story. And we all like stories, so
including our politicians, so let's just
go with it. As far as creating stories, of
course, the subject of Israelite origins
has been so worked over so often. Here
are just a few of the more recent
examples of some of the very interesting
and rich volumes that have been produced
about the origins of Israel. I will of
course found my own thesis on a lot of
what these people have done in others
before them.
My take will be a little bit different.
Of course there is this elephant in the
room, which is the biblical text. The
biblical text, we have to understand is,
has its own program. It is a theological
document, it is presented as revelation,
but it is obviously a compendium of lots
of different sources, which have a
purpose: in their compilation, in their
presentation, at least in the form that
we have now. The rule of the thumb is
that the earlier you go in the biblical
text, the less of it is
historical and the later you go, the more
of it is historical and can be
corroborated by extra-biblical documents
from Egypt to Syria etc. The period of
time that we're going to be talking
about today is somewhere in the middle,
as you will see. And what I think what
we'll do first, then, is I will sort of
take the biblical text and I'll present
it in outline form, and then we'll sort
of deconstruct it and see what works and
what doesn't work. Most of it doesn't
really work. When we look at the Book of
Joshua, when the children of Israel enter
the Land of Israel to conquer the land
of Canaan, essentially the conquest of
the land of Canaan is divided into five
stages: first they cross over from Jordan
at Gilgal, the massive circumcision
ceremony, they conquer Jericho, the
trumpets and all of that, they go up to Ai
in the central hill country and take
that and destroy it, and then they move
south, there's a southern campaign, then
they move north to Hatzor, destroy Hatzor
and take that, and then they convene
at a place called Mount Ebal
in the hills above Shechem. And there's a
massive covenant ceremony where the laws of Yahweh are inscribed on standing
stones. And that is the covenant between
God and the children of Israel. And part
of that has also all kinds of prophecies
which, lo and behold, actually take place
later on. So it starts off with the
circumcision ceremony at Gilgal and
then it moves to Jericho and I'm using
all these old 19th century woodcut
drawings to illustrate the scenes just
for fun.
And we have them they go up to the hill
country and take Ai. Ai is going to be
problematic as we'll see in a minute. And
the whole thing ends up with this
covenant renewal at Mount Ebal that is
described in Joshua 8:30, chapter 8, verse[s]
30 to 35. And this is, the thing is, this
was prophesied, it's prophesied in the
book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy comes before Joshua. So in Deuteronomy this was
prophesied and in Joshua it takes place
the Covenant renewal at Mount Ebal. Now a
critical scholar might say okay, so was
it really a prophecy or maybe what
happened at Deuteronomy was written
after the events themselves and I'll
leave that an open question for right
now. But here's the text from Deuteronomy:
you cross over the Jordan, you'll set up
these stones concerning that which I
command you today on Mount Ebal, and you make an altar of stones and you shall offer
burnt offerings and a few other things.
So you might get a sense that I am being
deconstructivist and critical, but, as you
will see, some of this stuff actually
appears in the archaeology. So don't be
too cynical yet. Ancient Israel was
divided up by tribal inheritances in the
Book of Joshua. These tribal inheritances
seem to reflect a geopolitical situation
probably in the eighth or seventh
centuries BC, probably much later when
there was already a kingdom in place. And
all of this biblical text, for those of
you who don't know this, is framed in a
chronology. The biblical text contains
the year, dates of reigns of kings, and
events that occur, and if you go through
and you backtrack through the text you
can get to exact dates. That is how we
know, when the world was created fifty
eight hundred something years ago, we
have an exact date. So when people say
the world was created in the year X,
that's because it's in the biblical text.
There is a precise chronology in the
text itself.
And lots of scholars have used this as a
keystone in order to reconstruct
historical events. We know that some of
this doesn't work. As I said before, the
later you go, the more precise it is and
it can be confirmed; the earlier you go
not so much. But there is this chronology
and that's something we have to consider.
The biblical writers knew something and
other things they sort of put together
themselves. Archaeology is its own kind
of testament: it has its own paradigm, its
own research format, where we present
research questions and we have our own
ways of doing chronology with carbon-14
dating and coins and things like that
and the Hebrew Bible has its own
paradigm. These sometimes go together and
sometimes they don't.
As an archaeologist my job is to start
with the data in the ground. I try to
ignore the biblical text and reach my
conclusions from the stuff that I pull
out of the ground, creating frameworks of
inference, and then I'll go to the
biblical text and see what works, what
doesn't, 
and what the motivations might be behind
what's written when it doesn't work. But
that's sort of an after; that's the last
thing I do. The timeframe that we're
going to be talking about today is
presented here: the very end of the Late
Bronze Age into the Iron Age.The very
beginnings of the Iron Age, of course,
when iron first appears as
an important material culture item for
making tools and things. So there's our
framework. The Egyptian chronology is
also very important here because it has
a lot to do with the story I'm telling
today. Anybody recognize this place?
Your backyard.
That was quick! So here's Jericho in your
backyard. By the way, the word Jericho
means the place of the moon: yeah yeah
yeah a ho yeah yeah. It means then it's
place of the moon. It looks like a
crescent moon when you look at it
from the cliffs above. And here is Ai.
These are places that we know, that we
can excavate and have been excavated and
we visit them and we see things. At
Jericho, excavations took place already
at the beginning of the 20th century and
what was found, well, according to the
biblical chronology, around 1300-1250 BC
there should be a massive destruction
because, according to the biblical text
and the biblical chronology, Joshua
destroyed it. Guess what? No destruction.
There is a destruction from about 1540
BC, but after that the town was,
for the most part abandoned. There is no
destruction. So already back in the 20s
Garstang said hmmm, there's a problem here,
and Kathleen Kenyon went back to dig it
and she found the same problem. And this
was already a bit difficult. Then in the
1950s a Danish, excuse me not the Danish,
but an American expedition went to excavate
it, Ai, up in the hill country, to test
the story: once again the Joshua
narrative. And the site was excavated and,
lo and behold, there is no Late Bronze
Age destruction of a Canaanite city.
There's an early Iron Age occupation, a
settlement, but no previous destruction.
In fact, the previous settlement of
the site dates its destruction dates to
about 2500 BC, about 1200 years before
when the biblical account would have it
destroyed. So that's a big problem. But
here's the hint to the explanation of
why that is. The name of this site, Ai,
means the destroyed place. The biblical
writer, when he was writing about this
place, already saw a 
destroyed place and said,
okay, this will fit my narrative very
nicely. It's called the destroyed place.
Okay, Joshua did it. I'm being a bit
facetious here. The heartland of the
Israelite settlement, according to the
Hebrew Bible, is in the central hill
country of Israel today, what is now
called Judea and Samaria. It looks like
this, rolling hills, a chaparral,
vegetation, it's very dense very hard to
clear. This is a frontier. In antiquity,
this is not a great place to live. You
come here when you're desperate and you
have nowhere else to go. Here are some of
the key sites that have been written
about for many many years by Albright
Finkelstein and others that have
excavated here. All of these are
excavated iron-age one sites. Again we're
talking about twelve hundred to a
thousand BC, depending on your chronology.
Here is the famous site of Shiloh,
located in the central hill country. This
is where the tabernacle was first rested
in the Iron Age and, according to the
Hebrew Bible, this is was a main cult
site. It was a cult center for the
Israelites and people from the various
tribes would come and to this place. And
it was excavated by the Danes in the 50s
and once again by Sir Al Finkelstein in the
1980s, and a settlement was found here
from the early Iron Age. But guess what?
There's almost nothing here from the
Late Bronze Age.
Once again, the biblical chronology runs
into difficulties. What was found was a
series of houses, typical houses that are
called, in our jargon, the four-room house
or the quadripartite house. This is a
typical house for the first settlements
of the Iron Age in the hill country. They
have basically three longitudinal rooms
and then one cross chamber at some point
and you can organize them in different
ways. It took the old middle Bronze Age
wall in the back that dates to about
1600 BC and used it as the back wall and
then the houses were built up against it.
And the houses contained all kinds of
rich finds, especially rows and rows of
big jars that are called collared rim
pithoi. Here's an assemblage
from one of the rooms. This jar, this
pithos, called the collared rim pithos,
was considered since the 1920s to be the
hallmark of Israelite settlement, because
it was found in all of these sites in
the hill country. And so William Foxwell
Albright in Kelso and others said, okay,
this is what identifies the Israelite
settlement. This fits the biblical
picture perfectly. They didn't know about
the dating problem back then. Now we know
there's a problem. We'll get to the
solution to the problem in a bit. But
this is sort of a typical assemblage. At
Ai, also, we have the same kinds of
columned houses, variations on a theme,
with pillars down the middle of them,
also archetypal, and lots of collared rim
jars here too.
This place is located just south of
Jerusalem. It's called Gilo, it's now a
suburb, it now looks something like that.
The site is now gone but underneath all
those buildings was a very small
pastoral settlement with fences and a
small house and it had all kinds of
things like this in it.
Once again the collared rim pithoi jars
and cooking pots, a very prosaic simple
kind of settlement. Once again Amihai
Mazar, who excavated here, said this looks
like an Israelite settlement. It's in the
hill country and once again collared
rim pithoi. So what happens is sort of
a circular argument; as soon as, once you
say that the collared rim pithoi equal
Israelite settlement, when you find the
pithoi you have Israelite settlement.
And here's another one from, I think
that's from Aphek, the collared rim
pithoi rims, these are from Gilo again,
once again, sorry. And we go to another
site which is closer down the hill the
ridge toward Rosh Ha'Ayin, closer to Tel
Aviv called Izbet
Sartah, which is a lovely site excavated by Israel Finkelstein in the 80s, which is a big central
four-room house with a beautiful
pavement. It's surrounded by a ring of
smaller buildings and then a whole bunch
of pits between, in the spaces in between.
Why do you need all the pits?
Generally, when you have pits like this,
and now we're pretty sure they're for
the storage of grain, it's because things
are insecure. You're afraid that
somebody's gonna come and take your
grain, so you hide it in pits. And even if
the enemy comes and takes 80% of your
grain, you still have some of it left
that they didn't find. And this is, once
again, one of these archetypal aspects of
the settlements. These small settlements
in the hill country, together with the
collared rim pithoi, lots and lots of pits
like this, in this case, surrounding a
very large building that looks like that
typical four-room house. Here's one way
that it could be reconstructed. There's a bit
of argument about this. Some people think
there's a courtyard in the middle, the
lowest floor was for animals, sheep and
goats. The sheep and goats also
kept the building warm in the
winter from their heat. Others,
professor Larry Stager, for example, who
used to be here, claimed that the houses
were completely roofed over and that
there were no open spaces that would be
too muddy and too much exposure to the
elements.
Today his approach is considered
preferable, but they're still both in the
literature. Here's the open courtyard
version. So this is another one of those
aspects of so-called Israelite
settlement in the hill country. This kind
of house becomes totally normative for
domestic architecture in the later Iron
Age also. When you read about houses in
the biblical text, the Book of Kings for
example, or the prophets, they're talking
about houses like this: the four-room or
quadripartite house was the typical
house. If it was in the countryside, it
was big. If it was in the city, it was
small. Izbet Zartta also has one of the
earliest examples of the alphabetic
script. This dates to probably the late
11th or 10th century BC. It's what we
call an abecedary, which means it has the
ABC on it. If you go over here, let's say,
right over,
let's see where should we start? We're
missing the alef,
there's the alef, is right there. There's
a bet, dalet, hei, hei is there, vav, etc.
You have a b c d e etc. This is one of
the earliest examples. It starts from the
letter here and it goes all the way to
the end. This is the tav which becomes, in
Latin, the T. It already looks like a T.
This dates to about a thousand BC. You
can also go the other direction. You can
start over here alef, beit, gimel, dalet, you
can go both ways. What is this thing
doing here? Who would be using something
like that?
It's somebody who's learning how to
write. This is a student scribe. There are
a few more like this. So this is a period
when there are people who know how to
read and write. It's not illiterate and
they're not using the old scripts of the
surrounding civilizations. They're not
using Egyptian hieroglyphics and they're
not using cuneiform. This is a new kind
of script. It's been around for a while,
but it's not normative and it's not
official. It's what the common folk use.
The population density of the heartland
where that's colored in white. Shechem and
Shiloh is in the center of the country.
This is the archeology speaking here.
These are where most of these
settlements are and this coincides with
the biblical text to a large extent. A
lot of the descriptions that we have in
Joshua, Judges, and Samuel take place in
that area in the biblical text and the
hatched area to the north and the south
are less densely populated but there are
settlements there as well. When we look
at the oscillations of settlements that
work figured by Finkelstein in the 1980s,
we find that there is a fairly low
settlement intensity in the earlier
periods in the middle Bronze Age. It goes
way up and then it drops way down. In the
Late Bronze Age there's almost nothing.
And then in the early Iron Age period
that we're talking about mostly, it goes
way up once again back to the levels of
the middle Bronze Age. So there is this
tremendous spurt of settlement circa
1200-1150 BCE and one of the things that
we scholars have tried to answer is what
is the explanation for this spurt of
settlement that includes these material
culture features that I showed you just
before. Why does this happen?
Well, the biblical, traditional biblical
interpretation would be sure, the
Israelites crossed the Jordan River and
came into the land and they settled. They
couldn't settle other places because the
Canaanites and the other peoples
wouldn't let them. So they went to the
old country. That was the narrative until
about 30 years ago. This is Mount Ebal,
above Nablus, above Shechem, where Adam
Zertal
excavated in the late 70s and 80s, what
is clearly a ritual installation, despite
some naysayers. It looks something like
this in reconstruction. All around it
there are lots of pits containing burnt
and slaughtered animal remains.
All of them are kosher: sheep, goat, cows,
no pork, and boar do live in the hill
country here. So that this is it's
completely fixated on the taboo, the pork
taboo, it's all kosher and these animals
have been slaughtered and they're being
eaten here and there is this what looks
very much like a sort of altar or at
least a focusing place where people
would gather and carry out ritual meals.
So there's that. At this place of Mount
Nebo,
on the other hand, we have earlier
material, which is Late Bronze Age,
including a scarab seal from that
belongs to Ramses II or Ramses III,
so that would be the time frame, 1250 or
1150, between those dates, together with a
typical Late Bronze Age cooking pot, so
this is actually a little earlier. This
is not starting when it you would expect
it to start with the entrance of the
land according to the biblical
chronology—it's a bit earlier. But there
is this ritual place up there in the
hill country where the biblical texts
suggest it should be. Now one of the
historical documents that is critical
for our discussion here is the Merneptah
stone, which was found in Karnak in Egypt
many, many years ago. And its translation
led to the identification of the
earliest mention of Israel that we know
of, and we're talking about 1207 BC.
There's Israel right there. The Egyptians
didn't really have an "L" so they're
the L sound becomes an R sound and
that's led to some difficulty in
argument, but basically that's the word
Israel. It starts on the right, Is-ra-el,
and when you have the two figures with
the three lines underneath them, that's
what's called an Egyptian, a
determinative, that means it's a people, a
group of people. So we know there's a
group of people that are called Israel, and they're a group of people and,
according to their place in the sequence
of geographical names that are mentioned,
it pretty much looks like it's situated
in the central hill country of Israel. As
you can see, it's Ashkelon,  Gezer
Yano'am, you're going from south to
north. If you're looking at it from an
Egyptian perspective, and then Israel.
Israel is laid waste and his seed is not.
The Egyptians totally decimated Israel
and there's no more Israel. Obviously,
that, it was an overstatement. So if we
are going to summarize the various
interpretations of this data for the
origins of Israel using the archaeology
in tandem with the text,
the earliest interpretation was the
rapid conquest model that is laid out in
the biblical text. Scholars like Albright,
Yadin, and most recently Ben-Tor have
championed this view that the text
itself shouldn't be doubted and maybe
some nuances are off but basically the
narrative in the Bible is pretty much
what happened. Later, somewhat later
interpretation, suggested looking more at
Bedouins surrounding us and looking at
earlier narratives from the Genesis and
things like that, but the Israelite
conquests of the hill country was
actually a gradual affair. There was an
infiltration of Bedouin-
type elements from the east and the
south that settled in the hill country
and this was the German viewpoint that
was adopted also by the Israeli scholar
Aharoni. And there was a lot of argument
between these two schools. Later on,
starting in the 50s, but especially in
the 60s and 70s with the popularity of
Marxist interpretations, Mendenhall and
then Gottwald said actually what is
between the lines in the biblical text
and what we're seeing in the archaeology
because it's a lot of the finds are
similar to the Canaanite culture in the
lowlands, is that this was actually a
peasant revolt and people migrated into
the hill country to get away from the
oppressive rulers of the lowlands. And
the bible does have memories of this, but
they sort of put a spin on it for
political reasons. The 4th theory that
has become much more popular of late is
that this wave of new settlements in the
hill country actually represents nomads
who always had lived there, but when they
were nomads they didn't leave enough
material culture to be able to identify
them archaeologically. And once it was
critical for them to establish sedentary
settlements, because of the collapse of
empires all around, then they started
building buildings adopting an old kind
of pot, the collared rim jar that they
copied from middle Bronze Age ruins and
they started making pits and terraces
and these are sedentarizing nomads. And
that's why we suddenly see them because
they had to settle down. And this is
still, I think now, the most current
explanation that a lot of people go by.
One other variant of the previous
two is the ruralizing peasants theory
that Larry stager most recently
championed and it makes a lot of sense
also. And that is that people who no
longer had access to land, started going
into the hills perhaps being encouraged
to do so and started making terraces and
pits and this was not about
rebellion so much as just the need to
expand the agricultural potential that
was limited in the lowlands. So these are
pretty much the five existing theses at
this point in time and if you read
through the books that I showed you
before, this is pretty much the narrative
you'll get. Right now the last two are
the most popular interpretations of the
archaeological data to explain this
rapid establishment to settlements in
the hill country. Now we get to the
Egyptians. What about the Egyptians? So
let's do just a brief review of how
Egyptian rule administered itself in its
conquered territories in its province. It
wasn't actually a colony, it was a province
in Canaan. This is our big picture of the
empires of the region at the
time. Initially the Egyptians, after
having ejected Asiatics who actually
controlled the northern part of Egypt in
the late 16th century BC, they themselves
began a program of razzias, raids,
conquest, plunder into Canaan, into the
southern Levant. They had a minimal
presence in certain places, probably in
places like Gaza, Jaffa, Megiddo perhaps,
but not much beyond that, and the idea
was just to plunder. Take a bunch of
cattle, take slaves, take some firewood,
and then go back home. And make sure that
the people that are there know that if
they don't send olive oil and wine, which
were the big products and the necessary,
the necessities, that Egypt required, they
were gonna send another plunder
expedition. That was the motif. It worked
sort of, not great. Phase two of Egyptian
role, rule, in the 14th century BC was a
period of introversion, the el-Amarna
period. I'm sure you've heard lectures
about this here at the Oriental
Institute. A period when the king. when
King Akhenaten, adopted a new religion in
a political attempt to shift
the power from the Amun priests
and their holdings and to recentralize
authority and control with the king. This,
and he built a new capital, a place
called el-Amarna, and there's a whole
correspondence associated with that,
including letters from Canaan. From those
letters that you've seen, the lower right
hand picture, we know that things were
falling apart. That Egypt did not have
good control and the petty princes, the
vassal kings, warring, were warring
against each other and it was a catastrophe. Akhenaten, Tutankhamun,
were, that dynasty ended. That was
the end of the eighteenth dynasty.
Horemheb stages a coup d'etat and a new
phase is embarked upon. But I would say
call phase three of Egyptian rule, when
Egyptian power is reasserted in the
nineteenth dynasty. And here we're
talking about the thirteenth, twelfth
centuries BC. At this time there are two
big empires which are the superpowers of
the time who are, for the most part, at a
standoff, but they're constantly
jockeying for power and the zone between
them is the place of conflict. Various
vassal kingdoms and petty princes are
shifting alliances. The Egyptians are
very worried about this and that is when
Ramesses II, first Seti I and then Ramesses II, embark on a rearmament program. A new
capital is built in the delta at Pi-Ramesses
in the delta area, as you see down on
the bottom, as a staging point to
reassert control over the north. And it
is essential to bring the southern
Levant, Canaan, under control as well and
not have all these brigands and petty
kings fighting with each other because
they have to make sure that the Egyptian
crown can maintain its authority in its
holdings. And the Hittites are a big
problem. Of course this all ends up with
a great battle that takes place at a
place called Kadesh on the Orontes River
in Syria.
And according to the inscriptions in
Egypt there are several of them, this one
is from the Ramesseum, guess who won? The
Egyptians won, of course. But there's also
a Hittite version to the treaty that
resulted from this war and, according to
the Hittite version, they won. But the
additional text tells us that there are
agreements, the spheres of influence are
delineated and wives are exchanged, the
daughters of the kings are exchanged, and
marriage ensues and trade relations 
ensue and all of this rancor and all of
this danger with this treaty recedes. And
everybody knows what their, where their
place is,
and things are much better for a while.
And this leads the Egyptians then to
make sure that their control over the
province of Canaan, Retjenu, as it was
called, at least partly, is secure. And
what do they do? They start establishing
footholds, administrative centers, at lots
of different places, lots of different
places, throughout the land of Canaan. One
of the most important and best excavated
is at Tel Beit She'an. The University of
Pennsylvania and then Hebrew University.
The Tel we're talking about, not the
classic city below, where we have, for
example, the administrative buildings
that are very Egyptian in character,
especially the one on the upper left.
That is a typical 13th-12th century
Egyptian administrative building. It
actually looks like a big Egyptian house
with a central courtyard, two columns and
lots of rooms around it. At Beit She'an we
also have inscriptions of all of the
kings from Seti I onwards. So
here we have Seti I, we have a
stone, an inscription from Ramesses III,
and they're all there until a
certain point in time. So it's very clear—
here's that house once again it's been
reconstructed—if you go to Beit She'an
don't go in the summer, but if you go in
the winter it's a very interesting visit
with a great view all around. So here is
the Egyptian governor's residence and
it's a
typical governor's residence and Beit She'an also has an extensive Egyptian
material culture, for example, Egyptian
razor blades. They're not razors for
shaving the faces [but] for cutting hair, I'm
pretty sure. Egyptian pottery, the key
here is that this pottery is not
imported, it's manufactured on-site—in
other words, Egyptian potter's, people who
have the motor skills and the knowledge
of Egyptian forms and forming, are 
resident at Beit She'an.
So there are Egyptians at this place of
all different kinds. People providing
services and especially soldiers and
administrators. At Tel Dan where I work
we have tents of cooking pots, which are
Egyptian. They're totally foreign to the
local repertoire and suddenly in the, at
the very end of the Late Bronze Age,
circa 1200 BC, we have lots of these
cooking pots, more than any than all the
other sites in Israel put together.
Cooking pots of all things, go figure.
There's a story here, I don't want to get
into it right now, but it's interesting
in and of itself. Governors' residences like the one at Beit She'an are
found on in the Gaza Strip at 
Deir al-Balah. And here's a model of one at
Tel Afek, which is at the source of
the Yarkon River not far from Tel Aviv.
Here's a model that the Israel Museum
commissioned a few years ago. There's
also a lot of Egyptian elements in the
cult. Here's an Egyptian-style temple at
Tel Lachish in the Shfela. You can see
Egyptian-style column bases in the back
and that staircase. There's a temple that
is identical to this at Deir el-Medina,
the workers' village, in Thebes in Egypt—
identical. And Egyptian religious motifs,
like the Hathor fertility goddess motif
with the lotus flowers, are also present
in the iconography of Canaanite cult.
Even if we go way far south, just north of
Eilat to the copper mines of Timna, we
have a number of cartouches of
the symbols of Egyptian kings
engraved in the stone at Timna. Here's
one from Ramses III and we go up
to Ramses V here, I believe, or
IV and then there are no more. At
Beit She'an and at Deir al-Balah we also
have cemeteries with Egyptian-style
coffins. These are typical of the period
in Egypt, especially in the Delta area,
but this particular coffin is a bit
strange because of the headdress. That
you would not find in a typical Egyptian
coffin. That's something weird. And what
most of us think is that it is, in fact,
that's a tip, those are the typical
Egyptian coffins that you would find in
Deir al-Balah or in the Delta. But this
one looks like that kind of guy. Anybody
recognize him? He's probably a Philistine.
That's a Philistine headdress. We know
them from wall reliefs in Egypt, where
they're called Pereshtu—Philistines. So
here we have an Egyptian coffin with a
guy, with an interred individual
that maybe has a Philistine ethnic
identification. There's a some kind of
hybridization going on here. This is
something that Louise Hitchcock and
Aaron Mayer have written about
extensively and we see this in
this coffin. And there's lots of other
examples of similar things. So Beit She'an
has this in there too. And this is
already getting to what I want to get at.
That it's not just Egyptians, there's a
bunch of hybridization going on here of
different kinds. I'll get to that more in
a bit. Let's move north to Tel Dan again,
where I excavate. There's a little bird
that belongs to a bowl that looks like
this: here's a complete one from Tel
Qasile. Tel Qasile is a site on the
Yarkon River right next to the
Mediterranean. It was a Philistine port.
It has lots and lots of painted bi-chrome Philistine pottery and it has a
Philistine temple in it and it has a
bowl just like this and, lo and behold at
Tel Dan one of these bowls exists as
well.
Are there Philistines at Tel Dan? At
Tel Dan we also have a seal that's a
Cypriot seal. You will never find this
kind of seal in Israel, at least not in
the hill country. You might find it on
the coast in one or two cases at Ashdod
in a Philistine site. But at Dan we have a
Cypriot-style seal. I think this is
probably a seal that replicates a loom
weight, a Cypriot loom weight, and it was
used to seal packages of textiles, but that's another thing I
don't want to get into right now. These
kind of pithoi, we talked about the
collared-rim pithoi. we have lots of them
at Tel Dan, but we have these also in
their hundreds, tens of complete vessels
like this.
My predecessor, Avraham Biran, called it
the Galilean pithos. But you know what?
That pithos form with the broad
mouth and the handles on the shoulders
is exactly the same kind of pithos
we find in huge numbers in Cyprus and
at Ugarit, on the Syrian coast, and in Tyre. This is a maritime pithos—of a
Cypriot type and it's being manufactured
by potters
living at Tel Dan in this period. Just
when we have the birds and we have all
the other stuff. Here we have a little
figurine head from Tel Dan. This is
probably part of what's called an Ashdoda figurine—a Philistine female
figurine. You can tell she's female, I
hope. Some people think this is a
birthing goddess. A goddess that is
supposed to help women give
birth. And that's probably a birthing
stool, which is much better than what we
do in hospitals today. We also have a
Mycenaean-style mourning figurine, I wish
it was complete, but it's, there's no
doubt, there are all kinds of ritual
elements here that go to Greece, that go
to Cyprus, that go to
the eastern Mediterranean maritime zone,
at Tel Dan, which is an inland site. We
also have this little sanctuary with a
little Holy of, Holy of Holies,
with a
model silo sanctuary and a few other
ritual items in it. And this looks very
much like a whole bunch of temples that
we find on the coast at Tel Qasile, but
also at Cyprus at Enkomi, Kition,
Phylakopi in the Greek Peloponnese islands,
the Cycladic islands, excuse me. This is,
in my estimation, this is a Sea People
sanctuary.
Maybe not Philistine, but it's something
that brings a, that comes to us from the,
from the West,
from the maritime zone of the eastern
Mediterranean. So why are there so many
elements of Sea People material culture
in Egyptian control centers like Tel Den,
like Beit She'an, there's also a bunch of
Megiddo. Why are there so many of them
here? And might these be connected to the
four-room house in some way, the collared-rim pithoi in the central hill country and
these sites that are located in the
central hill country? Now let's remember
that the Merneptah stone mentions Israel
as a belligerent force. They are not
friendlies. And Merneptah left this
victory inscription as a result of a
punitive expedition to reassert
authority circa 1207 BC. So the
Israelites that are mentioned here for
the first time are not friendly to the
Egyptians—they are dangerous.
And that's part of the key here. And let
us then also remember that the markers
of Israelite settlement, those houses and
the collared-rim pithoi on the right,
happen at exactly the time when the
Egyptians have reasserted their control
after the battle at Kadesh when there
are still Egyptians in the Land of
Israel in Canaan. This is when the
Israelites are mentioned, the Egyptians
are still there. Now here this is a place
to point something out: think about the
biblical text,
the story of the conquest of Israel.
Think of Joshua. Think of Judges.
Where's Egypt? Nothing, nada, it's missing.
You would think that if it was a story
that was contemporaneous with political
and geopolitics, you would, Egypt would be
there, but they're not.
Nadav Na'aman, famous Israeli historian,
suggests that the biblical texts—the writers, were writing this down 500
years later. They just forgot that the
Egyptians were still there. And what was
important was the exodus narrative and
the conquest of the land. They just
didn't bother with the Egyptians already
being there. I don't know. I'm not
convinced. So there is this contemporaneity that we have to
deal with in our interpretation. Collared
green pithoi occur in great numbers not
so much not not just in the hill country,
where there are these small fragmented
settlements and you have fragments of
collared-rim pithoi,
they're found in great numbers in places
like Tel Dan, which was an Egyptian
control center, they're found in the
hundreds at Tel Megiddo, excavated by the
University of Chicago. You also find
quite a few at Beit She'an, and at Aphek, in
Lachish—some of them have gone
unidentified, by the way. The excavators
weren't expecting to find collared-rim
pithoi, so when they found pithoi, they
were just pithoi—they were not collared-rim  pithoi
because that didn't fit the narrative. I
got news for you, archaeologists tend to
find what they're looking for. So, collared-rim pithoi are found in their hundreds
at Tel Dan. And I'm claiming that this
vessel form was actually introduced, not
by the Israelites copying an old middle
Bronze Age form, I'm suggesting that they
were introduced by the Egyptians. One of
the keys to this interpretation is that
their volume is highly consistent. it
doesn't vary in the earlier contexts by
more than seven percent. So this is a
standardized form that's being
manufactured to a standardized volume in
order to provide, to allow for the
provision of someone with standard
quantities. And that's why these vessels
are located so much in Egyptian centers
like Tel Dan.
Later on, in later levels, the consistency
of the standardization changes. It becomes,
the variability becomes 15 per cent. Something happened. This needs to be checked a
little bit more, we need more statistics,
but something happened to make the
standardization dissipate. I'll get to
that in a second. So if these are
Egyptian, why are they in such quantities
in the central hill—highlands? So about an
hour ago, we were having dinner in the
Quadrangle Club and David Petraeus was
giving a lecture there. And he probably
was talking about his Petraeus doctrine,
so I'm going to talk about that right now too. The Egyptians, in order to establish
control in this last phase of
Egyptian rule, decided that they needed
to inundate the countryside with control
centers. They set up all these Egyptian
residences in all these places that we
talked about before. And I just gave you
a few of them—they're something
like 27 of them throughout the country.
But part of this surge, this inundation,
was to settle the highlands and pacify
the locals, the rebellious elements. Who
served in the Egyptian army? Egyptians liked
living in Egypt. They didn't want to go
to the provinces. It was an adventure but,
you know, you're, you're leaving the
fleshpots. The Egyptians had trouble
drafting enough people to serve in their
administrative centers and they learned
from hard experience that you could not
trust the locals. They tried that—14th
century did not work out well.
What do you do? What did the Romans do?
You go to whoever is willing to serve
and you offer payment and a prize at the
end. If you are a Cypriot or a Hittite or
a Libyan or a Syrian, and your farm
has been doing pretty well, you're not
going to inherit that land if you're the
third or fourth son. The oldest
son is going to get it. And what also
happens now is a critical event. Starting
around 1300 or so BC, we have a very
clear episode of climatic desiccation.
There is climate change. It's real. We see
it in archeology, we see it when we drill
cores into swamps and lake beds. We see
that agriculture is drying up. There's
less pasture and we see that there is a
crisis. Remember, this is a time when the
empires are collapsing. Egypt is
contracting, the Mycenaeans
collapse, the Hittites fall—all in the
13th century. There's definitely a climate element going on
here. Now we know it for sure because
we've tested in lots of different places
and the patterns are recurring
throughout the eastern Mediterranean in the
Middle East. So the farms are failing and
young men have nothing to do and they're
starving. One of the things you can do if
you're an able-bodied young man is to go to
Egypt and serve the Egyptian crown. And
they will send you to Canaan because
nobody else wants to go there. You go
serve in an administrative centre in
Canaan, be you a Cypriot or a Hittite
or a Syrian, and you're serving there and
you're a soldier and you're a man. What
do men need? Wives. And where are you
going to get a wife? From the locals. Now
the local people, for them it's not such
a bad idea because if you have a local
soldier in your family you have what we
call in Israel protectsia. You can
solve problems. If you have an argument
with your neighbor, guess who's gonna win
that argument? So, and it's, you know, this
is a patriarchal society in the 12th
century BC, 13th century BC, so women are
an economic and political tool. So 
women, a Canaanite woman, a local Danite
woman, let's say, marries a Cypriot
serving the crown at Tel Dan and they
have children. Now this guy is called,
he's called Jacob the Cypriot, he's just
the Cypriot and his wife is a Danite.
What are their sons and daughters called?
What is their attribution? What is their
group identification? They might be
Cypriot, they might be just a Danite. They
could be all kinds of things. And this
scenario replicates itself over and over
again.
That, by the way, is why, in these control
centers like Beit She'an and Tel Dan, most
of the cooking pots are local cooking
pots because, usually in traditional
societies, anthropologists have done
research on this, about 90 percent of the
time in traditional societies with
household modes of production women do
the cooking. When it gets industrialized
then men get involved. But if you're
finding mostly Canaanite-style cooking
pots in these places where Egyptians
control the town, probably it's local
women doing the cooking which, by the way,
it's very interesting that at Tel
Dan there's so many Egyptian cooking
pots. I don't know what to do with that.
So the Egyptians, all these
different people are serving the
Egyptian crown, they're soldiers
and, at the end of their tour of duty, say
20 years, they get a reward. And what is
the reward? Think of the Roman legions. You get land. And where do you get the land?
Not where you want it, you get the land
where they tell you you get it. And the
government will give you land where it
needs you to be. They send you to the to
the frontier. They send you to the place
where you're needed,
as eyes and ears for the administration.
And, as an added bonus, you will also be
able to develop the agricultural
potential of the countryside and
eventually provide more food and more
trade items for the centers down below
and actually even for export to Egypt.
Always keep in mind that the products of
the grape and the olive were critical to
Egypt. They could not raise good grape
vines and olive trees—they could raise
them, they figured it out at some point,
but it wasn't good. It was like, you know, when you buy bad wine and you
say why did I buy this? So why did I buy
that Egyptian wine? I could have
bought it from Canaan. This was critical
to the Egyptians to be able to have
access to these agrarian products. And if
you could expand into the hill country
and expand your ability to 
provide this, it's a double—it's a
win-win situation and for the veterans
and their families as well. So what I'm
suggesting is that the Egyptians carried
out an additional surge by giving land
grants to veterans who settled the hill
country. The collared-rim pithoi jars were
established as a standard measure in
order to provide these homesteading
families with start-up materials,
especially wine and oil, and perhaps
startup grain, at the beginning.
Eventually the hope was that they would
be able to produce the kinds of things
that would make it economically
worthwhile. At the beginning, the hill
country did not produce olive oil and
wine—not yet. That happened probably at
the end of the 11th century, 10th century,
once the terraces started getting built
and once things calm down and once
agreements were made. But in this phase,
when the Egyptian agents are settling
the hill country, they are mostly
focusing on farming, grain farming, in the
valley bottoms, raising, pastoralism, sheep
and goats, textiles, things like that. Later
on they move over to the other agrarian 
products. So this is my explanation
for the settlement of the hill country,
which is distinctly not biblical. The
Egyptian rule over Canaan ends probably
in the time of Ramses VI. His
inscription, his cartouche, is the very
last one we have of the Egyptian New
Kingdom. After that there's a big gap,
until we have others in monumental form,
and it would appear that the Egyptians
basically left or abandoned their
control, circa 1140 or so BC. My guess is
that those who wanted to leave, left. And
the question is, once they left, who's
left?
So if you are, let's say, a Hittite and
you've married a local woman and
you've had children and they've had
children and they maybe call themselves
Hittites
or maybe just Beit She'anites or
something like that. You're not gonna go
anywhere—you're gonna stay. If you're an
Egyptian, you were an Egyptian soldier,
and you married a local woman, you might
think about going back to Egypt but, if
you're a third- or fourth-generation
Egyptian, you might not even think of
Thebes or Saqqara or anything else or
Pi Ramesses as your home. You're already
home. Where are you gonna go? And in any
case, everything's in chaos at this point.
Twelfth century BC is chaos. We have the
massive droughts, piracy, the empires have
collapsed.
Everybody's looking out for their own
interests. You have nowhere to go—you're
gonna stay there. The Egyptians—the
Egyptian cooking-pots appear in stratum
7 and Late Bronze Age, but they continue
all the way down to stratum 4B,
circa 950 BC. There were Egyptians there
and they maintained their culinary
practices for 200 years. They 
maintained a sort of Egyptian identity.
These people stayed.
Just as a sort of sidebar, the Levites,
in the biblical text the priestly class,
the Levites are quite curious and the
Bible gives us all kinds of hints as to
who they are.
Moses and Aaron are Levites. The name
Moses, the Bible gives us an
explanation for the name: [Hebrew]—to
pull out of the water. You know the story
about how Pharaoh's daughter pulls
him out of the Nile when he's a baby? But that's what we call an
etiological explanation. It's a way of
explaining, well in Hebrew it's called
midrashim, but the word "mes" means "son of": Thutmes Rammes, usually there's a
theophoric element in the name—the name
of a god. The writers of this text
actually didn't know his name. There may
have been a person of that, of Moses's, there
maybe really was a Moses of one kind or
another, but all they knew to call him
was Mes: Moses. The Levitic
priests, Hophni and Pinchas, those are
Egyptian names and so are others are
probably also Kohath, Merari.
All these Levitic names seem to be Egyptian and the big one is Miriam. What does Miriam
mean? Merely it's a it's a distortion of
Meryamun, beloved of the God
Amun. She's also a Levite. So the
Levites have a definite strong Levitic-
Egyptian connection. Exactly how that works lots of people are now writing about.
It's a hot topic right now so I won't go
into it any more but this, there's an
Israelite tribe of priests that probably
came from Egypt. So, who were the
Israelites? Some of them were really
Israelites. They're mentioned in the
Merneptah Stele. There's a group of
people living in the hill country
called Israelites, they're there. But
there are other peoples, too.
For example, the Danites are probably the
Danauna, which are mentioned in the
mortuary inscription, mortuary temple of
Ramesses III, as one of the Sea
Peoples. They're also called Denyen. They may have
come from Adana in southern Turkey. There is a Greek tribe called Danaeh. Perseus is
a Danaeh. Remember Perseus and Andromeda? Where's the rock of Andromeda in the
story? Next to Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. Who's
the most famous Danite? Samson, Samson.
Think of Samson. What are his features?
He's really strong. He has long hair. He
cavorts with women and Philistines.
What kind of Israelite judge is that?
Samson is Hercules. He's a Greek hero. The Danites are Danaoi, they're a Greek
tribe that migrated from the coast of
Turkey or Cyprus maybe. And it goes on. We
have Egyptians, the Levites, and probably
all kinds of other ethnic groups that
assimilated or acculturated. Think about
the biblical texts. Who is the general
that David sends into battle to get
killed when he falls in love with Bathsheba?
Uriah the Hittite, right? And in
Genesis there are Hittites, it's a guy
named Ephron, who Abraham buys the Makhpelah Cave in order to bury his family. He's
a Hittite. That's really important in
that story because he's a foreigner and
the account of Abraham buying the tomb
plot from Uriah the Hittite—from Ephron
the Hittite—is the text telling
us, yeah we were foreigners, we came here
later, there were other people here
before us. But look, there's that Hittite
guy who was here. He already had fields
and he had a tomb and we bought it with
money for a contract. It's legit, it's
legal.
He's a Hittite. Where did Hittites come
from? In the 13th century, 12th century,
Hittites served the Egyptian crown. They
served in the army and they stayed there
and they kept their ethnic identity for
a long time afterwards. He's that Hittite
guy. And they were good
in military affairs and that's why
Uriah was a general. And we could go on
and on with that but I won't. The
Israelite settlement was initiated by
the Egyptians. Once the Egyptians left,
things got complicated as they tend to
do. Security was a real issue. It was a
struggle to subsist. Remember the drought, 
the extended drought, affected Israel as
well. The hill country is maybe a little
better off because there's a little more
rainfall. This also is immigration and
refugees are a big part of this as well.
The people that serve the Egyptian crown
that had stayed after the Egyptian
administration left, they may have even
written to their relatives in Cyprus
saying you should come here. We're at Tel
Dan. We have this terrific source of
water, the source of the Jordan River,
great fields all around us. We're a bunch
of warriors here. Join us. We need more
people. Come. And part of the immigration
to the land of Israel, including in the
Philistine coastal plain, further south,
may well be associated refugees that
came to join their brethren. when they
knew there was a place to go. This is how
refugees work. You don't just come when
you don't know anything. You have a
relative. Think of all the Hispanic
people you know, who have made it good
here and done good things. They came
because there was a pioneer, somebody who came 50 years ago, set up shop and then
the family started coming. That's the way
migrants succeed in a new country. And it
probably is the same in ancient Israel.
Once things start coalescing people are
at each other's throats but eventually
they learn to make alliances. And part of
all of this is also probably a religious
transformation because you have this big
salad of all different kinds of
religious beliefs and cultic behaviors.
And they're going to influence each
other and something is going to come out
on top. Or at least there's going to be
some coagulation of different kinds of
things into something that's a little
more mainstream. And I would suggest that
the description in the biblical texts 
of ancient Israelite religion,
crystallizing at this time, actually
finds its echo in the archaeology as
well. And that could be a whole other
lecture. I won't do it now but there's
data to support that as well. And I would
also suggest that the book of Judges is
a pretty accurate representation of what
the land of Israel looked like circa
1100 BC. The conflict, the charismatic
leaders that come up and then fail or
succeed, and that eventually you need to
the nation coalesces in tribes
initially, shifting alliances as we said.
Borders become established that are more
clearly recognized and kingship is
established first with Saul then with
David. Of course Samuel was made sure to
tell everybody are you sure you want a
king? It's not always a good idea there's a downside. But they decided they
want it and that was probably because
they, it was something that was needed at
the time, because there was a big enemy
especially in the south, the Philistines,
but again that's another subject. Thanks
very much.
And we do have time for a few questions.
We do, OK. So, questions?
Aside from grain, grinding grain, and
cooking, women would presumably, because
I'd be with the kids most of the time
and suckling them, be the primary
transmitters of culture. How would that
fit into your story? Sure, but I would
suggest that that is one of those sort
of culture those kind of things that we
say and it's not a hundred percent true.
I think that men do transfer culture
also, especially if you're a macho guy and 
you're a warrior. I mean your kids are gonna
say my dad you know, you know And the
dads, you know, they don't talk very much
they just go out and do stuff. And the
kids admire them and the mother says why,
why, you know? He's not transmitting
culture.
I'm actually being sort of serious in my
reply I don't, I don't think it's so, I
think it's more balanced than that. Yeah but they were, they were getting things from both
sides for sure. And probably they were
speaking the mother's language. And we
see that in the archaeology. You saw the
abecedary. Everybody was adopting the
Canaanite's language and the script,
those who knew how to read and write
Yeah? I have a just A and B portions of
the question. Just in support of your,
of you're pointing out that some of the Levi priests probably or possibly had
some kind of Egyptian origin. There was a
book called the culture of ancient Egypt
written by a professor from here, the University of Chicago, many decades ago. But in that
book, which he presents two Psalms from
the Hebrew Psalms and compares them to
some songs from Egypt or some writings
in each of it in that the correspondence
is just astonishing. The word by word
the similarity so. And the
B portion is, could you comment a little
bit about Cupid or master ah the work
done on this tel in the, in the Manasa
tribal lands by Ralph Hawkins.
Can you comment on that and
how what he found there in Khirbet el-Mastarah
with, they couldn't identify the
above-ground structures, but when they
dug deep in the trenches they can date them to the Iron Age One and he believes
that they're not similar with
things that they found from the middle
Bronze Age in that area so that leads
them to conclude that this could support
the crossing of Joshua from the Jordan
River as described in Joshua 3:16. Thank
you.
As far as the book of the Psalms go this
has been recognized already for about 50
60 years. That a lot of, but the thing is
that the Psalms may have been a later
addition to the Canon. So that it could
be let's say a late Iron Age or Persian
period edition, when people were much
more exposed to international languages
and literatures and it was adopted. So it
could be a later edition and, at the same
time, it could also be early and that's
not a surprise.
As far as the Hawkins excavations, we,
Ralph Hawkins and I had a couple
discussions. Some, we were sort of coming
at it from a completely different point
of view. It's not—when I point that out in
certain places where the destruction
layers don't correspond with the
biblical chronology, that doesn't mean to
say that nothing corresponds. There are a
number of places, like Lachish, for
example, where there is a destruction
layer where it should be in at the end
of the Late Bronze Age. So you're bound
to find a few of them or many of them
even, that work with the biblical text.
I'm looking at the ones that don't work,
especially those that are particularly
prominent. And again when you do the good when you do good work archaeologically,
you publish the data and then we can all
look at it and interpret it and have
arguments in our conferences—that's the
fun. Professor, I was wondering how the
material culture is created. How is the
work organized to make all those pots?
And are these, what kind of homes are these? Does everybody have a home like that?
And who does the work? Who makes the
swords, who makes the armory, stuff like
that? Do you study that kind of thing? We're not a hundred percent sure. It's a good question actually. It seems
that most of the work is done by the
extended family. You know, like the Amish
build a house and have a barn-raising
ceremony. It's possible that some of that
took place. It seems unlikely that
everybody knew how to build a building, a
really good building, so probably there's
somebody around there who specializes in
building and knows how to at least give
advice. It's—you probably don't hire
outside workers to do the building for
you because that is just too expensive.
And some places don't have four-room houses also. As far as pottery goes, when you're
looking at smaller vessels—bowls, cooking
pots—in traditional societies
usually it's women who do that. make the
pots, and this is something that's passed
on from mother to daughter. And somebody before said that the woman is usually in
the house with the children, which means
that certain activities are more
confined to women in traditional
societies and that is cooking, grinding
of flour, and taking care of children. 
They're in the household, while you're
doing these things, and making pottery
from time to time. When you get to the
more sophisticated, very large vessels,
then it's specialized. And making collared
pithoi requires a lot of knowledge
and experience. As far as we know from
petrographic examination of the pottery
through the microscope, there looks, it
looks like there are all together about
five centers of production in ancient
Israel. And that probably means that
there are specialists who may be men, or
maybe not just men, who are making the
pottery for the Egyptian crown and the
pots are being sent to various places
wherever they are needed. And we have
time for one final question.
Don't have to. I just, I'm just curious,
has there been any genealogical studies
of either burials in that area from that
time or current populations that can
trace back their genealogy to Cyprus or
other parts of the Middle East to
confirm some of the conclusions of DNA?
Yeah, so it's just beginning.
You know, in order for DNA to be viable
you have to have collagen in the bone.
And if there's no collagen, then you
can't do anything with it. There are some
examples of where collagen has been
preserved. Here's the big problem with
burial of people. In the early Iron Age
people stopped burying their dead. All
the Philistine sites from the 12th and
11th century BC, there are no cemeteries.
So, as my colleague Bill Deaver sometimes
says, they died in the Iron Age and they
were buried in the Iron Age 2A. But,
but something changed radically, so we
don't have
the human bones to be able to analyze
them. And if we do have them, in the rare
cases we do, a lot of times  there's no
collagen left. One day, a hundred years
from now, we'll be in a different place.
We are looking at animals and there has
been some really interesting work on
pork, on pigs, from Philistine contexts. And
the DNA from pigs in Philistia looks
like it comes from Europe. And in fact
most of the pig population in Israel in
the Iron Age. where you do, wherever you
have pigs, looks like it has markers for
European pigs. But that's about as much
as we can say right now. During the
period of the Egyptian administration,
how did they communicate with their
administrators? What language did they
use? So we're not a hundred percent sure,
we're pretty sure they were using
hieroglyphics on papyrus scrolls. This is
a research problem, my program I'm going
to be doing this year trying to figure
out if there was papyrus in Israel that
was being used and maybe that's why we
have so few documents because papyrus
doesn't preserve. So probably it's mostly
by written missives but we also know
that the Egyptians have a function
that's called the Runner—the messenger—
who are running from place to place. By
now there's also horses, maybe they're
being used, we don't know. And so this
combination of human means of transport
and written documents, probably in
hieroglyphics, is what's being used but,
as you saw in a couple of the slides, the
alphabetic script is already coming into
use, again probably on papyrus, and it's
being used by the common folk and maybe
soldiers are doing that. But the
administrators are communicating with
Egypt, probably with hieroglyphics. I have
a logistical question.
You showed us the hill country, which
looked like it was a mess to go through
with rocks and brushwork.
How did they get this stuff from Egypt
like those giant pithoi, you could get on
water, but then how did you get the
materials over the hills? So, for one
thing, the pithoi were not being
manufactured in Egypt, they were local,
they were manufactured locally. For
example, in the hill country we know
there's a hill country site. A place
where they're making it. From the clay we
can identify it's in the hill country.
There's probably another one in Jordan,
in the hills of Jordan. There's another
one on the coastal plain. There's one at Tel Dan. So there
are centers located as near by as
possible because those jars really are
heavy, you're right. As for other things,
probably the roots run at the base
of the, of the water courses, at the
gulches, not on the hills and not so much,
but not in the middle of the streams, but
at the edge. That's where the trails are
today. And probably, and they're using
donkeys, and we're not using horses
or mules yet, it's donkeys. So donkeys can
pretty easily get through a trail that
goes along the bottom of a slope. Folks,
can we thank our speaker one more time?..
