The Oxford History of the Biblical World

by Coogan, Michael D.

  The final period of occupation at Ain Ghazal, from 5500 to 5000 BCE, brings with it yet another significant innovation, pottery. For the ancients the development of ceramics was probably less significant than it has proven for modern researchers. Although pottery made long-term storage more convenient, such storage was already possible in the form of baskets for dry goods and animal skins for liquids—both of which continued in use for millennia. The discovery that clay, when fired at high temperatures, would become hard and durable, was made independently at a number of sites in different regions and at different times in the Neolithic Age, and it occurs relatively late at Ain Ghazal. The new technology, however, became widespread, and by 5000, ubiquitous. Clay, the raw material for ceramics, was readily available, and most pottery was locally made, at first by hand, then on the wheel (although hand manufacture continued to be reserved for some types of vessels). Although ceramic bowls, cups, plates, jars, and other forms are easily broken, they were easily and inexpensively replaced, and the sherds simply discarded. But these sherds are indestructible, and they have become one of the most commonly found and most important tools for archaeologists.

  From the end of the Neolithic Age on, pottery fragments, even on the surface of the ground, are a sure sign of human occupation. Over the millennia, pottery changed, but slowly and generally synchronously, so that the materials used, the forms, and the decorations became cultural and chronological markers. Over the past hundred years, archaeologists have accumulated a repertoire of these changes, so that pottery becomes an important tool for dating, especially in later periods when radiocarbon dates are less precise. Indeed, until coins become widely used beginning in the Persian period, pottery can be the most important chronological indicator for the Near Eastern sites and levels in which it is found, since datable written remains are often sparse or nonexistent. Within a narrow confine, different types of ceramics can be used to elucidate social stratification and political control. Moreover, as containers for goods traded and even as an object of trade itself, pottery is an indicator of commercial and hence cultural interchange.

  Another important site for this period is Jericho, in the Jordan Valley just north of the Dead Sea; until the discovery of Ain Ghazal it was the type-site for the Levant. Like Ain Ghazal, Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) is endowed with an abundant water supply, in the form of a spring that produces as much as 4,000 liters (1,000 gallons) per minute. This spring produced a large oasis in a region of marginal rainfall and warm climate, enabling agriculture to be carried out with ease and virtually year-round. At Jericho, we find essentially the same chronological development as at Ain Ghazal, although the occupation at Jericho begins earlier and is not continuous. As at Ain Ghazal, the burials at Jericho are generally beneath the floors of houses and often have special treatment of the skulls.

  In one respect Jericho is anomalous. In general, Neolithic sites are unfortified villages, as are settlements of the immediately following Chalcolithic period, but at the very beginning of the Neolithic era Jericho is a walled enclosure—perhaps even, anachronistically, a city. A stone rampart surrounds the site, at this time covering about 4 hectares (10 acres). This wall was successively rebuilt over the centuries, reaching a maximum width of 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) and a height of more than 6 meters (20 feet). A moat encircled the wall, and just inside the wall was at least one massive circular stone tower, more than 8 meters (26 feet) high, with a diameter of about 9 meters (30 feet) at the base and 7 meters (23 feet) at the top. Inside this tower was a twenty-two-step staircase leading from its base to its top. This complex enclosure system was in use for only a millennium or so, and its function is unclear, although defense is the most reasonable hypothesis. (An alternative explanation proposes a religious use, but archaeologists too often attribute religious functions to discoveries they do not fully understand.) In any case, the construction and maintenance of the system would have required considerable labor, presumably by specialists whose activity the larger community (probably numbering fewer than a thousand) would have had to compensate. At Jericho, then, and probably at other Neolithic sites as well, we should presume the existence of specialization of tasks and concomitant complexity in social organization that will in the Early Bronze Age (around 3000 BCE) evolve into full urbanism.

  Because of its ecologically advantageous setting, Tell es-Sultan in the Jericho oasis was rebuilt in successive periods, although with some gaps in occupation. It thus exemplifies one of the most familiar features of the ancient and modern Near Eastern landscape, the mound known in Arabic as tell, in Hebrew as tel, in Turkish as huyuk, and in Persian as tepe. A tell is the accumulated debris—generally trapezoidal in silhouette—of successive human occupations. Originally, settlers would choose to live on a natural hill, both for defensive purposes and because springs are often found at the base of hills. Houses were built of stone and sun-dried mud-bricks, and, from the Early Bronze Age on, fortifications as well. These settlements often survived for centuries, but eventually they fell victim to natural catastrophes or war, or were simply abandoned because of a change in rainfall patterns or the drying up of the water supply. But other settlers returned to the same site, sometimes immediately and sometimes later, building their town atop the ruins of the previous one. As this pattern was repeated, sometimes a dozen or more times, the site slowly built up, with the earlier debris often held in place by the foundations of the fortifications. Thus were formed the mounds of many cities, to borrow a phrase from Frederick Bliss, a late nineteenth-century excavator of Tell el-Hesi in southwestern Palestine.

  Understandably, these mounds were the primary focus of archaeological work in the Levant in the first century or so of systematic excavation. They can often be identified with cities mentioned in biblical and other texts, and thus their occupational history is illuminated by references to them in ancient sources. Moreover, their stratigraphy, though invariably complex, provides a diachronic record of changes in architecture, burial customs, technology, food sources, and the like—changes that can be dated by ceramic chronology. Because of the preoccupation of many excavators with the relationship between excavated remains and the Bible, many of the principal tells in Palestine have been partially excavated more than once, cumulatively yielding a detailed record of the political history and material culture of the region since prehistoric times. As one moves farther away from Palestine, the number of excavated tells decreases, even though in such areas as northern Syria the mounds are more numerous. In Jordan and Syria especially, countless sites have never been excavated.

  Since the last third of the twentieth century, more attention has focused on smaller sites, often occupied for only one period, and these have been studied not only by actual excavation but also often by surface survey. This type of investigation often pays more attention to social history than to political history, which is essentially the record of the elite. Many of the sites cannot be identified with ancient place-names, and some are no more than small villages not mentioned in ancient sources. But the investigation of these sites has illuminated the settlement patterns of various periods and the complex relationships between large urban centers and smaller satellite towns and villages, as well as the way of life of ordinary people.

  The Chalcolithic Age

  The periodization of history—its division into various eras, and the nomenclature given to those eras—is misleading. It implies sudden change, caused by migration, invasion, variations in climate, or other punctual events. But what is more apparent from the archaeological record is continuity, both through time and across a wide geographical area. Change occurs, of course, but it is almost always gradual and the process is observable.

  In the mid-fifth millennium BCE there begins the so-called Chalcolithic Age, a name derived from the Greek words for copper and stone. This period (ca. 4500–3300 BCE) was so named because metallurgy becomes widespread, although stone tools also abound. The Chalcolithic is followed, in archaeological nomenclature, by the Bronze Age (sub
divided into Early, Middle, and Late) and then by the Iron Age. But this terminology, based on technology, conveys the wrong impression. Stone artifacts continued to be used throughout the Bronze Age and beyond; some agricultural villages in the Middle East today still use stone blades in harvesting and threshing tools, and stone mortars and pestles have been commonplace in daily life up to modern times. Moreover, iron objects appeared before the beginning of the Iron Age, and well into it bronze remained the most widely used metal.

  Once recorded history begins, periodization is based on political events in Egypt and elsewhere. This is the case with the subdivision of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. Subsequent periods are delineated by shifts in imperial control—the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods, for example.

  The culture of the Chalcolithic in many respects evolved from the preceding Neolithic Age. Ceramic forms developed in the earlier period continued to be used in the later, as did stone (usually flint) tools. The process of domestication continued, with olives, dates, and flax added to the repertoire of cultivated flora. Chalcolithic settlements, like those of the Neolithic, were unfortified. In Palestine the number of known sites is much larger for the Chalcolithic, and they are often found in previously unsettled regions. In part because of the expanding repertoire of food supplies, diet improved and population increased. Given the demonstrable continuities with the preceding period, earlier theories that posited migration as the source of innovations now seem unlikely.

  Yet there were innovations in this period as well, some of short duration and others longer-lasting. New ceramic forms developed, often ornately painted or incised. Some are ossuaries, small receptacles for the secondary interment of bones after the flesh has decomposed. In the Neolithic, apparently only skulls were given this secondary treatment; now the entire skeletal remains of adults were gathered together, deposited in the ossuaries, and placed in burial caves. The ossuaries are usually large boxes, averaging 70 centimeters (2 feet 3 inches) long, 60 centimeters (2 feet) high, and 30 centimeters (1 foot) wide. Some are elaborately decorated, giving them the appearance of a house, with openings for doors and sometimes windows. Although not all Chalcolithic burials are of this type, secondary burial was at least widely practiced, and continued for millennia.

  Since the Chalcolithic period is still prehistoric in the sense that we have no texts to help us interpret the material culture, we know nothing about the ideas underlying secondary burial in ossuaries. Is this an attempt to give the dead a home, if only on a reduced scale? Why are architectural details of the ossuaries inconsistent with ordinary houses of the period? Why are some ossuaries shaped like animals, and some elaborately decorated with disembodied eyes? Why are some interment sites distant from settlements, and why are some corpses not given secondary burial? Our inability to answer such questions reveals how little we know of ancient peoples in this and prior and even subsequent ages. What archaeologists excavate at a site of any size is only a small fraction of what was there when it was a vibrant, flourishing entity. Moreover, much excavated material from all periods is prehistoric in precisely this sense, coming from sites and individuals that will forever remain anonymous. Even after writing was developed, the overwhelming majority of texts were produced by and for a small elite. Their social attitudes and religious beliefs and practices can only partially, and even then with difficulty, be projected to nonelite, nonurban, ordinary folk, whose social history and thinking must largely be inferred from the fragmentary survivals of their material culture.

  The same sort of questions arise about another type of artifact of the Chalcolithic Age, the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figurines. Usually ceramic, but sometimes carved in ivory or stone, these figurines are carefully executed artistic expressions whose function and interpretation are unclear. The stone exemplars are carefully executed, portraying what seems to be a woman in an abstract violin-like shape. In the media of pottery and ivory, both males and females are portrayed more realistically, with their sexual organs rendered in explicit, sometimes exaggerated, detail. Plausibly this suggests some association with fertility ritual. The same theme is also apparent in two complete ceramic examples. One is a nude seated woman who holds on her head a large churn, a well-attested ceramic form from the period generally. The other is a ram, on whose back are three tapered cups, or cornets, another common Chalcolithic form. The torsos of both the woman and the ram are churnlike in shape. Human and animal reproduction and milk production thus seem to have been understandable preoccupations of Chalcolithic people, although the rituals in which these needs were expressed are unknowable.

  Chalcolithic settlement is found throughout Palestine, from upper Galilee and the Golan Heights to the Negeb. The best-known large sites are a cluster of three in the Beer-sheba region, the source of most of the ivory figurines, and Teleilat Ghassul, just northeast of the Dead Sea. Approximately midway between them lie the sites of two major discoveries. During the systematic exploration of caves in the Judean wilderness to the west of the Dead Sea that followed the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, a large cache of copper objects was recovered from a cave on the Nahal Mishmar. Dubbed the “Cave of the Treasure,” it contained hundreds of ivory and copper objects, along with pottery, textiles, stone tools, basketry, and several burials. The large number of copper objects and their technical and artistic sophistication is unparalleled elsewhere in the same period and for centuries to come. The hoard included ten crowns, some intricately decorated with animal heads and horns, birds, and knobs. There were also more than 100 standards, many decorated with the same elements as the crowns. Copper jars and baskets, chisels and a hammer, and more than 240 mace heads were also found. Since the lost-wax process was used in casting the objects, there are no exact duplicates among the more than 400 in the cache.

  The origin and function of this trove are a mystery. There was no nearby contemporary settlement of any size. Some 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) to the north-northeast, on a terrace overlooking the Dead Sea near the prolific spring at En-gedi, are the remains of a complex of structures that has plausibly been interpreted as a Chalcolithic shrine. A screening or temenos wall separated the shrine from its immediate environment, enclosing an area of about 375 square meters (4,000 square feet). Two gates in the wall gave access to an open courtyard, and projecting inward from the wall were two large rectangular buildings of what is known as the “broadroom” type, with their entrances on the long side. The larger of the two measures 5.5 meters (18 feet) by 20 meters (65 feet), and has opposite its entrance a raised platform, flanked, as was the doorway, by benches. The isolation of the complex, the finds found within it (for example, nearly 70 percent of the pottery was cornets), and parallels to its design at other sites suggest that this was a religious center, probably used by several communities. The trove from the Cave of the Treasure may have originally belonged to this sanctuary.

  Together with burial practices and figurines, the complex at En-gedi is evidence for an organized system of communal practices based on the shared belief, or hope, of a reality greater than the human, perhaps even a life after life. There is a similar complex at the important site of Megiddo (Tell el-Mutesellim), also with a temenos wall and two broadroom structures, each with a platform, or altar, opposite its entrance. The date of the original construction of this complex is disputed, whether in the Chalcolithic or the immediately succeeding Early Bronze I Age, but the interpretation of its function as religious is supported by the presence of temples in the same area at Megiddo in uninterrupted succession for over two thousand years, until the beginning of the Iron Age.

  The Chalcolithic Age, then, was a brief era of both relatively peaceful existence and extraordinary artistic expression. The construction and maintenance of the public architecture and the manufacture of the copper, ivory, and ceramic artifacts must have been the primary occupation of specialized groups. The movement toward complex social organization thus continued. This was apparently an internal developme
nt, rather than the result of massive invasions from outside the region. The Chalcolithic ended mysteriously, with some of its principal sites simply abandoned and never resettled. But many of the elements of its culture continued to be used in the succeeding Early Bronze Age, suggesting continuity rather than disruption.

  The Rise of Cities and Nation-States

  The phenomenon of urbanism in the Early Bronze Age throughout the Near East was not a sudden development. As populations grew, societies became more complex, resulting in ever more specialized occupations. Competition increased among villages and towns for natural resources, especially arable land and water, and one specialization that developed was military. Defensive and offensive weapons become increasingly lethal, and settlements began to be fortified with increasingly elaborate ramparts, towers, and gates.

  During the apparently peaceful, artistic Chalcolithic Age in Palestine, urbanism was already developing in Mesopotamia, and shortly thereafter, in Egypt. By the beginning of the fourth millennium BCE, at Uruk and elsewhere in southern Mesopotamia, true cities had appeared. They are characterized by monumental public architecture that had both religious and administrative functions, by sophisticated technology in various media, and, eventually, by the use of writing. As populations increased, agriculture also became a specialized activity. No longer could each family or domestic unit supply its own food. Many of its members might pursue other occupations—soldiers, builders, priests, potters, metallurgists, administrators—and their needs would have been met by others—farmers, herders, traders.