Biblical Peoples

The World of Ancient Israel

Marek Dospěl & Glenn Corbett—Editors

Robert Bronder—Designer
Jonathan Laden—Publisher

©2022
Biblical Archaeology Society
5614 Connecticut Avenue NW #343
Washington, DC 20015
www.biblicalarchaeology.org

Cover Image: Glazed brick relief panel (heavily restored) showing a Persian archer. Excavated from the Palace of Darius
at Susa, it dates to the sixth century B.C.E. Photo by Alvesgaspar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
 Biblical Peoples

About the Biblical Archaeology Society

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© 2022 Biblical Archaeology Society 2

 Biblical Peoples

CONTENTS

About the Authors 4

Introduction 5

1. The Egyptians 6
“The Egyptianizing of Canaan”
By Carolyn R. Higginbotham

2. The Hittites 19
“Warriors of Hatti”
By Eric H. Cline

3. The Assyrians 30
“Who Were the Assyrians?”
By Chris Hays

4. The Babylonians 40
“Nebuchadnezzar & Solomon”
By Bill T. Arnold

5. The Persians 52
“Making (Up) History”
By Matt Waters

6. The Canaanites 62
“Texts from Ugarit Solve Biblical Puzzles”
By Edward L. Greenstein

7. The Philistines 73
“Piece by Piece: Exploring the Origins of the Philistines”
By Daniel M. Master

8. The Phoenicians 86
“Phoenicia and Its Special Relationship with Israel”
By Ephraim Stern

9. Ammon, Moab, and Edom 94

“Gods and Kingdoms East of the Jordan”
By Joel S. Burnett

Notes 104

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Bill T. Arnold is the Paul S. Amos Professor of Old Testament Interpretation at Asbury
Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. His areas of expertise include Hebrew, Aramaic
and the history of Israelite religion.

Joel S. Burnett is Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Biblical and Related
Languages at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. His research interests include the ancient Near
East, the history of Israelite religion and the religion of Iron Age Transjordan.

Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology and Director of the Capitol
Archaeological Institute at The George Washington University. He is author or editor of over 15
books and 100 articles, and co-director of the Kabri Archaeological Project at Tel Kabri, Israel.

Edward L. Greenstein is Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. A

prolific author in biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies, he has recently published Job: A New
Translation, with Yale University Press.

Chris Hays is the D. Wilson Moore Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Fuller Theological
Seminary in Pasadena, California. He is the author of The Origins of Isaiah 24–27: Josiah’s
Festival Scroll for the Fall of Assyria (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019).

Carolyn R. Higginbotham is a Team Minister at Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in

Indiana. She taught biblical studies, archaeology and religion for many years, first at Muskingum
College in New Concord, Ohio and then at Christian Theological Seminary.

Daniel M. Master is Professor of Archaeology at Wheaton College and Co-Director of the Tel
Shimron Excavations. He also directs the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, which is working
toward publication of its findings.

Ephraim Stern was Professor Emeritus of the Archaeology of Eretz Yisrael at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. A specialist in Phoenician material culture, Stern directed excavations
at Tel Dor, Tel Kedesh and Tel Mevorakh, among other sites.

Matt Waters is a Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Wisconsin-Eau
Claire. He is the author of Ancient Persia: A Concise History of the Achaemenid Empire, 550–
330 BCE (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014).

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INTRODUCTION

Ancient Israel’s history, culture, and writings were shaped by its contacts with the many peoples
and cultures of the ancient world. In this eBook—carefully assembled from articles published
in Biblical Archaeology Review and Archaeology Odyssey magazines—prominent biblical
scholars and archaeologists introduce you to the major peoples and powers that dominated the
ancient Near East and interacted socially, politically, and militarily with ancient Israel.

Situated at the heart of the eastern Mediterranean world, ancient Israel shared borders
with many different peoples, kingdoms, and empires. Through trade, politics, and military
campaigns, Israel was connected with peoples both near and far. Through the millennia, this
included the Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Canaanites, Philistines,
Phoenicians, Ammonites, Moabites, and Edomites, among others. Although the Hebrew Bible
portrays them mostly as villains, these peoples, and the nature of their contact with ancient Israel,
were much more complex and nuanced.

Chapter by chapter, explore the biblical and archaeological evidence for each of these
groups and learn how they interacted with the ancient Israelites. Enjoy discovering how deeply
these various peoples influenced the history and culture of biblical Israel and Judah. It will leave
you with a deeper appreciation for the Bible and the cultural and historical setting in which it
was written.—Marek Dospěl and Glenn Corbett

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The Egyptians
“The Egyptianizing of Canaan” *
By Carolyn R. Higginbotham

KING AKHENATEN (r. 1348–1331 B.C.E.), the so-called “heretic” king, broke with Egyptian
religious tradition and exclusively worshiped the sun god Aten. This relief fragment of
Akhenaten’s figure dates to c. 1345 B.C.E. and is currently in Neues Museum, Berlin. Photo by Gary
Todd from Xinzheng, China, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the centuries before Israel emerged in the highlands of Canaan, first as a people and then as a
nation, the region was essentially ruled by Egypt. But how are we to understand this hegemony?

Until a little more than a century ago, about the only source of information we had regarding
Egyptian-Canaanite relations was the Bible. In 1887, however, a female peasant made a
stupendous discovery at a site in Egypt called Tell el-Amarna. Digging up decayed mudbricks

*
This article originally appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 1998.

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for fertilizer, she unearthed a cache of cuneiform tablets. Since such tablets had never before
been found in Egypt, scholars were initially skeptical of their authenticity. Nevertheless, the
tablets were peddled to those antiquities dealers, scholars, and museum curators who were
interested in them.

Map of Egypt and Canaan.

Once the tablets were determined to be genuine, archaeologists began excavating the site.
Known in ancient times as Akhetaten, “the Horizon of (the god) Aten,” Amarna was the capital
of Pharaoh Akhenaten’s empire. Akhenaten (r. 1348–1331 B.C.E.), the so-called “heretic” king,
broke with Egyptian religious tradition and exclusively worshiped Aten, who is represented in
Egyptian art by the sun disk with its myriad rays ending in hands.

Akhenaten built his city along a remote stretch of the Nile in Middle Egypt. After his death, the
capital was moved back to its original location at Thebes, and Akhetaten was abandoned to the
sands. Although the site was explored by Egyptologists and European travelers in the 19th
century (the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, for example, noted Amarna’s “charming
landscape, broad and peaceful”), its true significance remained hidden until the discovery of the
Amarna letters, as the cache of nearly 400 cuneiform tablets is now known.

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AKHENATEN’S NORTH PALACE at el-Amarna, the “heretic” king’s short-lived capital city built at
the virgin site in Middle Egypt. The city’s Egyptian name, Akhetaten, means “the horizon of the
Aten”—in reference to the new principal deity, the solar disk called Aten. Photo by Olaf Tausch, CC
BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

When deciphered, the tablets—which date to the 14th century B.C.E., about 100 years before
Israel is thought to have emerged in Canaan—proved to be an archive of international diplomatic
correspondence between Pharaoh Akhenaten and his father, Pharaoh Amenhotep III (1387–1348
B.C.E.), on one side, and the city-rulers of Syria-Palestine on the other.

The Amarna letters clearly show that the rulers of these city-states were vassals of the pharaohs.
The city-rulers, often called princes by modern scholars, were bound by oath to accept the
sovereignty of the pharaohs. They were obliged to pay tribute (at least theoretically on an annual
basis), provide logistical support for Egyptian army units marching through the region and, upon
request, supply troops to augment Egyptian forces. Above all, the vassal princes were expected
to be loyal to the pharaoh and refrain from activities that could undermine Egyptian authority.

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In return, Egypt allowed the princes to manage their own day-to-day affairs and simply
adjudicated disputes between neighboring city-states in Syria-Palestine. The plaintive tone of the
Amarna letters suggests that as long as taxes were paid and Egyptian sovereignty was not
challenged, the pharaohs interfered little with the affairs of the region, adopting a policy that
could perhaps be characterized as “benign neglect.”

Several decades after Akhenaten’s death, the 19th Dynasty of Egypt was established, ushering in
the Ramesside period. For 67 years, Ramesses II, who was also known as Ramesses the Great
and whom some believe to be Pharaoh of the Exodus, reigned over Egypt.

Since the discovery of the Amarna letters, archaeologists have also unearthed mounds of artifacts
in Egypt and Canaan, dating to the late second millennium B.C.E., which make it clear that life
in Ramesside Canaan was markedly different from that in the preceding Amarna age. In short,
during the Ramesside period, the material culture of the Canaanite lowlands began to show
conspicuous Egyptian influence. True, during the Amarna age, Egyptian artifacts were present in
the archaeological record of Canaan. But by the 13th century B.C.E. (Late Bronze Age IIB,
which corresponds roughly to the 19th Dynasty of Egypt), the amount of Egyptian-style objects
had increased significantly at Canaanite sites. Egyptian-style artifacts are similarly prevalent at
Iron Age IA (between about 1200 and 1150 B.C.E.) sites; thereafter, these kinds of objects
decline in frequency.

Based on this evidence, some scholars have concluded that beginning in the Ramesside period,
Canaanite city-rulers no longer served as vassals to the Egyptian pharaohs. Instead, they argue,
Ramesside pharaohs initiated a policy of military occupation and direct imperial administration
of Canaan. This model, which we may call the “direct rule” model, was given a significant boost
from an influential 1981 article by James Weinstein, who catalogued the architectural and
inscriptional evidence of an Egyptian presence in Canaan. 1 He concluded that the monuments
and numerous small finds of Egyptian type indicate a shift in pharaonic policy toward the region.
The gist of Weinstein’s argument is that the rise in the frequency of finds with Egyptian
characteristics corresponds to the posting of large numbers of Egyptian soldiers and bureaucrats
at imperial centers in Canaan.

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AMARNA LETTERS were mostly sent to the Egyptian throne by either the vassal rulers of Canaan
or the dominant powers of the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East (e.g., the Hittites,
Babylonians, Assyrians, and Mittanians). Commenting on political conditions, social customs,
trade relations, even diplomatic marriages, the Amarna tablets shed light on how the Egyptians
ruled Canaan in the 14th century B.C.E. Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC
BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A more nuanced look at the evidence, however, suggests that this view is not entirely correct and
that the vassal relationship described in the Amarna letters continued into the Ramesside period.
What accounts primarily for the increase in Egyptian-style objects is not direct rule, but a
different model, which we may call “elite emulation.”

Scholars in many fields have observed this phenomenon in relationships between prestigious
cultures and surrounding communities, which tend to view these influential cultural centers as
the heart of civilization and power. By linking themselves to such centers, local rulers often try
to enhance their own stature and authority. They might adopt features of the great civilization—
such as its language, attire, artistic and architectural styles, and symbols of governance (the
scepter, crown, throne and seal, among others)—in the hopes of acquiring some of the prestige of
the distant center. Scholars have observed this process in the Islamization of sub-Saharan Africa,

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the Indianization of South India and Southeast Asia, and the Sinicization of the Chinese
periphery, 2 for instance.

About 2,000 years ago, the same sort of transformation that occurred in Ramesside Canaan
characterized the Roman invasion of Britain. 3 Romanized architecture, especially buildings
modeled on the Roman forum and villa, began to appear in Britain in the period immediately
following the invasion. These Romano-British structures were not identical to their continental
prototypes but were adapted to local needs and circumstances. In the post-invasion period, local
leaders apparently wanted to appear Romanized to enhance their prestige before both the
imperial authorities and their own communities. 4

Map of Canaan.

In Ramesside Canaan, as in Roman Britain, rulers of local city-states were likewise dependent
upon an external polity for their access to power. Given the prestige accorded to Egypt—not only
as a military and political power, but as a center of civilization—local princes probably emulated
Egyptian culture to enhance their own stature. Egypt and all things Egyptian, after all,
symbolized power and authority.

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As early as the reign of Pharaoh Thutmose III (1397–1387 B.C.E.), young princes from Asia
were raised and educated in the Nile Valley. Upon returning home, they might well have
introduced a provincial Egyptian culture to symbolize their elite status and legitimate their
authority. Moreover, advancement within the pharaonic bureaucracy was historically open to
Egyptianized foreigners (witness the biblical Joseph)—an additional motivation for emulation.

How does this elite emulation model comport with the archaeological evidence? What we find is
that there is some truth in both the direct rule and the elite emulation models. As in the preceding
Amarna age, Egypt did continue to practice direct rule to a degree by maintaining imperial
centers in Canaan. On the other hand, this military presence consisted of a few sites staffed by
small numbers of soldiers and administrators. Just as important to the power structure of the
region were the vassal princes who Egyptianized themselves to varying degrees. In short, a
mixed system of administrative styles prevailed in both the Amarna age and the Ramesside
period—though elite emulation was the more significant component in the mixture.

The two principal imperial centers were Beth-Shean (south of the Sea of Galilee) in the north and
Deir el-Balah (near Gaza) in the south. In addition, Egyptian installations with more strictly
administrative functions were probably located at Gaza and Jaffa.

One Amarna letter shows that Egypt maintained a garrison at Beth-Shean during the Amarna
age. 5 The archaeological data indicate that in the subsequent Ramesside period, the Egyptian
presence was even more pronounced. In the levels from the end of the Late Bronze Age (1550–
1200 B.C.E.) and Iron Age I (1200–1000 B.C.E.), excavators uncovered large quantities of
Egyptian-style pottery and several buildings similar to those found at Tell el-Amarna, in Egypt. 6
The name and title of Ramesses-User-Khepesh, apparently the commander of the garrison during
the reign of Ramesses III (1185–1153 B.C.E.), were inscribed on the lintels and doorjambs of
one of Beth-Shean’s buildings. A statue of Ramesses III was found in a secondary context. Also
unearthed were three royal stelae, two set up by Seti I (r. 1290–1279 B.C.E.) and one by
Ramesses II (r. 1279–1212 B.C.E.). 7

Located on the Mediterranean coast about 10 miles southwest of Gaza, Deir el-Balah marked the
end of the land route across northern Sinai linking Egypt with the Levant. It is the only site in

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HONORING RAMESSES III at Beth-Shean, the Canaanite town located south of the Sea of Galilee
that housed an Egyptian administrative center in both the Amarna and Ramesside periods.
Among the Egyptian-style artifacts from Beth-Shean is the only pharaonic statue ever found in
Canaan, a basalt carving of Ramesses III (1185–1153 B.C.E.). Photo by Davidbena, CC BY-SA 4.0,
via Wikimedia Commons.

Canaan at which Egyptian-style pottery was more common than local types. According to Trude
Dothan, the site’s excavator, a garrison was stationed there throughout the 13th century B.C.E. 8

An Egyptian granary at Jaffa (modern Tel Aviv) is also referred to in an Amarna letter. 9 One of
the few published objects from the excavations at Jaffa is a monumental gateway, which may
have stood at the entrance to the granary complex, bearing the cartouches of Ramesses II. 10

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No archaeological data are available for Gaza, but inscriptional references to the city from the
Amarna period onward show that the city served as some sort of base of operations for Egyptian
interests in the southern Levant. 11

The evidence points to only these four Egyptian imperial outposts—at Beth-Shean, Deir el-
Balah, Jaffa, and Gaza. The existence of two garrisons and two administrative complexes
suggests a limited, rather than a massive, military-administrative presence.

Some scholars have suggested that Egypt assigned resident governors to various Canaanite sites.
But no evidence exists for such a system. The officials who were always thought to be resident
governors were probably either circuit officials, dispatched to make the rounds of a frontier zone
or conquered territory, 12 or royal envoys sent to the Levant on a specific mission. Like their
counterparts in Nubia, south of Egypt, these officials maintained their primary residences in
Egypt, though they may have visited Canaan for extended periods of time. 13

A cuneiform letter found at Taanach refers to this circuit system: An Egyptian official named
Amenhotep (not one of the pharaohs of that name) complains about being slighted during a stop
at Gaza, where the city-ruler of Taanach failed to appear before him. 14

A cuneiform letter recovered at Aphek (east of modern Tel Aviv) also points to the deployment
of an Egyptian circuit official. The letter was sent by an official from Ugarit (in Syria) to an
Egyptian named Haya whose residence is not indicated. Since the other finds from Aphek do not
suggest that the site functioned as an imperial center, the letter probably caught up with Haya
while he was passing through Aphek on his circuit.

These Egyptian circuit officials fulfilled two primary functions in the Levant—taxation and
oversight. A relief on the Luxor temple illustrates the first of these functions: Royal officials are
depicted presenting tribute to Ramesses II. An accompanying hieroglyphic list of functionaries
includes names of the overseers of northern and southern lands who were responsible for the
collection of taxes in Asia and Nubia.

The oversight function is indicated in several texts. The Kadesh Bulletin—a 13th-century B.C.E.
Egyptian record of an important battle between the Egyptians and the Hittites that took place on
the banks of Syria’s Orontes River during the reign of Ramesses II—shows that Egyptian

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officials were indeed responsible for keeping abreast of developments in the Levant and
providing accurate information to the pharaoh. In an earlier text (from the 15th century B.C.E.),
the overseer of northern lands refers to himself as “the eyes of the King of Upper Egypt and the
ears of the King of Lower Egypt.” 15

Finally, the Aphek letter from the Ramesside period demonstrates that Egyptian officials
continued to be responsible for settling arguments between vassals, in this case a dispute over a
grain transaction between Ugarit and another city, perhaps Jaffa.

Although Egyptians exercised oversight, collected taxes and maintained the peace, the everyday
affairs of the city-states appear to have remained in the hands of local rulers. We have no textual
evidence for a large-scale replacement of local princes by pharaonic functionaries. Moreover, in
the Kadesh Bulletin, both local rulers and Egyptian officials are held accountable for faulty
information about the location of the Hittite army. Ramesses II blames not only his own
functionaries but the vassal princes too, one indication that the vassal system familiar from the
Amarna letters was still in place in the Ramesside period. Total responsibility for the affairs of
the region was shared between Egyptian military commanders or administrators and local city-
rulers.

A comparison of the archaeological data with the expectations for the elite emulation and direct
rule models also suggests that local elites remained in place. If the elite emulation model is valid,
we would expect to find a sharply limited range of “foreign” features in the tools and objects of
everyday life. We would also expect objects to exhibit features of both foreign and local cultures
or to be used differently in local societies than in foreign ones. Objects bearing foreign elements
would occur predominantly in funerary and ritual contexts, but even then they would be used in
association with local artifacts. Within a site, we would not expect to find purely foreign
enclaves.

If the direct rule model is true, however, we would expect to find a broad range of foreign
objects at local sites that would be virtually indistinguishable from those found in their
homeland. Both domestic goods (objects used in everyday life) and prestige goods (those objects
valued as status symbols regardless of function) bearing foreign influence would be well

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represented in domestic, as well as funerary and ritual, contexts. Foreign enclaves would also be
expected, resulting in an even greater distribution of foreign material. 16

Outside the Egyptian imperial centers of Beth-Shean and Deir el-Balah, the archaeological
evidence accords better with the elite emulation model than with the direct rule model. Looking
at the evidence as a whole, we find very limited examples of Egyptian-style pottery in Canaan

THESE MUMMY-SHAPED COFFINS, discovered at a vast Canaanite cemetery at Deir el-Balah (10
miles southwest of Gaza), are nearly identical to coffins found in the Nile Delta—more evidence
that the material culture of Canaan bore significant Egyptian influences. Excavations at other
sites, however, have uncovered only a few examples of purely Egyptian artifacts. Artifacts at most
sites are stylistic hybrids, bearing both Egyptian and local influences. Photo by yoav dothan, GFDL,
via Wikimedia Commons.

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during the Ramesside period. For example, there are no Egyptian-style cooking pots, bottles or
flasks, to name just a few types of artifacts we would expect to find, assuming the validity of the
direct rule model.

Moreover, Egyptian-style objects are significantly more common in ritual and funerary contexts
than in domestic ones. Egyptian-style glass vessels, for example, have been found only in
temples and tombs.

As would be expected from the elite emulation model, objects based on Egyptian prototypes
have been modified, producing hybrid types. Only one Canaanite house dating to the Amarna
age resembles the prototypical Egyptian house. The others show variations in the placement of
the entrance and the arrangement of columns, as well as in their construction techniques, which
were influenced by local architectural traditions. Likewise, ivory furniture panels from Megiddo
and an anthropoid sarcophagus with pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions from Lachish exhibit a
mixture of Egyptian and local influences.

Even at Beth-Shean and Deir el-Balah, sites with a relatively high quantity of Egyptian-style
artifacts, the assemblages reflect local influences. Local ceramic types, for example, form a
significant part of the corpus. Indeed, throughout Canaan, Egyptian-style objects regularly occur
side-by-side with local object types and with objects influenced by other cultural traditions: the
Syrian-style ivories from the so-called Megiddo treasury, the Mycenaean-style figurines found
inside an anthropoid sarcophagus at Beth-Shean and the Hittite bulla from Aphek, for example.
The Egyptian-style objects that have been excavated have not been found in isolated “foreign”
enclaves, as would be expected from the direct rule model.

Thus the evidence does not support the theory that the Ramesside pharaohs initiated a policy of
large-scale military occupation and direct imperial administration of the Levant. Far more likely,
the system of vassal princes and circuit officials reflected in the Amarna letters continued until
the end of Egyptian control of the region, during the latter part of the 12th century B.C.E. The
changes in the archaeological record in the Ramesside period reflect the Egyptianization of the
vassal rulers who sought to enhance their power and prestige by associating themselves with the
mighty Nile Valley civilization.

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Even a superficial reading of the Bible indicates that ancient Israel was fascinated by its neighbor
to the southwest. When it came time to establish a strong central government, both David and
Solomon modeled their royal courts after pharaonic bureaucracies. 17 The Bible even links
Solomon directly to the Egyptian royal family through marriage to a daughter of the pharaoh (1
Kings 3:1).

Israelite wisdom literature was also strongly influenced by Egyptian prototypes. Indeed, one
section of the book of Proverbs (22:17–24:22) is so heavily dependent on the Egyptian
Instructions of Amenemope that it could almost be termed a paraphrase.

One way to understand these influences is to place them in the context of the elite emulation
process. The leaders of ancient Israel, like the rulers of the city-states before them, drew upon
Egyptian models to legitimate their own national authority. The more closely they resembled the
great pharaohs of Egypt, the grander and more awe-inspiring they appeared in the eyes of their
subjects. Even though Egypt’s star had waned, the Nile Valley still represented power and
civilization to the people who built the nation of Israel.

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The Hittites
“Warriors of Hatti” *
By Eric H. Cline

IMPOSING STONE LIONS guard the gate to the ancient Hittite capital of Hattusa, about 125 miles
east of modern Ankara. Around 1400 B.C.E., Hattusa was an enormous Late Bronze Age city filled
with palaces, a temple complex, and a library with 3,000 cuneiform tablets. Its rock-and-brick
perimeter walls ran for 6 miles around the city. Photo by KapuskaCoFabli, CC BY-SA 4.0, via
Wikimedia Commons.

Just who were the Hittites?

When this question began to be asked a little more than a century ago, our only knowledge of the
Hittites came from the Hebrew Bible. 1 Abraham buys a burial plot for his wife Sarah from
“Ephron the Hittite” (Genesis 23:3–20). King David falls in love with Bathsheba, the wife of

*
This article originally appeared in Archaeology Odyssey, January/February 2002.

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“Uriah the Hittite,” as he watches her bathe (2 Samuel 11:2–27). David’s son Solomon chooses
“Hittite women” to number among his wives (1 Kings 11:1).

Perhaps the most famous biblical reference to the Hittites comes in Exodus, when God appears to
Moses in the burning bush and declares:

I have come down to deliver them [the Israelites] from the Egyptians, and
to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing
with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the
Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites (Exodus 3:7).

From such biblical references, one would gather that the “country of the Hittites” was in northern
Palestine or Syria. After David commands that the people of Israel be counted, for instance, the
census takers visit, among other places, “Kadesh in the land of the Hittites” (2 Samuel 24:6),
probably referring to a Syrian site that David is said to have conquered. The problem was that
scholars could find no evidence of a Hittite kingdom in that region.

Map of the ancient Near East.

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In the late 19th century, however, German and Swiss archaeologists began investigating the ruins
of a strange, unknown civilization far to the north, in modern Turkey. Here was a classic
conundrum: Ancient historians could name a people (the Hittites) but not their homeland, and
they could name a homeland (ancient Anatolia) but not its people.

Thanks largely to archaeological excavations by German archaeologists—including Hugo

Winckler in the first decade of the 20th century and Kurt Bittel in the years before World War
II—we now know that those Anatolian ruins are the remains of a great Hittite empire that
flourished in the second millennium B.C.E. The Hittites developed from little-known kingdoms
into a fledgling empire in the mid-17th century B.C.E., when they built their capital at Hattusa
(modern Bogazköy, 100 miles east of Ankara). Some decades later, they were powerful enough
to attack Babylon, bringing down the Old Babylonian dynasties. Thereafter, until the collapse of
Hittite civilization in the 12th century B.C.E., they rivaled Egypt as a Near Eastern superpower.

Their story is masterfully told by Australian scholar Trevor Bryce, in The Kingdom of the
Hittites, the most important book yet written in English about Hittite civilization. It’s so good—
filled with interesting facts, novel insights, and rollicking stories—that it reads like a work of
historical fiction.

The name “Hittites,” Bryce reminds us, is something of a misnomer. Because the Bible referred
to Hittites, the term was simply adopted by scholars to refer to this Late Bronze Age Anatolian
kingdom. The Hittites, however, never referred to themselves as Hittites; rather, they called
themselves the “people of the Land of Hatti.” Had we learned about the Hittites in a more orderly
way, we would probably have called them “Nesites” or “Nesians,” for the earliest Hittite rulers—
shadowy figures named Pithana and his son Anitta—based their kingdom at the city of Nesa
(about 200 miles southeast of Hattusa), where a dagger with Anitta’s name on it was discovered.
Nesite was also the name the Hittites gave to their language, an Indo-European tongue that we
instead call Hittite.

Our knowledge of the early Hittite kings comes from chronicles found at Bogazköy/Hattusa.
These documents consist of cuneiform tablets inscribed in Hittite and Akkadian, a Semitic
language spoken by the Babylonians and Assyrians. Two documents concern the first clearly
attested Hittite king, Hattusili I (r. 1650–1620 B.C.E.), who established the capital at Hattusa

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(Hattusili means “man of Hattusa”). The Annals and Testament of Hattusili, which survive only
in later copies dating to 400 years after his reign, tell of the king’s military expeditions and
numerous courtly intrigues—including his wresting the throne from his grandfather and later
bestowing it on his grandson, Mursili I (r. 1620–1590 B.C.E.).

According to the 16th-century B.C.E. Proclamation of the Hittite king Telipinu, which also
survives only in later copies, in 1595 B.C.E. Mursili marched the Hittite army hundreds of miles
southeast from Anatolia to Mesopotamia and destroyed Babylon; then he turned his men around
and marched them home again. No one knows why Mursili conducted this “weekend raid” on
Babylon; the whole affair seems gratuitous and unprovoked. But the campaign was long
remembered as one of the major military triumphs of the early Hittite period. Only a few years
later, however, fate turned against Mursili, who was assassinated by his brother-in-law.

The heyday of Hittite power came during the 14th and 13th centuries B.C.E. In 1991, a bulldozer
operating near ancient Hattusa’s famous Lion Gate uncovered dramatic new evidence from this
period: a bronze sword from the Neo-Hittite kingdom’s first king, Tudhaliya. The sword con-

TWELVE ARMED GODS carved on a wall of the 13th-century B.C.E. Hittite religious sanctuary of
Yazilikaya near the ancient Hittite capital of Hattusa. Until a century ago, no one knew anything
about this Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 B.C.E.) empire. Now, Egyptian records along with
archives excavated at Hittite sites tell us that during the Late Bronze Age the land of Hatti
stretched across Anatolia and northern Syria—making it one of the period’s great superpowers.
Photo by China Crisis, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

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tained an inscription in Hittite: “As Duthaliya [Tudhaliya] the Great King shattered the Assuwa-
Country, he dedicated these swords to the Storm-God, his Lord.” 2 This confirmed accounts
written during Tudhaliya’s reign about a rebellion by a group of small vassal kingdoms,
collectively known as Assuwa, along the Aegean coast of Anatolia. Tudhaliya, the accounts tells
us, marched west to crush the Assuwa Rebellion.

The texts from Tudhaliya’s reign also suggest that one of the allies of the Assuwa league were
men from “Ahhiyawa.” This place name comes up frequently in Hittite documents; it has been
the cause of debates among Hittitologists since at least the 1920s, when the Swiss scholar Emil
Forrer claimed that “Ahhiyawa” was a Hittite transliteration of the Greek “Achaea,” the word
Homer uses to refer to mainland (or Mycenaean) Greece. Initially, Forrer’s identification of the
Ahhiyawans with the Mycenaeans won little support; nowadays, however, more and more
scholars believe that the Ahhiyawans were in fact either people from the Greek Peloponnesus or
Greek settlers along Anatolia’s Aegean coast. 3 According to Bryce, the inscribed bronze sword
was likely “produced in a western Anatolian/Aegean workshop” and was “booty from the
Assuwan campaign.” Indeed, the bronze sword looks suspiciously like weapons found on
mainland Greece during this period. 4

So here, in Hittite annals, we may well meet the Achaeans who, according to Homer, crossed the
Aegean and destroyed Troy. Bryce intriguingly suggests that the Trojan War was not simply a
one-time conflagration; instead, it was the consummation of centuries-long contacts—sometimes
friendly, sometimes hostile—between Mycenaean and Anatolian peoples.

Not surprisingly for a Late Bronze Age power, the Hittites also had relations with Egypt. Letters
from Hittite kings have been found among the Amarna Letters, the diplomatic correspondence of
the Egyptian pharaohs Amenophis III (r. 1390–1352 B.C.E.) and his son Akhenaten with other
Near Eastern monarchs. And Hittite annals contain similar references to letters—sometimes
describing dynastic marriages—exchanged between Hittite rulers and foreign kings. One such
reference comes from The Deeds of Suppiluliuma, a chronicle written by the Hittite king Mursili
II (r. 1321–1295 B.C.E.) about his predecessor and father, Suppiluliuma I. According to the
Deeds, Suppiluliuma, after returning from vigorous campaigns in western Anatolia and northern
Syria, received an unusual letter, purportedly from the Egyptian queen:

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My husband is dead. I have no son. But they say that you have many
sons. If you would give me one of your sons, he would become my
husband. I will never take a servant of mine and make him my husband!

Suppiluliuma doubted that this letter was indeed from the queen of Egypt, since the Egyptians
and Hittites were on hostile terms and had been fighting for decades over control of northern
Syria. So he sent an emissary to Egypt, instructing the man to find out the truth. The next spring,
after the winter snows had thawed, the emissary returned from Egypt bearing a furious response
from the queen:

Had I a son, would I have written about my own and my country’s shame
to a foreign land? You did not believe me, and you even spoke thus to
me! He who was my husband is dead. I have no son! Never shall I take a
servant of mine and make him my husband! I have written to no other
country. Only to you I have written. They say you have many sons; so
give me one son of yours. To me he will be husband. In Egypt he will be
king!

Who was this queen? The Deeds refers to her simply as Dahamunzu, which means “the wife of
the king,” and to her dead husband as Niphururiya. This latter name, Niphururiya, is a fairly
precise rendering in cuneiform of one of the royal names of Pharaoh Tutankhamun (r. 1336–
1327 B.C.E.), Nebkheperure. Thus, many scholars argue that the vitriolic queen was none other
than Ankhesenamun, the widow of Tutankhamun, who died at a young age.

Apparently persuaded that the royal marriage proposal was genuine, Suppiluliuma sent one of his
younger sons, Zannanza, to forge a dynastic alliance with Egypt. But the marriage never took
place: Zannanza and his party were ambushed and murdered while on their way to Egypt.

Bryce gives a riveting account of the ensuing events. Suppiluliuma retaliated for his son’s death
by attacking the Egyptians in northern Syria, only to be killed by a plague brought back to the
Hittite homelands by captured Egyptian prisoners. This pestilence (probably the bubonic plague,
which would decimate medieval Europe 2,500 years later) ravaged the Hittite homelands for the

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TUTANKHAMUN AND HIS WIFE,

ANKHESENAMUN, portrayed on the back
of a gilded and inlaid throne.
Ankhesenamun is shown anointing the
sitting king. Found in the king’s tomb in
the Valley of the Kings, this ancient
masterpiece is now on display in the
Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Photo by Djehouty, CC BY-SA 4.0, via
Wikimedia Commons.

next 20 years. It prompted Suppiluliuma’s successor and son, Mursili II, to write a series of
prayers to the gods known as the Plague Prayers of Mursili. In these prayers, Mursili
“remonstrates with the gods for punishing his land so severely, warns them that the kingdom is
falling prey to enemy forces that surround it, and seeks reasons for the divine wrath.”

Relations between the two Near Eastern superpowers, Egypt and Hatti, were mended only after a
furious battle in 1274 B.C.E. at Kadesh, on the Orontes River in modern Syria. We possess a
great deal of information about this battle, thanks to two separate versions of the subsequent
treaty signed by both powers. One version was inscribed in Egyptian hieroglyphs on the walls of
two temples: the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Ramesses II (r. 1279–1213 B.C.E.) in western
Thebes, and the Temple of Amun at Karnak in eastern Thebes (modern Luxor). The other
version of the treaty, inscribed on a clay tablet in Akkadian cuneiform, was uncovered at Hattusa
(a translation of the latter is now mounted at the entrance to the Security Council of the United
Nations in New York).

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THE DEEDS OF SUPPILULIUMA is a

chronicle narrating the Hittite king
Suppiluliuma I’s achievements. Inscribed
in the second half of the 14th century
B.C.E., this clay tablet was found in
Hattusa and is now on display in the
Istanbul Archaeological Museum, Turkey.
Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin
FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia
Commons.

The Battle of Kadesh began when the Hittite king Muwatalli II (r. 1295–1272 B.C.E.) amassed a
huge army of nearly 50,000 troops and marched southward through Syria, determined to crush
the Egyptians once and for all. Ramesses II marched north to oppose the Hittites. Along the way,
the Egyptian army came across two Bedouins, who reported that the Hittite army was far to the
north, near the Syrian city of Aleppo. The Bedouins, however, had been planted by the Hittites to
give false information to the Egyptians. In fact, the Hittite forces had already reached Kadesh;
they were just across the Orontes River.

Ramesses fought valiantly against the surprise attack, holding off the Hittites until
reinforcements arrived. The Egyptians may have been unwittingly aided by Hittite soldiers, who
stopped to plunder the Egyptian camp before vanquishing Ramesses’s army. As it turned out, the

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battle ended in a draw, though both sides claimed victory. Ramesses had his “triumph” recorded
in the usual Egyptian bombastic style:

Then my army came to praise me … my high officers having come to

magnify my strong arm, and my chariotry likewise boasting of my name
and saying … “You are great of victory in the presence of your army, in
the face of the entire land … You have broken the back of Hatti forever!”

Some 13 years after the treaty was signed, a royal wedding was arranged between Ramesses II
and a daughter of Hattusili III, Muwatalli II’s successor. A short time later, a second Hittite
princess was married to Ramesses II as well, and Hattusili III may have visited Egypt in person.
The Hittites and Egyptians agreed to divide the Near East between them.

The last great Hittite king, Tudhaliya IV (r. 1227–1209 B.C.E.), is perhaps best known for
completing the rock-hewn religious shrine at Yazilikaya, less than a mile from Hattusa.
Tudhaliya IV, however, was no stranger to international campaigns. He claims to have
conquered Cyprus, for example, carrying away gold and silver. One text from Tudhaliya’s reign
is a treaty drawn up between the Hittites and Sausgamuwa, the ruler of Amurru, a small kingdom
on the coast of north Syria. The treaty is primarily concerned with prohibiting trade with Assyria,
with whom the Hittites were then at war.

KADESH TREATY. Following the Battle

of Kadesh (1274 B.C.E.), the Egyptians
and Hittites entered a peace agreement.
Each side wrote down its own version
of the agreement. Then they exchanged
the documents, with the Akkadian
translation of the Egyptian version
going to Hatti and the Akkadian
translation of the Hittite version going
to Egypt. This fragmentary, Akkadian-
language tablet was found in the Hittite
capital at Hattusa. Photo by Iocanus, CC
BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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THE EGYPTIAN VERSION of the Kadesh Treaty was engraved in hieroglyphs onto the western
outer wall of the Precinct of Amun-Re at the Temple of Karnak, in Luxor, Egypt. It includes
descriptions of the figures and seals that were on the original tablet that the Hittites delivered.
Photo by Olaf Tausch, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The most interesting part of the so-called Sausgamuwa Treaty, however, has to do, once again,
with those pesky Ahhiyawans—or Mycenaeans/Achaeans—whom Tudhaliya IV’s ancestor, also
named Tudhaliya, had defeated in the Assuwa Rebellion 200 years earlier. In the treaty,
Tudhaliya also places an embargo on trade between Ahhiyawa and Assyria. For some reason, in
the surviving draft of the treaty the name of the king of Ahhiyawa was crossed out from the list
of kings whom Tudhaliya considered his equals: “the king of Egypt, the king of Karadunia
[Kassite Babylonia], the king of Assyria, the king of Ahhiyawa [with a line though the last
phrase].”

Why Tudhaliya included, and then omitted, the king of Ahhiyawa remains a mystery. What is
clear, however, is that the Ahhiyawans were still a presence in the Aegean or in Anatolia itself at

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the end of the 13th century B.C.E., when the destruction of the great Late Bronze Age city of
Troy took place.

The Hittite Empire collapsed around 1200 B.C.E., perhaps destroyed by the mysterious Sea
Peoples—who, according to Egyptian documents, destroyed the “Land of Hatti”—or perhaps by
unfriendly neighbors. After the fall of Hattusa, the so-called Neo-Hittite city-states in northern
Syria continued to function for almost 500 years. Originally Hittite vassal kingdoms, these petty
monarchies assumed the mantle of their former masters, keeping alive Hittite writing, sculpture
and mythology. Such continuity of culture on the periphery of a former empire can often be
observed in history—such as playing cricket and speaking English in India today, long after the
sun has set on the British Empire.

Thus in the first millennium B.C.E., a semblance of the Hittite Empire could be found at Aleppo,
Carchemish and other northern Syrian sites. It was these Neo-Hittite city-states that the writers of
the Hebrew Bible would have known. In Bryce’s words, “Assyrians, Urartians, and Hebrews
continued to refer to Syria and the Taurus regions as ‘the Land of Hatti,’ and the Bible makes
reference to the local Syrian rulers as ‘Kings of the Hittites’.” So it’s not surprising that when
archaeologists and historians first began to look for the Hittites, they searched in the wrong
place.

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The Assyrians
“Who Were the Assyrians?” *
By Chris Hays

ASSYRIAN DOMINANCE. This relief panel captures the Assyrian army attacking an enemy town.
Excavated at the Central Palace at Nimrud, it dates to the reign of Tiglath-pileser III (730–727
B.C.E.). It is now on display in the British Museum. Photo by Allan Gluck, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia
Commons.

“Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger” (Isaiah 10:5). This is how generations of readers of the Bible
have come to know Assyria, as the terrifying military power that (as the poet Byron put it) “came
down like the wolf on the fold,” and overthrew Israel and shattered Judah. Despite this
reputation—or perhaps because of it—the Assyrians have been the subject of intense fascination
in the modern world. Ever since their imposing reliefs and statues were plundered and brought to
Europe and America in the 19th century, they have drawn crowds and sold copies of newspapers
and magazines.

The Assyrians whom the biblical authors encountered were part of the Neo-Assyrian Empire,
which expanded rapidly across the ancient Near East in the ninth through seventh centuries

*
This article originally appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 2019.

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B.C.E. Its scale had no precedent, but it emerged in a land that already had an ancient history—
and, as many nations have, it claimed its roots in distant antiquity.

The Assyrian heartland was northern Mesopotamia, the area between the Tigris and Euphrates
Rivers. More than a millennium before the Neo-Assyrians, some of the most powerful kings in
the region’s history had ruled not far from the same area. These included Sargon of Akkad (r.
2334–2279 B.C.E.), who was important in propagating the Akkadian language, which became
the lingua franca of the ancient Near East for centuries, and Naram-Sin (r. 2254–2218 B.C.E.),
who declared himself a god.

Map of the ancient Near East under Assyria.

About 400 years later, Shamshi-Adad I (r. 1833–1776 B.C.E.) briefly established another
“Kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia,” which included the later imperial centers of Assur and
Nineveh. Already in this period, the Assyrians had an extensive trading network reaching
westward into present-day Turkey. Neo-Assyrian rulers sought to connect themselves with these
famous predecessors by inserting them into lists of their royal predecessors and by adopting their
names.

In the Middle Assyrian period (14th–10th centuries B.C.E.), under rulers such as Ashur-uballit I
(r. 1363–1328 B.C.E.) and Tukulti-ninurta I (r. 1243–1207 B.C.E.), Assyria expanded again, into

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eastern Syria and Anatolia. From this period, the Middle Assyrian Laws and Palace Decrees shed
light on a culture that was militaristic and controlled its court women tightly. Assyria became
one of the large regional empires of the Late Bronze Age, but it had a difficult time being
acknowledged as a peer by the other contemporary great powers, such as Egypt, Hatti, and
Babylonia—partially because Babylonia viewed Assyria as a threat and sought to exclude
Assyria through diplomacy. The two Mesopotamian powers continued to struggle against each
other over the ensuing two centuries. The reign of Tiglath-pileser I (r. 1115–1077 B.C.E.) was a
time of particular Assyrian flourishing.

The Assyrian kings of the late tenth and early ninth centuries campaigned in the west and helped
to reestablish regional control through infrastructure. However, it is Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859
B.C.E.) who is often considered the founder of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. His kingdom reached
from the Taurus Mountains in the north to the Euphrates River in the west. He established a new

THE BLACK OBELISK of Shalmaneser III (r. 858–824 B.C.E.) features 20 reliefs depicting five
defeated kings bringing tribute before the Assyrian monarch. In this close-up of the obelisk, the
central panel references “Jehu of the House of Omri.” The prostrate figure in the scene is thought
to be King Jehu of Israel, although some scholars have called this identification into question.
Photo by British Museum, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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capital city in Kalhu and built it into an impressive city with imperial wealth, accumulated from
taxes, trade, and the “tribute” payments extracted from vassal nations in exchange for their
independence. This “yoke of Assur” was a great burden to smaller client states. Shalmaneser III
(r. 858–824 B.C.E.) expanded farther and came into conflict with King Ahab of Israel, who was
part of a federation of 12 western kings who had banded together to throw off Assyrian control.
As recounted on Shalmaneser’s Kurkh Monolith, Ahab was one of the larger contingents, with
10,000 soldiers and 2,000 chariots. Shalmaneser waged four campaigns against the coalition
between 853 and 845 B.C.E. Although the outcomes of these campaigns are not entirely clear,
his famous Black Obelisk includes a record of receiving tribute from King Jehu of Israel a few
years later, in 841, and even depicts the Judahite contingent.

Assyria stagnated for much of the next century, struggling with centripetal forces that worked
against centralized power. The period saw the rise of Queen Shammuramat, the wife of
Shamshi-Adad V (r. 823–811 B.C.E.) and source of the later Greek legends about Semiramis.
As mother of the crown prince, she wielded significant influence and was sometimes described
as a virtual co-regent with her son.

TIGLATH-PILESER III (r. 744–727

B.C.E.) is depicted in this relief from
Nimrud. King Menahem of Israel
taxed every landowner 50 shekels of
silver in order to pay tribute to the
Assyrian ruler and maintain his
royal power (2 Kings 15:19–20).
Photo by British Museum, Public
domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Tiglath-pileser III (r. 744–727 B.C.E.) brought new energy to Assyria’s ambitions. He quickly
re-subdued Babylonia to the south and Urartu to the north and campaigned into Syria-Palestine
by 738 B.C.E. He took tribute from King Menahem of Israel (r. 746–737 B.C.E.), who taxed
every landowner 50 shekels of silver to pay the Assyrians and maintain his power (2 Kings
15:19–20).

The Hebrew prophets frequently condemned Assyria, as well as Israel’s and Judah’s reliance on
it (e.g., Hosea 5:13; 7:11; 8:9; Micah 5:5–6).

The heavy Assyrian taxation would of course have been controversial, and soon Israel joined an
anti-Assyrian coalition of Syro-Palestinian states, akin to Ahab’s. Judah, however, would not
participate in this rebellion. Therefore, Israel’s coalition attacked Judah in the Syro-Ephraimitic
War in 734 B.C.E. (2 Kings 16:5–9; Isaiah 7), intending to replace Ahaz of Judah with a ruler
more sympathetic to their collective goals. It did not work. Judah survived, and Tiglath-pileser
wiped out the anti-Assyrian coalition by 731 B.C.E.

DURING HIS REIGN from 721 to 705 B.C.E.,

Sargon II (pictured in this alabaster bas-relief
from his palace at Khorsabad) turned Israel
into the province of Samaria and claimed
that he deported more than 27,000 Israelites.
Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin
FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0.

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At that time, Assyria placed Hoshea (r. 730–722 B.C.E.) on Israel’s throne as a puppet ruler, but
even he failed to pay the tribute in 725 B.C.E. and sought the support of Egypt instead. Assyria
thus returned to besiege and destroy Samaria, the Israelite capital, in 722–721 B.C.E. The
Assyrian emperor Sargon II turned Israel into the province of Samerina (Samaria) and claimed
that he deported more than 27,000 Israelites. Surely many others fled southward to Judah as
refugees.

Sargon, however, met his end on the battlefield in 705 B.C.E. This uniquely awful fate for an
Assyrian king prompted his heir, Sennacherib, to inquire of the gods seeking the reason. It also
perhaps brought celebration in Judah (Isaiah 14), and it prompted King Hezekiah to repeat the
rebellious pattern of his neighbors by forming a coalition with Sidon, Byblos, Ashdod, Ashkelon,
Edom, and Moab and withholding tribute.

Sennacherib was not free to campaign to the west until 701. When he did, he was seeking
vengeance. He claimed to have pillaged 46 Judahite cities and taken more than 200,000 people
and animals as spoil. His inscriptions and 2 Kings 18:14–16 agree that Hezekiah paid a heavy
tribute but managed, surprisingly, to retain his throne. The events at Jerusalem and the reasons
for the outcomes are disputed because of the complex and conflicting assortment of sources: Was
it a Cushite intervention? A plague among the Assyrian troops? In any case, it became one of the
more celebrated campaigns in ancient Near Eastern history, thanks to the impressive reliefs that
Sennacherib proudly made for his palace in Nineveh, depicting his conquest of Judah’s second
city, Lachish. These reliefs now adorn the British Museum.

Sennacherib thus expanded the empire, though he was harassed by rival powers on various fronts
and smoother succession than his had been by making his vassals and his own people swear, in
the Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon, that they would remain loyal to his son Ashurbanipal when he
became king. These loyalty oaths are often compared to biblical covenants, especially that of
Deuteronomy. 1

Ashurbanipal had a long and seemingly successful reign, extending Assyria’s control over
Egypt—though it was never complete, as the Cushites continued to resist. He also suffered civil
war at home, as his brother Shamash-shum-ukin, who ruled Babylon, rebelled against him.

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THE SIEGE OF LACHISH. Assyrian soldiers attack the Judahite city of Lachish in this seventh-
century B.C.E. relief from the walls of Sennacherib’s palace in Nineveh. Pictured in this segment
is a unit of archers firing towards the besieged city. Photo by Zunkir, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia
Commons.

Elam was a constant thorn in his side; various approaches failed Ashurbanipal until he mounted
in 653a vicious campaign to wipe out the rival nation, sowing salt in its fields and disinterring its
dead kings’ bodies. Ezra 4:9–10 suggests that he deported some of the Elamites to Samerina.
Ashurbanipal seems to have been complex, however, since he claimed to have advanced scribal
training, and his patronage of scholarship allowed the famous library at Nineveh to flourish.

Historians frequently remark upon the mystery of Assyria’s apparently rapid decline. Despite the
problems already noted, it was near the height of its power and size in the 640s B.C.E.

Ashurbanipal’s death after a long reign, in 631, was followed by succession problems, but those
were common. Unfortunately, few Assyrian royal inscriptions survive from the period after 639,
and we must rely on the Babylonian chronicles and other Babylonian sources. Led by the
Chaldean Nabopolassar, Babylonia regathered itself in the 620s. Joined by the Medes and
Scythians, it began to attack Assyrian cities in 615 B.C.E. The Assyrians were taken by surprise

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LIKE A BIRD IN A CAGE. In this cuneiform prism listing his campaigns, Sennacherib (r. 704–681
B.C.E.) boasts of having shut up King Hezekiah in Jerusalem “like a bird in a cage.” Photo by
Anthony Huan, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

in various ways, most significantly by the sudden need to defend their heartland. They seem to
have been overextended. From that point, the collapse was startlingly swift. The capital city of
Nineveh fell in 612 B.C.E. after a siege of only three months. Their major cities in ruins,
remnants of the Assyrian court and military apparently fled westward where they survived for a
while with Egyptian support. The Babylonian Chronicle, a terse recounting of major events by
year, reported Assyrians still fighting in the west in 609. Texts from the Babylonian court—
written in the Assyrian dialect at the very end of the seventh century—suggest that the scribal
legacy of Nineveh survived for a while, but then the Assyrians are heard from no more.

The Hebrew prophets did not overlook the fall of Assyria. Nahum raised a taunt song: “Alas, O
city of bloodshed, completely deceitful, full of plunder—there was no end to [your] depre-

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dations! … There is no relief for your wound, your injury is mortal. All who hear the report
about you clap their hands over you. For over whom did your relentless evil not sweep?”
(Nahum 3:1, 19, author’s translation; see also Zephaniah 2:13–15). Ezekiel 31–32 would portray
Assyria as a “world tree” that once flourished as the envy of the earth but was then cut down; it
lists the Assyrians among the empires that “go down to the pit” (Ezekiel 31:16).

Among its achievements, Assyria’s military stands out. Capable of mustering tens of thousands
of troops, the army came to specialize in siege warfare and included expert troops drawn from
the empire’s numerous territories. Imperial highways and extensive support staff made the
military and communications networks more effective. Although the Assyrians had the
reputation of being violent, they preferred to use terror-inducing propaganda to achieve their
ends—it was more efficient. Their texts and art often portrayed the horrible fates that awaited
those who resisted them.

Assyrian religion is often overshadowed by the more prestigious cults of Babylonian cities, but
distinctive points emerge. The Assyrians’ high god Assur shared a name with the city and the
nation, which was not accidental. He embodied Assyria’s sense of “Manifest Destiny.” Assur
was seen as the instigator and guarantor of the nation’s expansion through the agency of the
king. In Assyrian tradition, Assur took over Marduk’s role as chief deity in Enuma Elish, the
Babylonian myth of creation. Ishtar was important as a goddess of prophecy, and the gods
Shamash, Nabu, Enlil, and Ninurta also played significant roles. Ancestors, particularly dead
kings, were also seen as divinized powers worthy of supplication. Assyrian rulers avidly
practiced ancestor cults as well as numerous other ways of seeking supernatural knowledge.

Despite Assyria’s fearsome reputation in Israel and Judah, its culture was quite influential,
including literature, art, and architecture. Assyrian culture was not imposed on them to any great
degree, but rather seems to have worked primarily through prestige and emulation, as the story of
King Ahaz copying an altar from Damascus indirectly illustrates (2 Kings 16:10–16).

From a literary standpoint, a number of genres of biblical literature are better understood with a
knowledge of Assyrian texts, such as the birth narratives, treaties, and historical records already
mentioned. Most distinctive are the Neo-Assyrian prophetic texts. These show certain common
phraseology with biblical prophecies; for example, the Akkadian term for oracles of well-being

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is shulmu, etymologically related to the Hebrew shalom, “peace.” The compilations of Assyrian
prophecies also empirically demonstrate processes that probably mirror the early stages of the
formation of biblical prophetic books. Other Assyrian texts, such as annals, chronicles, and even
temple-building accounts, bear comparison with biblical cognates.

In later Jewish literature, Assyria was one of the nations that represented the prototypical evil
foreign empire. It was paired with Egypt in Zechariah 10:10–12 as one of the ends of the earth in
a cosmic judgment, and it was “dehistoricized” in a different way in late biblical narratives such
as Jonah and Ezra, in which a Persian king is called “the king of Assyria” (Ezra 6:22; 1 Esdras
7:15). Similarly, in Judith 1:1, Nebuchadnezzar is remembered as a king “who ruled the
Assyrians in Nineveh.” By that time, “Assyria” was a general term for the east.

Historians in classical antiquity were prone to confuse and conflate Assyria with other imperial
powers from the east, and eventually Assyria was de-emphasized as a paradigmatic empire in
favor of Babylon and Rome, so that its cultural and political innovations are often
underestimated. For better or worse, Assyria laid the groundwork for those later empires.

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The Babylonians
“Nebuchadnezzar & Solomon” *
By Bill T. Arnold

A BABYLONIAN RULER mentioned in the Bible, Merodach-baladan II (r. 721–712 B.C.E.) was one
of the ethnic Chaldeans who played an important part in developing Babylonian resistance to the
Assyrians. This 1.4-foot-high stela provides a rare depiction of a Babylonian ruler and records a
land grant from Merodach-baladan (the tall figure on the left) to the governor of Babylon (on the
right). From Hans F. Helmolt and James Bryce, The history of the world: A survey of a man’s record,
Volume 3 (New York, 1902), overleaf between pp. 26 & 27. Public domain.

The ongoing debate over the historical value of the biblical narrative has called into question the
very existence of an “ancient Israel.” Indeed, key features of the Bible’s familiar storyline—
Israel’s arrival from outside Canaan, wars with the indigenous Canaanite inhabitants, eventual

*
This article originally appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 2007.

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emergence into nationhood and the United Kingdom—are considered by so-called minimalists to
be largely legendary and without historical value.

This raises an interesting question: Were there other Semitic groups in antiquity who had
historical trajectories similar to the Israelites? During the past century, scholars have sought to
illuminate Israelite history by reference to parallels with groups as distant as Arab bedouin
traditions, the Nabateans, Greek amphictyonies and Hellenistic historiographers. Perhaps it is
time to look for parallels among Israel’s neighbors in the Fertile Crescent who shared similar
linguistic, cultural, and social features. If other groups have recorded a similar understanding of
their own history, then a historical storyline like that portrayed in the Bible may be plausible
after all.

Map of Mesopotamia.

Two periods of Neo-Babylonian history together provide an instructive parallel to the history of
early Israel. The first is the century prior to Nabopolassar, when Babylonia emerged from
lethargy and political insignificance to become one of the great empires of the ancient world
(747–626 B.C.E.), and the second is the period of the Neo-Babylonian empire proper (626–539
B.C.E.). This survey of Babylonian history provides a number of fascinating and instructive
analogues to Israel’s premonarchic and early monarchic periods.

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This may be particularly relevant because the Neo-Babylonian empire was the only native
Semitic state of Iron Age Babylonia. The rule of all other monarchs of southern Babylon was
imposed from outside Babylon.

Moreover, the tribal groups of Babylonia were distant relatives of the early Israelites; their
language and culture reflect the same West Semitic origins as Israel’s.

My question is a simple one: Is the Bible’s historical storyline for early Israel plausible? Could a
group of Semitic tribes loosely organized in a political confederation have entered Syria-
Palestine as outsiders, gradually settled in the central hills and eventually emerged as a powerful
nation-state? These social and political parallels with the Neo-Babylonian period suggest that the
biblical scenario is not only plausible but also attested elsewhere in ancient Near Eastern history.

Southern Babylonia in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E.—prior to the rise of the Neo-
Babylonian empire—was ethnically heterogeneous, as we have learned only in recent decades. 1
The country was divided ethnically into three distinct groups: what we may call native
Babylonians, Arameans, and Chaldeans. The native Babylonians were native only in that they
had not recently migrated to southern Mesopotamia. They were, in fact, an ethnic amalgam of
several older groups who had arrived in the third and second millennia B.C.E. but who were, by
the eighth century B.C.E., indistinguishable from one another. This “native Babylonian” group
may also be referred to as “Akkadian,” since Assyrian sources refer to them as such when they
want to distinguish them from other tribal groups (and that is the term modern scholars apply to
their East Semitic language). The heritage of these “native Babylonians” consisted
predominantly of Akkadians and Sumerians of the third millennium, and Amorites and Kassites
of the second.

In the eighth century B.C.E., the native Babylonians were settled urban dwellers of southern
Babylonia. They made up the largest component of the population in the old cult centers along
the Euphrates corridor in the northwest (Babylon, Borsippa, Cutha, Dilbat, and Sippar) and in the
prestigious cities of the southwest (Ur and Uruk) (all in modern Iraq). Because of their long-
standing presence in the country and their ethnic and cultural continuity with Babylonia’s past,
they were the bearers of traditional Babylonian culture, as witnessed by their personal names and

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their continued use of Akkadian as the language of choice against encroaching West Semitic
Aramaic influences. 2

The fundamental social unit of the native Babylonians was the family. The standard formula for
a personal name was “x son of y,” reflecting the importance of the nuclear family. Personal
names occasionally also indicate the importance of broader kin-based groups; the name may be
derived, for example, from an occupation (like Potter, Smith, or Fisher). Or a name might
incorporate the name of a common eponymous ancestor, for example, “x son of y descendant of
z,” in which the last name is regarded as the founder of the family (e.g., Muezib-Marduk maru a
Kiribtu mar Sîn-nasir). 3

The cities controlled by this Babylonian population formed the civil, religious, economic, and
judicial strength of Babylonia. These Babylonian cities were also the intellectual and cultural
centers of the country.

The second ethnic group was the West Semitic Arameans. Arameans begin to appear in Assyrian
literary sources in the late 12th and 11th centuries B.C.E., in central and northern Mesopotamia.
Aramean groups existed in southern Babylonia from the beginning of the first millennium B.C.E.
The origin and early development of the Arameans is shrouded in obscurity. Traditional
scholarly interpretation has the Aramean hordes from the desert steppe sweeping across Syria
and Upper Mesopotamia, conquering native populations. But recent anthropological studies have
questioned this massive-invasion reconstruction for the appearance not only of the Arameans but
also other pastoral nomads in the ancient Near East. It now seems likely that these West Semitic-
speaking peoples had lived in Syria and Upper Mesopotamia throughout the second millennium
B.C.E. Although the traditional “invasion interpretation” has clearly been overstated, there is
nonetheless evidence of some Aramean invasion eastward into Assyria and Babylonia in the
early 11th century B.C.E. due to a famine in their homeland. The Arameans seized cities by
force, and for much of the tenth century B.C.E., the western corridor of Babylonia was in a
constant state of disruption because of the Aramean tribal groups that now controlled the
important trade route along the Euphrates River.

The Arameans settled principally along the Tigris and its tributaries. We have evidence of more
than 40 such tribes, 4 for example, the Gambulu, the Puqudu (the “Pekod” of Jeremiah 50:21 and

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Ezekiel 23:23), the Ru’ua, and the Gurasimmu. The first two of these were the largest tribes and
the only ones for which we have much information.

The third ethnic constituent were the Chaldean tribes in southern Babylonia. They first appear in
Assyrian sources of the early ninth century B.C.E. Like the Arameans, they were West Semitic,
and many scholars have assumed they were in fact identical with the Arameans. However, the
native Assyrian and Babylonian sources consistently distinguish between them with a different
tribal organization, different dates of their respective appearances in history and contrasting
levels of Babylonization. All this leads to the conclusion that the Arameans and Chaldeans were
two distinct groups, though perhaps ethnically related. 5

In general, these Aramean tribes were less likely than the Chaldeans to assimilate Babylonian
culture. The Aramean economy seems to have been based on animal husbandry, and the
Arameans occupied fewer cities and villages than the Chaldeans. The Aramean tribesmen were

A LEGENDARY PRIDE. The Book of Daniel records Nebuchadnezzar II’s boast about “magnificent
Babylon” that he built “by [his] mighty power and for [his] glorious majesty” (Daniel 4:30). The
cuneiform text on this cylinder of Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 604–562 B.C.E.) describes the
construction of the outer city wall of Babylon. Such cylinders were buried in the corners of large
buildings to record the ruler’s accomplishments. Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, 1886;
Accession Number 86.11.60; public domain.

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not generally inclined to become involved in the Babylonian political system, and no known
Aramean ever held the throne of Babylon. 6

The Chaldeans controlled the trade routes of the Persian Gulf area and thereby accumulated
considerable wealth. In addition to trade, they also engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry.
They became deeply involved in Babylonian political life and, by the middle of the eighth
century, became contenders for the Babylonian throne. Sometime during the second and third
decades of the eighth century B.C.E., a certain Eriba-Marduk of the Bit-Yakin tribe became the
first ethnic Chaldean monarch of Babylonia, out-maneuvering a temporarily weakened Assyria
in the north. His reign lasted only nine years, but it set the stage for Chaldean resistance to the
Assyrians for the next century and a half. Other Chaldeans attempted to rule from a Babylonian
base (including Merodach-baladan II, who is mentioned in 2 Kings 20:12–19 and Isaiah 39). The
Chaldeans thus played a significant role in Babylonian resistance to Assyrian rule. In the end, the
unity and spirit of independence among the Chaldean tribes culminated in the rise of the so-
called “Chaldean Dynasty,” more appropriately known as the Neo-Babylonian empire.

These, then, were the three primary ethnic groups of southern Babylonia during the last half of
the eighth and during the seventh centuries B.C.E. Socially, the older Babylonian inhabitants of
the larger cities were often aligned against the more ethnic tribal groups of Arameans and
Chaldeans, who were relative newcomers. The older Babylonians on the one hand, and the
Arameans and Chaldeans on the other, seldom acted in concert in matters of self-governance and
in fact were frequently in conflict with each other during this turbulent period. In an internecine
war between two brothers, each of whom hoped to rule over both Assyria and Babylonia, for
example, the Babylonian cities of the southland were typically pro-Assyrian, while the tribal
groups supported Babylonian independence. 7

How does this situation in southern Babylonia provide a comparison with early Israel? First, the
sociological constituents of Babylonia during the seventh century B.C.E. may be compared with
premonarchic Israel. Second, the progression from tribalism to statehood may be compared.

Like southern Mesopotamia during the century prior to the rise of the Neo-Babylonian empire,
ancient Palestine was composed of two distinct sociological groups. There were the settled
urban-dwellers, who were the bearers of the older, traditional culture: the Canaanites. Then there

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were the pastoralist tribal groups: the tribes of Israel. As in Babylonia, conflict between these
groups persisted over several centuries.

Whether these two groups in Palestine were ethnically distinct and whether the tribal pastoralists
were newcomers or long-standing inhabitants of the land are subjects of ongoing controversies
among biblical scholars. But a simple comparison with Babylonia demonstrates that it was quite
possible for tribal pastoralists to overtake an established culture, whether by sudden invasion (as
some of the Arameans undoubtedly did) or by gradual infiltration (as some of the Chaldeans
apparently did). On the basis of this comparison with southern Babylonia, it seems quite
reasonable that the Israelites could have included tribes that originated outside of Palestine and
were ethnically distinct from the Canaanites.

A second comparison involves the transition from a loosely organized tribal confederation into
statehood. Babylonia was under-populated, impoverished and politically fragmented at the
beginning of this period. The eminent Assyriologist John A. Brinkman has demonstrated that the
foundations of future Neo-Babylonian strength were in fact established during this period of
weakness, and surprisingly it was the Assyrian threat in the north that provided the impetus. The
constant threat of Assyrian domination transformed heterogeneous anti-Assyrian elements within
Babylonia into a political coalition that would eventually provide a power base for a Babylonian
empire. 8 Because of the pax Assyriaca, the Babylonian economy improved dramatically through
agriculture, animal husbandry and international trade. Population levels rapidly increased,
though the sources of the new residents are not entirely clear. Social organizations changed as
family-centered structures gradually gave way to broader kin-based groups. Ultimately, the role
of the ever-present Assyrian threat from the north played a significant role in the rise of
Babylonian statehood. Paradoxically, anti-Assyrianism provided the rallying cry for the
populations of Babylonia and stimulated their political unity.

This portrait of a rapid population increase, improved economic conditions and a movement
toward unified socio-political organization is exactly paralleled in early Israel. Surface surveys in
the hill country of Ephraim, for example, located only five occupied sites in the Late Bronze Age
(1550–1200 B.C.E.), but in Iron Age I (1200–1000 B.C.E.) there were 115. 9

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Some archaeologists interpret these data as shifts in the living patterns of inhabitants already in
Canaan. Regardless of how we explain the changes, however, it is clear that the central hill
region of Palestine witnessed a rapid population growth in Iron Age I, just as Babylonia did prior
to the rise of the Neo-Babylonian empire.

The other main features that gave rise to statehood in Babylonia were also present in Israel, that
is, improved economic condition and external military threat. Due to the rise of iron technology
and improved agricultural techniques, the early Israelites eventually enjoyed economic
improvement, though nothing quite as dramatic as the Chaldean advances in Babylonia. 10 And
just as the tribal groups of southern Mesopotamia were united politically by the long history of
Assyrian aggression, so the Philistine threat attested in the Bible provided motivation for
centralization of Israelite authority. Recent sociological and archaeological studies demonstrate
that the Philistine problem intensified as the Israelite population grew and expanded westward.
These circumstances provided an impetus for the rise of the Israelite monarchy. 11

The Neo-Babylonian empire was characterized by military conquests, expansive building

activities, as well as literary accomplishments. This, too, may be compared with the situation in
Israel.

Two of the largest Chaldean tribes, the Bit-Amukani and Bit-Yakin, had suffered most at the
hands of the Assyrians. Despite repeated Assyrian attacks on these tribes, it was they who
provided the most important impetus and resources for Babylonian independence from the
Assyrians. Ultimately, it was Bit-Yakin from which the royal dynasty of the nascent Neo-
Babylonian, or Chaldean, empire emerged. 12

As the state emerged, the need for unification grew greater, as did the need for a strong central
authority. These needs were met partially by the massive rebuilding of Babylon undertaken by
Nabopolassar (r. 625–605 B.C.E.), Nebuchadnezzar (r. 604–562 B.C.E.) and, later and to a lesser
extent, Nabonidus (r. 556–539 B.C.E.). The rebuilding efforts concentrated on public works:
palaces, fortifications, streets and temples. Without doubt, the early motivation for such
rebuilding was the need to unify all Babylonia administratively and religiously.

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FOUNDATION OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. Some Babylonian temples—like the Esagil of Marduk—
were built at ground level, but others were placed on top of stepped platforms, or ziggurats. When
Nebuchadnezzar came to power, he continued his father’s work to restore the ziggurat at Babylon
called Etemenanki, which is sometimes believed to be the biblical tower of Babel. The platform he
built stood at a towering height of 295 feet, but very little remains of it today. Pictured here is the
earliest known ziggurat, located in Ur and dating to the Neo-Sumerian period (2112–2000 B.C.E.)
and partially reconstructed. Photo by Hardnfast, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

During Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, Babylon saw extensive replanning and new construction
unparalleled in its history. Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt the walls of Babylon and joined the halves of
the city on either side of the Euphrates with a bridge. In addition to a new royal palace on the
Euphrates in the northern district, he focused on cult centers. He continued the work of his father
and completely restored the temple tower (ziggurat) named Etemenanki (“The building that is
the Foundation of Heaven and Earth”) and the temple of Esagil (Marduk’s shrine) adjacent to it,
along with its subsidiary chapels. Nebuchadnezzar’s pride in his accomplishment became
legendary, as recorded in the Bible: “Is this not magnificent Babylon, which I have built as a
royal capital by my mighty power and for my glorious majesty?” (Daniel 4:30 [4:27 in Hebrew]).

The reconstruction of the city of Babylon was motivated by the need to unify the confederation
of Chaldean tribes, together with Arameans and native Babylonians.

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The literary contributions of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar were only slightly less
impressive than their architectural accomplishments. Here we need to distinguish between
“literature” in the strict sense and non-literary inscriptions such as lexical, economic, and
administrative texts. Documents of the latter kind were produced in quantity by Babylonian
society throughout most of the first millennium, so these texts are not really a fair indication of
royal strength later on. We may assume this kind of text was more common in ancient Israel than
epigraphic finds would attest due to the perishable types of writing materials used in ancient
Canaan (as opposed to clay tablets in Babylonia), given the apparent widespread availability of
writing in Israelite society.

Many cuneiform Neo-Babylonian archives have Aramaic dockets scratched on the clay or are
otherwise marked with black ink summarizing the cuneiform texts for the benefit of those who
could not read cuneiform. Judging from the cuneiform records, 13 the Neo-Babylonian period was
one of the most productive in all of Mesopotamian history. More than 4,600 economic, business
and legal documents (including letters) dated to the Neo-Babylonian kings have been
published. 14 The majority of these come from temple and private archives, not state archives,
apparently because state chanceries used Aramaic-speaking scribes who wrote on perishable
leather and papyrus. 15

This period also produced, however, a valuable historiographic source, the so-called Neo-
Babylonian Chronicle Series. 16 These chronicles record outstanding events of each year
beginning with the reign of Nabonassar (747–734 B.C.E.) and continuing into the third century.
These chronicles are objective and as close as the Babylonians came to genuine historiography. 17

We also know of significant libraries at Babylon and Borsippa from both the Old and Neo-
Babylonian periods. In 1986, archaeologists from the University of Baghdad discovered the
library chamber in the Neo-Babylonian temple of Shamash at Sippar. Only a few of the texts
have been published, but it appears that this find will shed light on the contents of Neo-
Babylonian collections and on the physical arrangement of a Babylonian library. The tablets
were shelved in deep cubicles with markings on the tablet edges for easy access by librarians
(“call numbers”). 18

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In sum, the age of Nebuchadnezzar saw significant architectural achievement as well as

increased literary activity and a renewed interest in the past. The ruins of Nebuchadnezzar’s
magnificent palace even contained a museum in which he housed a large collection of
“antiquities,” revealing his interest in archaeology and history. 19

What occurred in the Neo-Babylonian empire may actually reflect a wider cultural phenomenon.
Among ancient Semitic cultures that rose to nationalistic empires, a period of literary florescence
and architectural accomplishments occurred under the aegis of their most successful and
dominant monarchs. Curiously, among some scholars working on the Hebrew Bible, such a
possibility has been denied for ancient Israel. These scholars deny that Israel ever had dominant
and successful monarchs like David and Solomon. For those minimalist scholars who admit the
bare existence of David and Solomon, the age of literary greatness is nonetheless assumed to be
not their reigns, but the Babylonian Exile, though this would be an unparalleled situation among
ancient Semitic peoples.

A close comparison of these two ancient Semitic cultures—Israel and Neo-Babylonia—suggests

that the literary traditions of Israel preserved in the Hebrew Bible genuinely reflect the
architectural and literary activities of Israel’s United Monarchy. The building of Jerusalem as a
unifying factor for previously disparate tribes is socially and politically paralleled in the
Chaldean architectural achievements at Babylon. And just as the Neo-Babylonian monarchy
preserved its great literary heritage and emphasized a previously little-used form of
historiography (the chronicle series), Israel appears to have preserved its own literary heritage
(perhaps the sources of the Pentateuch) and created new forms of historiography (the earliest
layers of the Deuteronomistic History: Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings).

This scenario appears to have been quite typical among ancient Semites whenever tribal groups
rose to statehood. Wherever nationalistic empires developed among Semites (Akkad, Ashur,
Mari, etc.), the period of greatest military and political strength also became an age of flourishing
literary and architectural accomplishment. 20 Such periods of enforced peace were the only times
in the turbulent ancient Near East when monarchs and their state guilds had the time, inclination
and resources to turn their attention to the architectural and literary achievements. In Babylonia,
they used durable writing materials (clay). Moreover, the royal city of Babylon was later

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unoccupied (yielding magnificent archaeological testimony to the empire’s building activities).

Alas, we have no such luxury in the case of ancient Israel. Scribes would write almost
exclusively on perishable papyrus and leather, and Jerusalem was built and rebuilt many times
after the reign of Solomon.

As a result, extrabiblical testimony for the United Monarchy remains elusive. Nonetheless, these
parallels with the Neo-Babylonian period suggest that David and Solomon may have more in
common with Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar than might at first be supposed. These
institutional and socio-political analogies should provide limits to our skepticism 21 about early
Israel and the biblical picture of the United Monarchy.

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The Persians
“Making (Up) History” *
By Matt Waters

HIGH UP ON A CLIFF FACE in Bisitun, in western Kurdistan, Darius had his claim as rightful
successor to Cyrus the Great carved into stone. The tall figure of Darius stands at left, with his
foot on the supine Gaumata “the Magus,” pretender to the throne, before nine rebel kings who are
bound at the neck. The relief is accompanied by a trilingual cuneiform inscription in Elamite,
Babylonian, and Old Persian; in the text, Darius claims that he restored the kingship to “our
family.” Photo by PersianDutchNetwork, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The ancient Persian empire, founded by Cyrus the Great (r. 559–530 B.C.E.), was on the verge
of chaos. In 525 B.C.E., Cyrus’s son and successor, Cambyses II, led a campaign in Egypt to
expand the empire’s territories. Just three years later, however, Cambyses was forced to return to
Persia to put down a revolt by his brother, Bardiya, but the king died on the journey.

The revolt was quelled by a man named Darius, who later became known as King Darius the
Great (r. 522–486 B.C.E.). According to an inscription left by Darius at Mount Bisitun (or
Behistun) in present-day Kermanshah, Iran, the man who claimed to be Bardiya was really an

*
This article originally appeared in Archaeology Odyssey, November/December 2005.

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imposter named Gaumata, whom Darius called “the Magus.” The real Bardiya had died some
years earlier, perhaps even murdered by Cambyses himself.

This kingdom that Gaumata the Magus stripped from Cambyses, that
kingship from long ago had belonged to our family ... No one dared to
say anything about Gaumata the Magus, until I came ... Afterwards I
beseeched [the god] Ahuramazda; Ahuramazda bore me aid ... then I
with a few men slew that Gaumata the Magus and those who were his
foremost followers. I took the kingship from him ... The kingship that
had been taken away from our family, that I reinstated. 1

Map of the Persian Empire.

The fifth-century B.C.E. Greek historian Herodotus provides colorful details about Darius’s
seizure of the throne, but his account does not always square with Darius’s. 2 For example,
Herodotus credits a nobleman named Otanes with organizing resistance to the rebel Smerdis
(Herodotus’s name for Bardiya/Gaumata)—whereas Darius, in the Bisitun Inscription (DB §68),
includes Otanes in a list of his helpers. In Herodotus’s version, Darius was only a late addition to

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the plot, though he did strike the killing blow against Bardiya/Smerdis/Gaumata. The
conspirators, Herodotus tells us, decided to leave the selection of the next king to portent: The
rider of the first horse to neigh at sunrise would become king. Darius’s groomsman, Oebares,
allowed his master’s horse to mate with a favorite mare at the site of the contest, so when the
riders approached the site the next morning,

Darius’ horse plunged forward and neighed. At the same time this
happened, there was a flash of lightning from a clear sky, and thunder.
These additional signs clinched the selection for Darius (3.84–86).

Once in power, Darius had to deal with rebellions throughout the empire: Elam, Babylonia,
Media, Assyria, Egypt, Parthia, Armenia, Margiana (in modern Turkmenistan), Sagartia (in
central Iran), Sattagydia (in modern Afghanistan), Scythia and Lydia. By 519 B.C.E., Darius was
in full control, and the empire that Cyrus and Cambyses had built was intact.

Although Darius claimed that he was the legitimate successor to Cambyses (“The kingship that
had been taken away from our family, that I reinstated”), the fact that he encountered so many
rebellions—some in the very core of the empire—suggests that his claims were not, at least
initially, recognized. (Indeed, Herodotus’s very different account reveals that Darius’s version
was not the only one in circulation.) In the early years of his reign, therefore, Darius moved
quickly to put his own imprint upon the Persian empire—in texts, monumental architecture and
art. He not only used brute force to put down rebellions across the realm, but he created and
solidified his royal lineage through propaganda. 3

In particular, Darius formulated the Achaemenid dynasty, named after an ancestor named
Achaemenes, to justify his succession to power. The term “Achaemenid” is still used by scholars
to refer to the entire line of kings from Cyrus II (Cyrus the Great) to Darius III, whose defeat by
Alexander in 331 B.C.E. ended the Persian empire.

Darius gives his version of the events of this turbulent period in the monumental Bisitun
Inscription, which was inscribed in the Elamite, Babylonian Akkadian and Old Persian
languages. Darius also dispatched this account throughout the empire, as we know from an
Aramaic copy found at Elephantine in Egypt and from fragmented inscriptions found in Babylon.

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PORTRAYING A KING with bow and arrows, this coin likely represents the Persian king Darius I (r.
522–486 B.C.E.). It is called siglos and is made of silver. Credit: Classical Numismatic Group, Inc., CC
BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Bisitun Inscription, which was carved high up on Mount Bisitun’s sheer cliff face, consists
of the trilingual text and a central relief scene. This scene is all that would have been discernible
from the road, some 150 feet below; it shows an over-sized, triumphant Darius hailing the god
Ahuramazda (the winged disk figure) and resting one foot upon the prostrate Gaumata
(Bardiya/Smerdis). Behind (to the left of) Darius are two attendants; in front of Darius stand the
nine rebels he defeated, each of whom is bound by a rope attached to his neck. The captions
identifying the rebels were placed above and below the figures, or on the figure itself (for
example, on the third rebel from the left, Phraortes). The addition of the final figure, Skunkha the
Scythian, necessitated the obliteration of part of the Elamite version of the inscription. A full
copy of the Elamite version was subsequently added to the lower left of the relief, below the
Babylonian version, with the Old Persian version inscribed directly beneath the relief.

In the text, Darius traces his lineage to one Achaemenes:

My father is Hystaspes, the father of Hystaspes is Arsames, the father of

Arsames was Ariaramnes, the father of Ariaramnes was Teispes, the
father of Teispes was Achaemenes ... For this reason we are called
“Achaemenids” (DB §2–3).

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CYRUS CYLINDER (sixth century B.C.E.) is inscribed with a Babylonian Akkadian text
documenting Cyrus the Great’s conquest of Babylon and the capture of Nabonidus, the last
Babylonian king, in 539 B.C.E. In this 10-inch-long clay barrel found at Babylon, Cyrus refers to
himself as “king of Anshan” but not as “king of Persia,” and certainly not as an Achaemenid.
Photo by Prioryman, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Teispes was the great-grandfather of Cyrus the Great (and the father of Cyrus I, about whom
very little is known). Darius thus claims a shared descent with Cyrus from Achaemenes. 4
However, this claim to a common ancestry is exaggerated and misleading, if not an outright lie. 5

In his own dedicatory inscriptions, all from Babylonia, Cyrus II emphasized his lineage as “king
of Anshan,” a center of great importance throughout most of Elamite history. This is curious in
that the archaeological record suggests that Anshan ceased to be an important urban center by
about 1100 B.C.E. 6 Although we know little about the region Cyrus had ruled before he began
his conquests, the title “king of Anshan” appears to have been a modification of the traditional
title “king of Anshan and Susa,” which was used by many Elamite kings during the Middle
Elamite and early Neo-Elamite periods (c. 1400–700 B.C.E.).

In the Cyrus Cylinder, a 10-inch-long clay barrel modeled after Assyrian and Babylonian
foundation inscriptions, Cyrus traces his lineage through three generations:

I am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, strong king, king of Babylon,
king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters [of the world], son of

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Cambyses the great king, king of Anshan, grandson of Cyrus the great
king, king of Anshan, great-grandson of Teispes the great king, king of
Anshan (lines 20–21).

Cyrus is called “king of Anshan” earlier in this inscription (line 12) and in a dedicatory brick
inscription from Ur. Cyrus adopted the grander, Mesopotamian-styled titulary (“king of Babylon,
king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters”) at the appropriate point in the Cyrus
Cylinder. The title “king of Anshan” clearly resonated with Cyrus, even after his extensive
conquests; he clearly felt, at some level, that he was the heir and conveyor of an Elamite
tradition.

Cyrus’s new capital of Pasargadae, about 50 miles southeast of Anshan, was to serve as a
physical statement of the empire’s power and prestige. Although not much of the city remains,
its ruins are enough to suggest its former grandeur: palace complexes, gardens, a sacred precinct
and the Zendan (a 45-foot-high stone tower, called the “Prison of Solomon” by the Persian poet
Firdausi [940–1020 C.E.]). Many of Pasargadae’s buildings were unfinished when Cyrus died,
and some of these were completed by Darius 7—a sign of piety to his predecessor and, perhaps
more significantly, an opportunity to promote his own dynastic agenda. Several cuneiform
inscription fragments have been found at the site, but only two inscriptions survive in full: CMa
and CMc (CMb is fragmentary). The inscriptions were written in Elamite, Akkadian and, in the
case of CMa, Old Persian:

I am Cyrus the king, an Achaemenid. (CMa)

Cyrus the great king, an Achaemenid. (CMc)

These inscriptions link Cyrus with the Achaemenid lineage espoused by Darius. There is no
mention in the Pasargadae inscriptions of Anshan or any of Cyrus’s predecessors. The authorship
of these inscriptions, however, has been the subject of acrimonious debates in modern
scholarship. They were likely the work of Darius, who installed them to link himself to the
dynastic line of Cyrus the Great, founder of the empire. 8

Once these inscriptions are attributed to Darius, there is no compelling reason to label Cyrus an
Achaemenid. Cyrus traced his lineage only to Teispes, and he emphasized his dynastic line’s

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kingship of Anshan. Although Cyrus ruled the territory of Parsa (at that time, Parsa was
geographically synonymous with Anshan, that part of Iran roughly equivalent to modern Fars),
his titulary retained an Elamite focus. Darius, on the other hand, never used the toponym
“Anshan” and called himself instead the “king of Parsa” (that is, “king of Persia”). Elamites and
Persians had clearly been living together in Parsa/Fars for quite some time, and Elamite
influence on the Persians was pervasive. 9 But the choice of titulary reflected a deliberate
emphasis: Elamite for Cyrus, and Persian for Darius.

What do we make, then, of Darius’s claims of legitimacy via a familial link with Cyrus? Did he
make it up out of thin air?

Maybe not. In the Bisitun Inscription (DB §10), Darius refers to Cambyses II (the son of Cyrus
the Great) as a member of Darius’s family (that is, as an Achaemenid). Darius’s claim that
Cambyses was “of our family” may be reconciled through the person of Cambyses’s mother,
Cassandane, an Achaemenid woman who married Cyrus. According to Herodotus, “Cambyses
was the son of Cassandane, the daughter of Pharnaspes, an Achaemenid” (History 2.1).
Herodotus also noted her death and the subsequent mourning:

He [Cambyses] was the son of Cyrus and Cassandane, the daughter of

Pharnaspes, and Cassandane had died before Cyrus himself; Cyrus had
mourned greatly for her and instructed all his subjects to do likewise.
Cambyses, then, was a son of this woman and Cyrus (3.2).

No Near Eastern source mentions the name of Cyrus’s wife and Cambyses’s mother, but her
death, in 538 B.C.E., is described in a document from Babylon called the Nabonidus Chronicle:

In the month [Adar] the wife of the king died. From the twenty-seventh
of the month Adar [February-March] to the third of the month Nisan
[March-April] there was mourning in Akkad. All the people bared their
heads. 10

In describing Cassandane’s death, Herodotus clearly used the Nabonidus Chronicle, or they
shared the same source. What Herodotus supplied for us is her name and her clan affiliation:
“Achaemenid.”

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ONE PRINCIPAL SOURCE of information about the rise of Cyrus the Great (r. 559–530 B.C.E.) is
the so-called Nabonidus Chronicle. It consists of a series of cuneiform tablets (such as the 5.5-
inch-high fragment) listing important events that took place during the reign of the Babylonian
king Nabonidus (555–539 B.C.E.). Credit: British Museum, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Darius may well have linked Cambyses to his family (or, more broadly, his clan, the
Achaemenids) through Cassandane’s marriage to Cyrus the Great. In the Bisitun Inscription,
Darius strengthened this shared descent with Cyrus by stating that Cyrus’s great-grandfather,
Teispes, was a son of Achaemenes. Thus Darius legitimized his own claim to the throne. That
this claim was indeed problematic is also suggested by the fact that both Darius’s father,
Hystaspes, and paternal grandfather, Arsames, were living when he took the throne, which
vitiates Darius’s implication that the kingship had descended in a direct line to him. 11 Notably,
when Darius claimed in the Bisitun Inscription that he was the ninth king in succession, he did
not provide the names of those who reigned before him (DB §4).

So who was this Darius who took control of a great empire in a time of turmoil and made it even
greater, by extending its territories in central Asia and Europe?

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According to Herodotus, Darius’s father, Hystaspes, served as governor (hyparch) of Persia

under Cyrus the Great (History 3.70). In the Bisitun Inscription, on the other hand, Darius
indicates that his father held an important post in Parthia (DB §35). Herodotus states that during
Cambyses’s reign Darius himself was a “spear-bearer” (doryphoros) and thus “not yet a man of
great account” (History 3.139). But Herodotus likely underestimates the importance of the
Persian title “spear-bearer.” In an inscription from Darius’s tomb at Naqsh-i Rustam, one of
Darius’s six co-conspirators, Gobryas, is also given the title “spear-bearer” (arshtibara, in Old
Persian), and it is clear from the context that this position was one of high honor. 12 Thus, Darius
held a position of influence under Cambyses and perhaps under Cyrus as well. 13

Darius’s association with the god Ahuramazda tells us something about his background.
Ahuramazda was the supreme god in Zoroastrianism, a religion that did not reach its mature
form until the Sasanian period, around the third century C.E. The cultic strain observed by the
Achaemenid kings is usually referred to as “Mazdaism.” Ahuramazda was probably not a new
arrival in Parsa/Fars at this time, but there is little clear evidence of Mazdaism there before
Darius’s reign. The prophet Zoroaster, for instance, is not mentioned in Persian texts of this
period (though he is mentioned in fourth-century B.C.E. Greek sources). In any event,
Zoroaster’s homeland, and thus the origins of Zoroastrianism, is thought to have been in eastern
Iran. Darius’s introduction of Ahuramazda into his inscriptions is consistent with his emphasis
on Persia, as opposed to Cyrus’s Elam. In some inscriptions, Darius even refers to his “Iranian”
ethnicity. 14

In taking power, Darius incorporated the empire founded by Cyrus II into his own
“Achaemenid” Persian empire. He proclaimed his rule in numerous, monumental, trilingual
inscriptions—for which he adapted cuneiform script for the Old Persian language. He built the
magnificent citadel of Persepolis as a visual emblem of his power, a kind of panegyric in stone.
And he continued the work of Cyrus in expanding the empire, eastward into central Asia (where
Persian influence remained paramount for hundreds of years), and westward into Europe.

The ancient Persians are perhaps best known in the West for the incursions into Greece by
Darius in 490 B.C.E. (a Persian force was defeated at the Battle of Marathon) and by Darius’s

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CARVED INTO A ROCK outcrop near Persepolis called Naqsh-i Rustam are the tombs of the
Persian kings Darius I, Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, and Darius II. The 75-foot-high, cruciform entrance
to Darius’s tomb leads to a three-chambered burial crypt that had been emptied by the time
excavators explored the tomb in the 1930s. Photo by Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia
Commons.

son and successor, Xerxes, in 480–479 B.C.E. Although defeated in a naval battle at Salamis,
Xerxes destroyed Athens and posed a serious threat to Greek independence.

After Xerxes’s invasion of Greece, the empire built by Cyrus and Darius remained dynamic and
active. The Achaemenids continued to rule a vast territory from modern Afghanistan to Libya,
despite a civil war between Artaxerxes II and his brother, Cyrus the Younger, which lasted from
404 to 401 B.C.E. (immortalized by Xenophon’s Anabasis and Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes),
and also despite the successful revolt (also in 404) of Egypt, which was not reintegrated into the
Persian empire until 342. 15 The Persian empire left a massive imprint on Central Asia, the
Middle East and the West. Its like was not seen again until the Roman Empire under Augustus,
and has been seldom seen since.

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The Canaanites
“Texts from Ugarit Solve Biblical Puzzles” *
By Edward L. Greenstein

UGARITIC GODDESS. A part of what used to be a lid from a cylindrical pyxis (box), this 13th-
century B.C.E. ivory engraving shows a goddess feeding a pair of wild goats. It was discovered in
Tomb 3 of the Ugaritic necropolis at Minet al-Beida and is now at the Louvre. Louvre Museum, CC
BY-SA 2.0 FR, via Wikimedia Commons.

Hebrew is a “language of Canaan,” says the prophet (Isaiah 19:18), a conclusion amply
confirmed by archaeologically recovered inscriptions. In scholarly terms, Hebrew is a south
Canaanite dialect.

*
This article originally appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 2010.

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As with the language, so with the alphabet: From its earliest appearance until the Babylonian
destruction, Hebrew was written in the Canaanite alphabet. 1

As with language and the alphabet, so with culture generally: Ancient Israelite culture was in
many respects a subset of Canaanite culture.

Map of ancient Canaan.

The most powerful and extensive demonstration of this last statement comes from the body of
literature uncovered at the site of Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast of Syria. The discovery of
Ugarit has a certain fairytale typicality to it. A peasant was plowing below the tell of Ras Shamra
in 1928 when he struck a solid mass, which later turned out to be a stone covering to a tomb. The
French authorities—in charge of Syria at the time—were alerted, and in 1929 archaeologists
from France, headed by the now-famous Claude F.A. Schaeffer, began the first season of
excavation. The French have continued to dig at Ras Shamra until today, although with more
involvement from the Syrians in recent years.

These excavations have revealed an extensive Late Bronze Age city (14th–13th centuries B.C.E.)
with palaces, temples and houses of notables, most of which have yielded troves of texts. This

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city was destroyed at the end of the Late Bronze Age by the Sea Peoples—of whom the
Philistines are perhaps the best known—and only modestly occupied thereafter.

The heavily fortified city gate of Ugarit protected entry into the palace area. The largest of the
palaces, the royal palace, was a spectacular edifice covering three acres. A roughly rectangular
structure, it measured 390 feet by nearly 300 feet. Smaller palaces provided sumptuous quarters
for lesser figures, like the palace of the queen mother.

The Ugaritic language, like Hebrew and other Canaanite dialects, is part of the language group
known as Northwest Semitic. As Hebrew is a south Canaanite dialect, Ugaritic is a north
Canaanite dialect.

The other language commonly found at Ugarit, also written in cuneiform, is Akkadian, the
lingua franca of the time. It was used for commercial and diplomatic documents and is part of
the language group known as East Semitic and centered in Mesopotamia.

On the main acropolis of Ugarit were the temples and the House of the Chief Priest. The
mythological tablets from this house (and some inscribed metal adzes) were the basis on which
the Ugaritic language was deciphered, mainly in 1931. It took only a year or so to decipher
because the script consists of only 30 characters and the language strongly resembles Hebrew
and Arabic. The alphabetic signs are written in cuneiform but are derived from the Proto-
Canaanite alphabet.

Inside the temple of Baal (the chief Canaanite deity) was a magnificent stela of Baal bearing a
weapon in his right hand and a thunderbolt in the form of a flowering spear in his left. Elsewhere
on the acropolis, excavators uncovered a seated statue of the god El, a name also used in the
Bible for the Hebrew God but in the Ugaritic texts the head of the pantheon. In the statue from
Ugarit, El is pictured as an old man, the father of the gods; he sits on an armless chair, wearing a
cloak and a conical hat.

Within a few years after the initial decipherment, scholars had translated extensive texts relating
to the stories of Baal and his sister Anath; and of their nemeses Yamm, the sea god, and Mot, the
god of aridity and death, and others.

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THE WALLS OF UGARIT were sloped to prevent siege engines from being brought too close to
the top of the wall. Protruding from the wall line on the left is one of the towers that provided
covering fire. The small gate, called the postern gate, could be opened and closed quickly without
the danger of opening the larger city gate. Photo by Dosseman, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia
Commons.

Another lengthy text, the Epic of Aqhat, illustrates the relationship between Ugaritic literature
and the Bible. The Epic of Aqhat is a narrative in epic verse preserved in part on three clay
tablets. Its language and style are startlingly similar to biblical poetry.

To begin with, the Epic of Aqhat solves a biblical mystery in the Book of Ezekiel. The prophet
Ezekiel is living in exile in Babylonia. In Ezekiel 14, the prophet utters a prophecy in the name
of the Lord:
O mortal, if a land were to sin against me and commit a trespass and I
stretched out my hand against it and broke its staff of bread and sent
famine against it and cut off man and beast from it, even if these three
men—Noah, Daniel and Job—should be in it, they would by their
righteousness save only themselves, declares the Lord God ... [Even]
those three men in it would save neither sons nor daughters, but they
alone would be saved. (Ezekiel 14:13–14, 16)

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The same language repeats in the immediately subsequent verses of the chapter. (Then, at the
end of the chapter, the prophet notes that even after the Babylonian destruction, survivors are left
and they will be consoled.)

The problem in this oracle concerns the inclusion of Daniel along with Noah and Job. In the
disaster that befell Noah, he was able to save his family—by virtue of his own righteousness.
Noah’s wife and children were not necessarily meritorious, but they were nevertheless rescued
from the great flood. In the disaster that Ezekiel is talking about, however, not even Noah’s
children would be saved. The same, says the prophet, goes for Job, who also lost his children; it
is not difficult to imagine their redemption along with Job himself.

But the case of Daniel is different. Ezekiel’s reference to Daniel presents a very difficult
chronological problem. At the time of Ezekiel, Daniel was a teenager and not the father of a
family. It makes no sense for Ezekiel to include Daniel here.

THE BAAL CYCLE, or Baal Epic, recounts the career of the Canaanite storm god Baal, who
defeats Yammu (“the sea”), then builds a royal palace on his divine mountain, and finally clashes
with the god Motu (“death”), which leads to Baal’s death and ultimate resurrection. The six clay
tablets date to c. 1500 B.C.E. and were found at Ugarit. Credit: Louvre Museum, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR,
via Wikimedia Commons.

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The mystery is solved by the Ugaritic Epic of Aqhat. The Daniel that Ezekiel is talking about is
not the Daniel we know from the Bible. Instead, it is the Daniel we know from the Epic of
Aqhat. In the Ugaritic epic, Daniel is the father of Aqhat himself.

How do we know that Ezekiel is referring to the Ugaritic Daniel? For one thing, we know it from
a careful examination of the Ugaritic text compared to the biblical text. In the Ugaritic text, it is
not exactly Daniel; it is Danel. Look carefully at the biblical text in Hebrew. When you do this,
you will see that it is missing one Hebrew letter, a yod (i, in English). The resulting name would
be pronounced Danel, not Daniel, as in our English translations.

There is additional confirmation that Ezekiel is really talking about Danel, rather than Daniel. In
Ezekiel 28:1–3, Ezekiel is delivering an oracle against the Phoenician prince of Tyre who is “so
haughty” as to consider himself a god. Ezekiel addresses him sarcastically: “You are wiser than
Daniel.” In this context, it makes no sense for Ezekiel to mock the prince of Phoenician Tyre by
reference to young Daniel living in Babylon. But it does make sense to mock the prince of Tyre
by reference to Danel, the renowned father of the young hunter Aqhat. And, indeed, this is
confirmed by looking closely at the spelling of Daniel in the Hebrew text of Ezekiel 28:3: It, too,
is Danel, without the yod, not Daniel.

In the Ugaritic epic, Danel is a pious judge who pays homage to the gods for seven days in a row
until Baal takes Danel’s plea to El. El blesses him with a son, Aqhat, who is the hero of the
Ugaritic epic. Ezekiel’s reference to the Danel of the Ugaritic epic makes perfect sense. Danel
lost his son Aqhat to a murderous scheme of the goddess Anath, and it is widely assumed that, in
the missing final tablet of the epic, he gets him back. More than that, it emphasizes that Ezekiel’s
audience was doubtless familiar with the Aqhat legend and could easily understand the prophet’s
allusion to Danel.

In David’s lament over the death of Saul and Saul’s son Jonathan, David cries out: “O hills of
Gilboa, let there be no rain or dew on you” (2 Samuel 1:21).

This verse was taken almost directly from Danel’s exclamation of grief over the death of his son
in the Epic of Aqhat. 2 By evoking a classic Canaanite expression of grief, David adds depth to
his lamentation for Saul and Jonathan.

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That is not all. Almost every word in this Ugaritic passage has a cognate in Hebrew, and it is
replete with biblical associations. A couple examples will suffice. Earlier in the epic, Danel’s son
Aqhat is killed by the jealous goddess Anath. When Danel discovers that his son is dead, as
mentioned above, he lays a curse on the earth:

For seven years may Baal make drought,

For eight, the Rider of the Clouds!
There be no dew, no rainfall,
No welling up of the two watery deeps,
No sweetness of Baal’s voice [that is, no rain following thunder]!

The parallelism of “seven” and “eight” recalls the many biblical verses where a number X is
parallel to a number X + 1.

For example, in Job 5:19 one of Job’s friends tells him:

[God] will deliver you from six troubles;

In seven no harm will reach you.

In the first chapter of Amos, the prophet delivers an oracle in the name of the Lord against
Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom and the Ammonites. In each case, the prophet intones:

For three transgressions of [the particular place or people],

For four, I will not revoke it.

Baal is referred to, in the passage from the Aqhat Epic quoted above, as “the Rider of the
Clouds.” The same epithet is applied to the Israelite God 3:

Sing to God, chant hymns to his name;

extol him who rides the clouds.
(Psalm 68:5; verse 4 in English) 4

The Ugaritic epic quoted above also juxtaposes the waters from above (“no rainfall”) with the
waters from below (“no welling up of the two watery deeps”). The juxtaposition of these two
sources of water is familiar to any reader of the Bible. For example, in the account of the flood
(Genesis 7:11), this is how it is described:

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All the fountains of the great deep burst apart,

And the windows of the sky broke open.

Moses’ blessing of Joseph is recited in Deuteronomy 33:13:

Blessed of the Lord (YHWH) be his land

With the bounty of dew from heaven,
And of the deep which lies below.

Finally, in Proverbs 3:19–20, we are told that

the Lord (YHWH) founded the earth by Wisdom.

He established the heavens by understanding.
By his knowledge the depths burst apart,
And the skies dripped dew.

It is clear that the Aqhat Epic, like so much of Ugaritic literature, served as the literary
background for some of the most classic moments in the Hebrew Bible. We have other examples
of Ugaritic literature, mostly incomplete, that must have been known to the Israelites writing
hundreds of years after they were circulating at Ugarit. Moreover, these were part of a larger
Canaanite literature that is now lost. Surely, there were many more poems, mostly oral but also
written. And for each of them, there were doubtless many versions.

The ancient Hebrew authors were apparently trained in the conventions of ancient Canaanite
literature, and in the course of their training, they learned the classics of that tradition. The
biblical writers assume their audience’s familiarity with this Ugaritic literature.

Understanding the Ugaritic background to a biblical passage often imparts new meaning to it.
One example: When Moses comes down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments and
sees the Israelites singing and dancing about the golden calf, he becomes enraged and hurls the
tablets from his hands, shattering them. Then he directs his attention to the golden calf:

He took the calf they had made. He burned it with fire; he ground it till it
was fine; he scattered it over the water and so made the Israelites drink it
(Exodus 32:20).

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This combination of burning, grinding, and scattering over water may seem puzzling—until we
look at an Ugaritic parallel. In one of the Ugaritic Baal myths, the hero is swallowed by Mot, the
ravenous god of death; in revenge, the goddess Anath destroys Mot in much the same way that
Moses destroyed the golden calf:

She seizes the god Mot. With a sword she cleaves him; with a sieve she
scatters him; with fire she burns him; with millstones she grinds him; in
the field she sows him.

In this Ugaritic myth, we find the same combination, albeit perhaps in a different order, of
burning, grinding and scattering.

In the Ugaritic myth, birds consume Mot’s remains, just as the Israelites were made to drink the
remains of the golden calf from the finely ground remains scattered in a nearby stream. When a

IVORY HEAD of an unnamed prince, from the

royal palace at Ugarit. Remnants of bitumen
indicate that eyes were once attached to the
figure. Credit: Haubi|Gerhard Haubold, CC BY-
SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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reconstituted Mot later recalls what happened to him, he says he “was sown in the sea!” Like the
golden calf, Mot was scattered over water.

In the golden calf story, the animal was being treated by the Israelites as a god. Suddenly the
strange combination of burning, grinding and scattering over water makes sense. As we learn
from the Ugaritic myth, this is the stereotypical method of destroying a deity. The ancient
Hebrew audience, upon hearing the story of the golden calf’s disposal, would understand that the
statue was being treated like a god in need of elimination. Knowing the Ugaritic source enables
us to understand the biblical narrative more authentically.

THE HUNT SCENE embossed in this gold patera from Ugarit features a man riding in a chariot
drawn by two horses and shooting arrows at one ibex and four bovines. Found near the Temple of
Baal at Ugarit, the patera is now on display at the Louvre. Photo by Zunkir, CC BY-SA 4.0, via
Wikimedia Commons.

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This taste of Ugaritic does not even begin to survey the extent and depth of the literary linkage
between Ugaritic literature and the Hebrew Bible. Taken as a whole, it demonstrates that Israelite
literature is an outgrowth of Canaanite literature, just as the Hebrew language is an outgrowth of
the Canaanite language. In short, Ugaritic and biblical literature belong to the same stream of
tradition.

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The Philistines
“Piece by Piece: Exploring the Origins of the Philistines” *
By Daniel M. Master

PHILISTINE CAPTIVES. Wall reliefs in Ramesses III’s mortuary temple at Medinet Habu depict
Egypt’s military confrontation with invaders. Accompanying inscriptions identify the perpetrators
as a confederation of island tribes—including the Denyen, Tjeker, and Peleset (Philistines). These
“Sea Peoples” sought food and a new homeland. After an intense fight, the Egyptians defeated
the Sea Peoples and resettled some of them in Canaan. Photo by I, Rémih, CC BY-SA 3.0, via
Wikimedia Commons.

Who were the Philistines? For centuries, the answer seemed clear: The Philistines were ancient
people from the Bible, villains fighting against God’s people. Every Philistine success was

*
This article originally appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, Spring 2022.

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lamented, every defeat celebrated in a classic clash between the forces of light and darkness. No
one cheered for Goliath’s military prowess or applauded Delilah’s seduction.

But what was the origin of these ancient villains? The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 seems to
connect the Philistines with the Egyptians (Genesis 10:13-14). Other texts in Deuteronomy,
Amos, and Jeremiah place them in Caphtor, leading some to speculate that Caphtor was in the
Egyptian Delta. According to this hypothesis, the Philistines must have arrived some time before
the era of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Map of the eastern Mediterranean.

Building on the discoveries of the past 200 years, we are not reliant solely on the Bible to
formulate our conclusions. Egyptian, Assyrian, and Babylonian texts all speak of the Philistines.
Archaeologists have now excavated four of the five major Philistine cities listed in the Hebrew
Bible (Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath). More recently, geneticists have sequenced Iron Age
genomes from the city of Ashkelon, providing dramatic new insights into Philistine origins. All
these sources clarify the Philistine story.

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Map of ancient Philistia.

As soon as hieroglyphs were deciphered, in the 19th century, references to “Peleset” were
observed in ancient Egyptian texts. The Peleset were immediately connected to the Philistines—
an equation still considered valid today. Because the Egyptian New Kingdom had dominated the
land of Canaan in the preceding centuries, Egyptian records would likely have mentioned any
Philistines even tangentially involved in the southern Levant. So when they suddenly appear in
the 12th-century inscriptions from the walls of Ramesses III’s temple at Medinet Habu, we have
a good indication of when they first arrived in the region. In the Egyptian texts, the Peleset
appear as part of a confederation of peoples from the “islands” who wreaked havoc across the
eastern Mediterranean and finally attacked Egypt itself.

Even with the Egyptian clues, many questions remained: The Egyptian texts noted that these
peoples came from “islands” but did not specify which islands. Further, it was not clear if all of
the groups linked with the Peleset came from the same region: Did they start out together, or did
new groups join them during their travels?

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PATENT POTTERY. These pottery vessels come from Ekron and Tel Azor and were decorated by
the early Philistines with patterns that include spirals and geometric designs, connecting their
makers to similarly decorated vessels in Cyprus and the Aegean. Photo by Hanay, CC BY-SA 3.0,
via Wikimedia Commons.

In the 19th century, scholars called the Peleset and their coconspirators “Sea Peoples,”
connecting them with the myths of Homer. The movements of Sea Peoples noted in the Egyptian
texts seem to echo tales of Odysseus and Aeneas. In addition, the classical legend of Mopsus, a
survivor of the Trojan War, recalled his leading people through Cilicia, ultimately arriving with a
group at Ashkelon. The mention of the Philistines in such contexts led scholars to wonder if the
Philistines of the Bible could be connected to classical legends, although any speculative
connections with the heroes (or villains) at Troy remained shrouded in the same uncertainty as
the rest of Homer’s world—with no clear basis in the history of the second millennium B.C.E.

Such an incomplete story opened the way for archaeologists to fill in the gaps. Early 20th-
century excavators in the southern Levant (first under the Ottoman empire, then under the British
Mandate) focused their attention on the 12th century B.C.E., based on the date of the Egyptian
texts. At just this chronological horizon, they discovered locally made pots with decorations that
reminded them of patterns from the Bronze Age Aegean. 1 Archaeologists saw the ceramics as

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key to demonstrating that a new people had moved into the region from the Aegean as mentioned
in Egyptian texts. The picture was becoming clearer.

In the late 20th century, archaeologists turned to the cities that the Bible lists as “Philistine,” with
modern excavations at Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron, and finally Tell es-Safi/Gath (Gaza remaining
unexplored). Each excavation team made similar discoveries. In the 12th century B.C.E., at all of
these sites, new ideas about architecture, family, food, and art appeared suddenly and broadly.
The patterns were only rarely found elsewhere in the southern Levant, but they could be
connected to the west, either to Cyprus or to the Mycenaean archaeological culture
encompassing mainland Greece, Crete, and the western coast of Turkey.

But patterns of objects can never tell the whole story of a people. Even today, if we reflect on the
clothes we wear or the daily objects we use, we must admit that the place of their manufacture—

ASHKELON’S CEMETERY is the first extensive burial ground found at a Philistine city.
Archaeologists uncovered more than 210 burials in the cemetery—located outside the ancient city
and used from the eleventh to eighth centuries B.C.E. Although the majority of the Philistines in
Ashkelon’s cemetery were buried in simple pits, others were cremated in jars or even buried in
built tombs, such as the multi-chambered tomb in this photo. Photo by Megan Sauter.

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and even the details of their style—do not always reflect our own location or background. Much
is traded; much is imported. The same was true in the ancient world. It is up to archaeologists to
determine whether the objects found in the excavation trench are characteristic of a particular
group or simply imports from another region.

In 1995, Lawrence Stager, the late director of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, tried to
address this specific difficulty by building a checklist to determine whether there was enough
evidence in the region of Philistine occupation to show an actual migration, as opposed to
internal developments or trade. He argued that the material culture in Philistia was distinct from
its surroundings and linked to earlier cultural patterns in the Aegean. There was a plausible route
that linked the two areas. As a result, Stager supported the long-held idea of an Aegean migration
in the 12th century. Other archaeologists agreed, arguing that when the cultural change is wide
and deep enough, when it touches the very patterns of hearth and home, it can be considered a
“deep change” and can therefore be linked to migration. 2

Yet, as much as archaeologists were tempted to infer that this group had migrated based on the
objects that they used, the conclusion was still indirect. While some things changed in Philistine
cities, many cultural features stayed the same. Did this mean that only a few people migrated?
Additionally, some Philistine objects were rare in the Aegean but common in Cyprus. Did this
hint that Cyprus played a more important role? It was difficult to weigh the evidence amid the
uncertainties.

One set of scholars even argued that the whole trajectory was off target. They asked whether the
interpretation of texts, both Egyptian and biblical, had biased archaeologists so much that a few
trinkets were privileged, while the mass of local material was ignored. Some revisited the basic
Egyptian texts that started it all, placing the battles in the days of Ramesses III farther north, at
the margins of the Egyptian empire. A few years ago, texts found in southeastern Turkey that
referred to “Walastin” or “Palastin” prompted the idea that this was the location of the Philistines
in the 12th and 11th centuries. Some scholars went so far as to argue that there was no evidence
for associating early Iron Age material from the southern Levant with the Philistines. 3

Beginning in 2013, however, the first direct evidence for the origin of the inhabitants of Philistia
in the 12th and 11th centuries emerged. The Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, in concert with

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the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, launched a program to chart the
genetic profiles of the ancient Bronze and Iron Age inhabitants of the city. 4 (By then I had joined
Lawrence Stager as a director of excavations at Ashkelon.) Rather than examining ancient texts,
perhaps written much later and having an agenda of their own, or looking at ancient artifacts that
provide only indirect evidence, this project sought to look at the genetic material of the
inhabitants themselves.

DISTINCTLY PHILISTINE. The Philistines created and used a distinct assemblage of artifacts—
from everyday objects, such as pottery and loom weights, to special objects, like weapons and
religious paraphernalia. The ceramic figurine above dates to the early Iron Age and measures
about 7 inches in height. It resembles a chair with a female torso and head as its back.
Archaeologists call this figure an Ashdoda, after the Philistine city of Ashdod where it was first
identified. Photo by ‫שועל‬, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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The first part of this genetic research examined people who lived at Ashkelon during the middle
of the second millennium. These individuals were buried in typical multigenerational family
tombs of the Bronze Age. Each of the Bronze Age individuals from Ashkelon contained genetic
material similar to groups that lived up and down the coast of the Levant in the Bronze Age,
similar to the inhabitants of Sidon and Megiddo. These were “local” groups of the Late Bronze
and Iron Ages, and they provided a baseline for understanding the 12th century at Ashkelon.

In the late 12th century, just when the material culture changed and the Egyptian texts suggest
migration, the inhabitants of Ashkelon buried infants in shallow graves under the floors of their
houses. Our excavations uncovered eight of these rare burials. It is extremely unusual to find any
human remains from 12th-century Philistia. These infants were too young to have traveled, and
their interment burial beneath houses is a mark of the permanent settlement of their families in
the homes above.

In the first round of testing, the genetic sequence of one of these infants was very different from
that of Ashkelon’s Bronze Age inhabitants. The infant’s ancestors had come from somewhere
else. In fact, this infant showed genetic characteristics of “Western European Hunter-Gatherers.”
This name is shorthand for a Stone Age population that lived in Europe long ago and never left.
These genetic anomalies can be found in many European populations, though it is not something
as specific as Spanish, French, or German would be in modern Europe. It is a much broader
marker, noted in varying degrees in populations from Crete to the British Isles.

Here, for the first—and really only—time in the Bronze or Iron Age world, this geographically
foreign genetic material appeared in families in Ashkelon. When all the genetic material was
taken into account (not just the small Western European Hunter-Gatherer component), no place
was a better match for the genetic material found than Crete—though places farther west also
produced good, possible matches. This result was so interesting that it needed further
confirmation. After looking at all the infants, three additional individuals from Ashkelon, all
infants buried beneath houses, still had enough preserved genetic material for analysis. The
results in each case showed the same nonlocal genetic heritage, but, interestingly, none of the
four individuals was closely related to the other. This was not just one new family; this was a
decidedly new population.

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For researchers, this definitive evidence established a 12th-century migration. These tests
showed that a significant number of the Iron Age I inhabitants of Ashkelon came from
somewhere else. Even though 100 percent of the infants with preserved DNA showed some of
this ancestry, this does not mean that Ashkelon’s entire 12th-century population was made up of
immigrants. But it does show, unequivocally, that a migration occurred. When these new data
were combined with the contemporary Egyptian references that describe the Peleset, or
Philistines, as part of a migrating group along with the later biblical references to Philistine
Ashkelon, the origin story becomes clear: People came to Ashkelon in the 12th century and
settled there, probably as part of a migration that started in Crete. These were the original
Philistines of Ashkelon.

But, as soon as they arrived to inhabited Levantine cities like Ashkelon, the situation became
quite complicated. Typically, human societies are divided into named groups. But there is often
uncertainty around the edges of a group and ambiguity about whether a person belongs on one
side or another of the social boundary. This does not detract from the importance of such groups
in the social landscape. From the Iron Age texts, it appears that the Philistines were one such
group, repeatedly called out by the people around them. Yet even though the name “Philistine”
did not change for the entirety of the Iron Age, that does not mean that everything stayed the
same. Even as social names persist, how people live—in their technology, economy, or simply
taste and style—changes frequently. So it was with the Philistines.

For the first decades of their settlement, the Philistines lived in the shadow of the Egyptians. The
Egyptians circumscribed their movement with a ring of fortresses, forcing them inward to live
alongside the earlier inhabitants of the region. Even then, at each of the Philistine sites, a similar
general pattern began to appear. Their distinctive pottery has designs or shapes that combined
Aegean and local ceramic patterns into something uniquely Philistine.

With the decline of the Egyptian New Kingdom, Egypt withdrew from Canaan in the late 12th
century. At that point, the breadth of regional interactions between the Philistines and others
accelerated. Distinctive Philistine artifacts were taken across the region and then imitated, and
more local motifs appear in the Philistine decorative repertoire. This was a dynamic process
involving choices and influences at every level of society. Although archaeologists have used

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various bits of jargon to describe this phenomenon (hybridity, creolization, transculturalism,

etc.), 5 it was no doubt a complex cultural process that does not fit easily into our conceptual
models and explanations.

Over time, though, the cultural development of the region faced a new constraint. From the
middle of the 12th century, many parts of the eastern Mediterranean experienced a massive
decline in trade, often considered the beginning of a “dark age.” For the inhabitants of Philistia,
this meant that, in practice, the only new influences that they had in their world were regional,
connected either to Egypt, to Levantine coastal cities, or to their inland neighbors. While aspects
of the Aegean remained part of their heritage, their Aegean connections were never renewed
with fresh cultural, linguistic, or genetic contributions from that world. As would be expected,
the Philistines began to look more and more like their neighbors. The pottery lost its
characteristic Aegean appearance and then even much of its distinctiveness within the region.
Their linguistic differences diminished so significantly that, by the tenth century, Philistine
writing used local alphabetic scripts that conveyed a Semitic language. The Philistines looked, at
least to modern archaeologists, much like their neighbors.

By the middle of the Iron Age, there was virtually nothing left in the material record that was
distinctive to the cities of Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath—and nothing that would have
been recognized as “Philistine” by those earlier migrants from the 12th century.

At Ashkelon, a third genetic study looked at the patterns visible in the Philistine cemetery, dated
to the tenth and ninth centuries. While there was some evidence of the same Western European
Hunter-Gatherer genetic input, for all statistical purposes, it could not be identified for certain.
The best models showed that these people were descendants of both the 12th-century inhabitants
and the earlier Bronze Age inhabitants. It appears from these results that so much intermarriage
had taken place between the original immigrants and the people around them that the genetic
makeup of Ashkelon’s inhabitants had lost its immigrant distinctiveness.

An unsophisticated reading of this evidence might lead one to argue that these people had ceased
to be “real” Philistines. But popular definitions often confuse biology and ethnicity, a
combination that does not reflect most ancient—or, it must be said, modern—societies. Despite
rampant intermarriage, the inhabitants of Ashkelon, Ekron, Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod were still

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called “Philistines” by the Assyrians, Babylonians, and biblical writers throughout the rest of the
Iron Age. This is a critical witness to the survival of the Philistines as a distinct group. The
genetic tests reveal that their ongoing social self-definition did not revolve around a particular
inherited, biological characteristic. Something else must have been key to their identity in their
eyes and in the eyes of others.

Toward the end of Philistine history, the biblical prophets Amos and Jeremiah both share an
interesting observation about the Philistines of their day. Amos’s oracle sees the divine hand in
earlier events: “Didn’t I bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor,
and Aram from Kir?” (Amos 9:7, author’s translation). In Amos’s telling, all three groups were
immigrants to the region.

The Philistine reference fits together in a surprising way with research on the very idea of
Caphtor itself. In Egypt, in New Kingdom tombs, a group called the Kephtiu was pictured with
dress and objects that seem to connect to the Minoan archaeological culture, centered in Crete
and its vicinity. An inscription on the base of a statue at Kom el-Hetan similarly seemed to
connect Kephtiu with an itinerary of named cities from this part of the Aegean. So, quite apart
from the study of the Philistines, scholars linked Kephtiu and Caphtor to Crete. 6 Of course, this
identification is based on Egyptian perceptions in the 15th and 14th centuries, and Amos is
writing in the eighth century, when the term is a rarely used archaism.

As we have seen, Crete is one of the closest matches to the genetic heritage of the Ashkelon
individuals from the 12th century, much closer than that of mainland Greece, Turkey, or any
other options represented in the current database of ancient samples. But Amos was writing in
the eighth century, past the time where that genetic material can be meaningfully identified in the
Philistine genome and past the time when Caphtor was a common term. Amos’s connection
between the Philistines and Caphtor is not something that could have been derived de novo in the
eighth century, even with the most advanced tools in our modern toolkit. Indeed, if
archaeologists and geneticists had not been able to sequence genomes from that sliver of time in
the 12th and 11th centuries, no one would have caught this at all.

Jeremiah, writing more than a century after Amos, says something similar: “The Lord is about to
devastate the Philistines, remnant of the Island of Caphtor. Baldness has come upon Gaza;

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EKRON INSCRIPTION. Discovered within a temple at Ekron, this Philistine dedicatory inscription,
dated to the seventh century B.C.E. and written in a Semitic language, records that King Ikausu
(or Achish) built the city’s temple for the goddess Ptgyh. The name Ikausu, meaning “Achaean” or
“Greek,” shows a Philistine connection to the West even in the seventh century—500 years after
they had settled in Canaan. Credit: Oren Rozen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Ashkelon is destroyed” (Jeremiah 47:4). Jeremiah still saw Ashkelon and Gaza (and Ekron) as
distinctively Philistine cities, and Jeremiah draws again on the idea that this group was connected
to Caphtor. In this case, Jeremiah rephrased the concept. The “remnant of Caphtor” is not
primarily a description of a place from which they came; it is a way of identifying the peoples
themselves.

There is no reason to suggest that this connection to Caphtor was particularly important or
meaningful to Amos or Jeremiah; it hardly mattered to them from where the Philistines came.
Yet someone was carefully remembering this information. An important late Philistine
inscription from Ekron helps us to see the rest of the story. In a famous seventh-century text
found at the site, the name of the king is Ikausu, a name also used by the king of Gath in the
history of David’s rise to kingship (e.g., Achish in 1 Samuel 21:10). This name has been
translated as “Achaean”—a term that, at least in the Homeric tradition, refers to the Aegean
world in general. 7

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Some have tried to link this foreign name to the influence of contacts with the Aegean world in
the later Iron Age but, from the standpoint of archaeology, this is a mirage. At the Philistine
sites, even at the port of Ashkelon, there is a huge gap in the evidence for connections between
the Aegean world and Philistia extending from the beginning of the “dark ages” in the middle of
the 12th century through the very end of the seventh century. From the archaeological record, it
appears that substantive connections to the Aegean only resume several decades after the Ekron
text was inscribed.

Other scholars have been skeptical that the Iron Age peoples could remember a name or an
Aegean connection for five centuries. And, no doubt, much was forgotten over the centuries. But
now, with the genetic results from 12th-century Ashkelon paired with the texts of Amos and
Jeremiah from the end of the Iron Age, it is certain that someone could and did accurately
remember at least one key aspect of Philistine history—their origin.

As continued use of the name Ikausu suggests, the Philistines were proud of their origin, and, I
would argue, they remembered the name Caphtor as well. Despite all the cultural and political
changes and despite intermarriage, their shared memory retained this idea. The self-image of the
eighth- and seventh-century Philistines was still rooted in a long-distant, but very real, immigrant
experience that took place in the 12th century. Their memory of this event defined them as a
social group from their beginning until their demise at the hand of the Babylonian king
Nebuchadnezzar, in 604 B.C.E.

The Philistines valued their distinctive origins, and, despite the vicissitudes of the Iron Age, their
memory defined who they were. Only now, with ancient texts deciphered, ancient cities
excavated, and ancient genomes decoded, can we begin to see the Philistines as they saw
themselves. They were not merely the enemies of the Israelites. They were a proud immigrant
people, defining themselves for almost 600 years as the “remnant of Caphtor,” heirs of the
Bronze Age Aegean.

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The Phoenicians
“Phoenicia and Its Special Relationship with Israel” *
By Ephraim Stern

PHOENICIAN FINANCES. This half-shekel coin from Sidon features a galley under sail on one side
and an uncertain king (or hero) drawing a bow on the other. Made of silver, it dates to about 430
B.C.E. Photo by Classical Numismatic Group.

The Phoenicians were the nearest people to the ancient Israelites in every respect. They spoke the
same language and wrote in the same script. Even their religion was similar, at least during the
First Temple period. The Phoenicians and the Israelites built Jerusalem together, as well as
several other cities, and they went on joint trading expeditions. By marriage, Phoenician royal
houses and those of Israel and Judea were related. The clearest sign of the close relationship
between the two peoples must have been the fact that they never went to war against each other
(in complete contrast to the Israelites’ relationship with all their other neighbors).

The Phoenicians were the late Canaanites of the first millennium B.C.E. (Iron Age through
Roman period), descendants of the Canaanites of the second millennium B.C.E. (Middle Bronze
Age through Late Bronze Age). “Phoenicians” was the name given to this people by the Greeks,
but the Phoenicians continued to refer to themselves as Canaanites or by the names of their

*
This article originally appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 2017.

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principal cities. During the second millennium B.C.E., the Canaanites controlled Palestine,
Transjordan and Syria—from Ugarit down to the Egyptian border—and they developed a rich
culture. Around 1200 B.C.E., they were forced out of these countries by the Arameans and the
Neo-Hittites in the north, the Israelites and the Sea Peoples (Philistines, Sikils and Sherden, etc.)
in the south, and by the Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites in the east. Between about 1200 and
1050 B.C.E., they retained control of a greatly reduced area—the narrow coastal strip of
Lebanon between Arwad, Tyre and Akko. Most of the population lived in five main cities:
Arwad, Byblos, Berytus, Sidon and Tyre.

Map of the ancient Mediterranean.

From about the end of the 11th century B.C.E. onward, the Phoenicians began to expand once
again from these centers—but this time to the west. First, they reached Cyprus, whence they
proceeded to the coasts of Sicily, Sardinia and Malta and subsequently to southern Spain and
northern Africa. These western settlers soon established a huge commercial empire that lasted
about a millennium.

Apart from the relatively few references to the Phoenicians in the Bible and in some ancient
royal inscriptions, principally of Assyrian kings, our only information about the Phoenicians
comes from Greek sources, most of which are hostile in tone (since the Greeks and Phoenicians
competed for control of the Mediterranean for more than 500 years). The Phoenicians themselves

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left behind some written sources, but these consist mostly of dedicatory inscriptions and contain
almost no important historical facts.

The Phoenicians inherited all the earlier rich Canaanite culture that had been developed during
the entire second millennium B.C.E.—in contrast to the other peoples who settled in the region
and who in the beginning were but simple nomads.

Yet the Phoenicians succeeded in creating a material culture of their own in many respects. The
major elements of the Phoenician architectural style were alternating courses of headers and
stretchers built of long, well-dressed blocks; walls constructed of ashlar piers with fieldstones in
the spaces between them; proto-Aeolic capitals, Hathor capitals and Papyrus capitals; recessed
openings (both doors and windows); ornamented window balustrades; and ornamented
orthostats.

THE PHOENICIAN TEMPLE AT AMRIT, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, is probably dedicated to

the Phoenician god Melqart (the primary god of Tyre) and the Phoenician god of healing Eshmun
(the main god of Sidon). Built in the sixth–fourth centuries B.C.E. (when the area was under
Persian control), this temple functioned until the site was abandoned. Photo by Dosseman, CC BY-
SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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This Phoenician architecture was adopted and imitated by all the peoples of Palestine—Israelites,
Judahites, Philistines and all the peoples of the eastern Jordan. Each of them modified aspects of
it, adding some characteristic features of their own. All faithfully followed this style in the public
buildings and palaces of their capitals and main towns until the Assyrian conquest at the end of
the eighth century B.C.E. The Assyrian conquest of the Israelite monarchy brought an abrupt end
to the Phoenician building style. Only in Phoenicia—that is, in the narrow coastal strip running
from Lebanon to western Galilee, the Carmel, and the Sharon down to Jaffa and Ashkelon—did
this architectural style continue uninterruptedly through the entire Assyrian (700–530 B.C.E.)
and Persian periods (530–300 B.C.E.) and perhaps even into the early Hellenistic period (300–
100 B.C.E.).

The number of excavated sanctuaries attributed to the Phoenicians is surprisingly small. Most of
those are dated to the Persian period, rather than to the earlier Iron Age (1200–600 B.C.E.), when
the Phoenicians were at the peak of their entrepreneurial power. Of the sanctuaries dated to the
Iron Age, those discovered at Kition on Cyprus are the best known.

In recent years, a few small prayer chapels have also been discovered, each consisting of one
relatively small room. These, too, follow an old Canaanite pattern, an example of which is at
Hazor in Israel. In these rooms, there was usually the statue of the god or goddess or sometimes a
line of stone stelae. Chapels of this type were found in various Palestinian excavations, such as
near the city gate at Tell Dan. Many more chapels have been found in the Phoenician settlements
along the coast, as well as overseas.

We learn about the cult practiced in Phoenician sanctuaries through biblical and Greek
references, as well as Phoenician inscriptions, all found in excavations. The longest one, an
ostracon (potsherd with writing) found at Akko, probably at the site of a sanctuary, is an order
issued by the city authorities to the guild of metalworkers to present a precious metal basin.

Long lists of cult items appear in the Phoenician inscriptions from Kition, which mention dozens
of metal objects, mostly of copper. Lists of tariffs found at Marseilles, France, which probably
originated in one of the nearby Punic colonies and were intended for the temple of Ba’al-Zaphon,
include the prices of the various animals brought there and resemble similar biblical lists
(Leviticus 1–7).

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ESARHADDON STELA commemorates the

Assyrian king Esarhaddon’s victory over the
Egyptians and their allies. Esarhaddon is
pictured leading two figures with ropes that
are connected to their nose rings. The
smaller figure may be the Egyptian prince
Ushankhuru, and the larger figure is possibly
Baal I, the Phoenician king of Tyre. Found at
ancient Sam‘al (modern Zincirli in southern
Turkey), the stela stands 11.4 feet tall and
dates to c. 671 B.C.E. Credit: Joyofmuseums,
CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Two major types of ceramic figurines appear in all Phoenician assemblages: (1) an adult male,
represented as a king sitting on a throne or standing, or as a warrior on a horse; and (2) a fertility
goddess, sometimes pregnant, supporting her breasts, at other times either holding or nursing a
child. Sometimes the child is depicted separately.

Additionally, clay models of sanctuaries, usually depicting a one-room chapel, have been found
in Phoenician settlements. Beside the official religion, there existed a popular cult based on
masks, pendants, vases and figurines of the Egyptian god Bes, which were intended to ward off
bad luck and disease.

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TEL DOR was an ancient Mediterranean port on the Carmel Coast of modern Israel. During the
Iron Age, it was successively ruled by the Sikils (a tribe of the Sea Peoples), Israelites, and
Phoenicians—before eventually falling under Assyrian control. Photo by Bukvoed, CC BY 3.0, via
Wikimedia Commons.

During the Iron Age, the Phoenicians typically burned their dead and placed the ashes into clay
urns, which were then buried. Above the urns, they placed stone stelae that were inscribed with
the names of the deceased, as well as the names of the deities to whom the dead were dedicated.

These cemeteries, usually called by the biblical name tophet, have been uncovered in the
Phoenicians’ western Punic colonies, such as at Carthage, and also in the heartland of Phoenicia,
recently at Tyre.

The Phoenicians later started to bury their dead in rock-cut tombs of various types and even half-
cut and half-built graves. Clay vessels and other personal belongings have been found buried
with the deceased in tombs.

Above all, the Phoenicians were renowned as master craftsmen, and there was a market for their
luxury goods across the ancient Mediterranean world. From the ninth to the early sixth centuries
B.C.E., the Phoenicians produced decorated objects—especially those associated with
cosmetics—made of limestone, alabaster, shell, glass, faience, metals and other materials.

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Phoenician ivory carvings, the finest expression of the Phoenician school, have been found at
many Palestinian sites. Although these ivories often originated in Phoenicia, the local artisans in
Palestine adopted and imitated these objects and produced them at the local centers of all the
nations of the country. At the end of the eighth century B.C.E., but mainly in the seventh century
under Assyrian domination, these began to disappear from the entire eastern Mediterranean
coastal region. Perhaps the cause was a lack of raw material. In any case, at that time artisans
began using cheaper materials, such as bone, stone and alabaster. The change in materials
appears to have caused a change in production quality and an increased use of simple designs.

The most common Phoenician decorated objects of the period are the cosmetic palettes made of
hard limestone in imitation of marble. Some were plain, but the majority was decorated with

PUNIC TOPHET at Carthage, one of the Phoenicians’ western colonies. Phoenician burials have
been uncovered throughout the Mediterranean world. Beginning in the Iron Age, the Phoenicians
generally burned their dead, placed the ashes in urns, buried the urns and set up stelae to mark
these burials. The stelae often included the name of the deceased and the gods to whom the
deceased was consecrated. The Phoenicians adopted other burial methods as well, but tophets
remained their trademark. Photo by Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, CC BY 2.0, via
Wikimedia Commons.

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concentric circles with dots in their centers or with net designs in various shapes. Other common
decorated objects include flat alabaster cosmetic palettes, probably used to mix paints or
powders, and decorated Tridacna squamosa shells, originating in the Red Sea. One end of the
alabaster cosmetic palettes was usually engraved in the shape of a goddess’s head. Similarly, at
the edge of each shell, a female human head was engraved. While the reverse depicts her
garment and jewelry, the inside was left plain except for the decorated edges. Akin to other
aspects of Phoenician culture, the production of these objects ceased at the end of the Iron Age.

Among the later Phoenician products common to coastal sites were coins, some from Sidon and
Tyre, with others having been struck in Dor, Samaria, Ashdod, Ashkelon and Gaza.

The heartland of Phoenicia was subjugated in turn by the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian and
Hellenistic empires, but their western colonies continued to enjoy autonomy until the second
century B.C.E. The Phoenicians’ commercial empire was brought to an end by the Romans who
came into conflict with the Phoenicians—whom they described as “Punics”—in a series of wars
that became known as the Punic Wars. The Carthaginians had no standing army (they employed
mercenaries) and relied on their fleet for defense. The Punic Wars culminated in the Roman
destruction of the Punic capital, Carthage, in 146 B.C.E., thereby ending a millennium of
Phoenician influence, success and power.

Throughout their existence, the Phoenicians encountered numerous groups. With some of these
groups, they competed, and with others, they warred. With almost all, they traded—exporting
their culture and their goods throughout the Mediterranean world. Yet their relationship with the
Israelites was distinct from all the others. It should not surprise us that when the kingdom of
Israel fell, the Phoenicians suffered, too. The loss of their close neighbor and ally disrupted the
growth and strength of the Phoenician empire.

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Ammon, Moab, and Edom

“Gods and Kingdoms East of the Jordan” *
By Joel S. Burnett

EDOMITE GODDESS. Among the large assemblage of Edomite figurines, statuettes, stands, and
other cultic vessels uncovered at the site of Ḥorvat Qitmit in southern Judah was this Edomite
goddess figurine wearing a three-horned headdress dated to the late seventh or early sixth
century B.C.E. Photo by Anagoria, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Although we have no Ammonite, Moabite or Edomite Bible, a growing wealth of archaeological

and epigraphic evidence from Jordan substantiates the existence of these Iron Age kingdoms
closest to Israel and Judah, just as presented in the Hebrew Bible. My work as a historian of
Israelite religion has led me through an ongoing firsthand exploration of this material east of the

*
This article originally appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 2016.

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Jordan River, most recently, a larger-than-life statue of an Ammonite king, the first Iron Age
statue on this scale ever discovered east or west of the Jordan. These discoveries in Jordan reveal
Iron Age kingdoms that, like Israel and Judah, formed on the basis of tribal structures, named
their own kings and worshiped their own national gods.

We know them in the Bible and increasingly in archaeology as Ammon, Moab and Edom.

Map of Judah and the Transjordanian kingdoms.

AMMON

The Hebrew Bible’s usual designation of the Ammonites as “the children of Ammon” (bĕnê
‘Ammôn, e.g., 1 Kings 11:7, 33) matches the threefold reference in the Ammonite Tell Siran
Inscription, “the king of the children of Ammon” (mlk bn ‘mn; c. 600 B.C.E.; cf. mlk bny ‘mwn,
Jeremiah 27:3). This kin-based formulation of political identity reflects a tribal social makeup
and kingdom organization analogous to that of ancient Israel, “the children of Israel” (bĕnê
yiśrā’ēl).

The Ammonite heartland comprised the north-central Transjordanian Plateau encircled by the
upper Jabbok (modern Wadi Zarqa), within a 12.5-mile radius of its capital at the headwaters of

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THE AMMAN CITADEL in downtown Amman, Jordan, is one of seven hills that comprised the
Ammonites’ capital, Rabbah. A large Iron Age structure—built of limestone boulders—lies buried
on this hill, most of which is concealed underneath the later, Roman-period temple to Hercules,
pictured here. Votive figurines recovered at the site, as well as the structure’s size and location,
suggest that this might be the main temple to Milcom, the Ammonites’ primary deity.
Photo by Berthold Werner, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

the Jabbok, Rabbah, “the Great (City),” or Rabbat bĕnê ‘Ammōn, “the Great (City) of the
Children of Ammon” (2 Samuel 12:26, 29), the modern Amman Citadel (Jabal al-Qal‘a).

Archaeological excavations at the Amman Citadel over the past five decades have unearthed
monumental architectural remains from the Iron Age II (1000–580 B.C.E.), including portions of
the city’s defense walls and water system. The excavations also exposed a large building
complex resembling an Assyrian palace on the lower terrace. Running beneath a later Roman-
period temple to Hercules, still visible today, are remains of an Iron Age megalithic building of
limestone boulders containing several votive figurines, possibly the Ammonite kingdom’s main
temple to its leading deity. 1

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AMMONITE KING. On display at the Jordan Museum in Amman, this statue depicts a deified king.
He is wearing a shawl over a garment in the Aramaic-Syrian tradition and an Egyptian-style Atef
crown, a symbol of kings and gods in Syria-Palestine. Dating to the mid-eighth century B.C.E., the
statue was found near the Amman Citadel. Public domain, CC0 1.0 Universal, via Livius.org.

References to building and architectural terms in the first-person speech of a king or god make
up the apparent focus of the famous Amman Citadel Inscription, dating to the late ninth century
B.C.E. The inscription begins with a partially restored mention of Milcom, regularly named in
the Hebrew Bible as the leading god of the Ammonites (see, e.g., 1 Kings 11:5, 33; 2 Kings
23:13). Milcom is also invoked in personal names, including the name of a royal official—
“Milkom’ur servant of Baalyasha”—on a clay seal impression from excavations at Tall al-
‘Umayri, dating to c. 600 B.C.E. Baalyasha is identified with the Ammonite King Baalis
mentioned in Jeremiah 40:14. Just as the worship of Yahweh set Israelites apart from other
peoples during the Iron Age II, so did the Ammonites’ worship of Milcom distinguish them from
their closest neighbors and rivals.

The Ammonite god Milcom receives artistic representation in a series of stern-faced (usually
bearded) stone statues and sculpted heads from Amman wearing a variant of the Egyptian Atef
crown, an emblem depicting deities in Syria-Palestine since the second millennium B.C.E. 2

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A collection of double-faced female sculpted heads in limestone from the Amman Citadel might
represent a goddess or group of Ammonite goddesses within an architectural design.

Ammonite stone sculpture also includes depictions of human royal figures. For example, the
inscribed limestone statuette of Yarḥ-‘Azar is identified as the grandson of Shanib, perhaps the
Ammonite king mentioned by Tiglath-pileser III around 734 B.C.E. And now we can include a
monumental basalt statue of an Ammonite king preserved to more than 6.5 feet in height and
excavated in 2010 in front of the Roman theater in downtown Amman. 3 These two statues
portray human royal figures not wearing a crown but, rather, wearing a headband or diadem with
the head uncovered. Both figures hold a drooping lotus flower, also of Egyptian derivation,
representing a deceased ruler in the art of Syria-Palestine. This larger-than-life image of an Iron
Age king is the first statue of this size ever discovered east or west of the Jordan.

MOAB

Turning to Moab, the famous Mesha Stele (c. 840 B.C.E.) presents the longest Iron Age
epigraphic text surviving from the southern Levant. The basalt stone monument once stood in
Mesha’s capital, Dibon (modern Dhiban), marking a worship place that the king built in honor of
Moab’s god Chemosh, whom Mesha credits in the inscription with his achievements of territorial
expansion, building cities and defeating enemies. The principal enemy in the inscription is the
northern Israelite kingdom previously ruled by Omri and “his son.”* According to Mesha, Moab
had suffered in the past under these Israelite kings because Moab’s god Chemosh “was angry
with his land.” In describing the lands he rules and conquers, Mesha reveals a kin-based society,
invoking his father, Chemosh[yat], 4 who ruled before him, identifying himself by the people-
group designation “Daybonite,” and discussing “the men of Gad,” doubtless the same Gad
figuring as an Israelite tribe in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 49:19; Deuteronomy 33:20–21; etc.).
Though built on this tribal basis, Mesha’s kingdom is identified primarily by geography, namely,
the ancient country of Moab appearing in Egyptian texts centuries earlier and united from
territorial segments through warfare in the name of the god Chemosh. 5 Like ancient Israel,
Moab’s practices of ritual warfare included ḥerem, the execution of whole populations in
devotion to the vanquishing deity (Deuteronomy 13:15; 20:16–17; Joshua 6:17–19; etc.).

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MESHA STELE. Almost 4 feet tall and 2 feet wide, the Mesha Stele from the ninth century B.C.E. is
the longest Moabite inscription. Its 34-line-long text chronicles how the Moabites were subjected
to Israelite rule until King Mesha—with the divine help of Chemosh, the main Moabite deity—
overthrew the Moabites’ oppressors. Louvre Museum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Mesha Stele views Moab and Israel as analogous kingdoms in irreconcilable opposition:
each with its own territory, people, king, royal lineage (Chemoshyat and Mesha vs. Omri and
“his son”) and god (Chemosh vs. Yahweh). These oppositions resolved at the boundaries through
warfare, conquest and ḥerem. 6

The full name of Mesha’s father in the Mesha Stele (kmš[yt]) is supplemented in the Kerak
Inscription fragment, another monumental inscription on stone in the same Moabite language,
with a similar script of comparable date, that begins with the same formulary naming of the
“King of Moab.” 7

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THE BALUA‘ STELA—usually dated to the end of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 B.C.E.)—
depicts a king or chieftain flanked by a god on the left and a goddess on the right. Both gods
appear in Egyptian-style attire, while the central figure wears a Shasu headdress, an emblem
typically used in Egyptian iconography to denote pastoral peoples from Transjordan. The god—
possibly the Moabite god Chemosh—hands the central figure a scepter (divine right to rule).
Coming from the Iron Age site of Balua‘ in Jordan, the stela is about 6 feet tall and 3 feet wide and
includes several lines of undeciphered writing. Photo by Makeandtoss, CC0 1.0 Universal, via
Wikimedia Commons.

These and other Moabite inscriptions, monumental architecture and royal sculpture indicate a
Moabite kingdom spanning territory both north and south of the Arnon River.

Like the Ammonites, the Moabites developed their own sculptural forms drawing on broader
ancient Near Eastern artistic traditions, portraying divine support of royal power. Monumental
basalt sculpture from the land of Moab includes several impressive examples, most prominently
the stela from the Iron Age site of Balua‘, which guarded southern access to the Arnon River
from the Kerak Plateau.

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The Balua‘ Stela (which recent scholarship has dated variously between 1400 and 800 B.C.E.)
displays a section of undeciphered writing and a relief scene showing an Egyptian-style god and
goddess conferring emblems of authority on a human leader wearing a Shasu headdress, an
emblem recognized from Egyptian artistic depictions.

The Egyptian term Shasu refers to mobile pastoral peoples with a kin-based social and political
structure, often in connection with southern Transjordan in Egyptian texts of the 19th Dynasty
(13th–early 12th centuries B.C.E.). 8 At the Arnon River crossing, the Balua‘ Stele reflects a
vision of divinely sanctioned kingship on the basis of tribal political authority, suggesting
formative dynamics for the Iron Age II Kingdom of Moab.

The Shihan (or Rujm el-Abd) relief discovered just a few miles northwest of Balau‘ shows a
warrior figure wielding a spear and reflects Egyptian artistic motifs. 9 A basalt orthostat from
Kerak in the form of a lion resembles Neo-Hittite and Aramean palace and temple traditions in
Syria. 10

Recent archaeological discoveries from Moab have added important religious evidence for the
Iron Age. These include a plethora of limestone altars from the fortified outpost of Khirbat al-
Mudayna (Mudeiniyeh). 11 A small temple just inside the town’s six-chambered fortified gate
yielded three limestone altars ranging in height from c. 19.5 to 37.5 inches, one of which is a
rectangular shaft altar for pouring libations (as indicated by a drain hole). 12

The archaeological site Khirbat ‘Aṭaruz about 7 miles east of the Dead Sea has been identified
with Ataroth, which is mentioned in the Mesha Stele as a town of Israelite Gad that the king of
Moab conquered and from which he pillaged an important cultic item (“the altar hearth [?] of its
DWD”).

Excavations at ‘Aṭaruz have revealed an elaborate temple complex yielding spectacular cultic
artifacts, including a ceramic bull statue and a multi-story shrine model with male figurines
attached. 13 The ‘Aṭaruz temple complex has also yielded a cylindrical sculpted stone pedestal,
ostensibly part of an altar or other cultic object, bearing an inscription dated to the ninth century
B.C.E. 14

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EDOM

Like Moab, Edom figures primarily as a territorial designation in Late Bronze Age Egyptian
texts and in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Genesis 32:4; 1 Kings 11:14–16). As reflected in biblical
etiologies connecting to Esau (Genesis 25:25, 30), Edom refers to the mountainous “red” land of
sandstone, granite and soil east of the Arabah, extending south of the Zered (modern Wadi Hasa)
to the Gulf of Aqaba. Along with the closely associated place-name Seir (cf. Genesis 36:8–9,
21), Edom appears in Egyptian texts with frequent associations to the tent-dwelling mobile
pastoralists designated Shasu. 15 These Egyptian references to Edom’s Shasu peoples may
provide the textual background for the kin-based population known from the enormous cemetery
labeled Wadi Fidan 40 at the entrance to the Faynan wadi system in the northeast Arabah. 16

The god Qaus/Qos is by far the most frequently invoked deity in Edomite personal names from
various inscriptions. The role of Qos as Edom’s leading deity receives further corroboration from
the names of Edomite kings mentioned in Assyrian sources. 17 A royal seal impression of “Qaus-
ga[bri], King of E[dom]” (qws g[br]/ mlk ’[dm]) was recovered from a palace on Umm el-Biyara
in Petra. 18 The deity’s name was also found on a vessel sherd from Busayra (Buseira), whose
impressive architecture indicates the site’s status as the Edomite royal city by the late eighth
century B.C.E. 19 At Tell el-Kheleifeh near the Gulf of Aqaba shore, multiple impressions come
from the seal of a royal official, “Qos‘anal, servant of the king” (qws‘nl/ ‘bd hmlk,). 20

The Hebrew Bible’s mysterious silence regarding Qos, or any Edomite deity for that matter, 21
along with Yahweh’s associations with the territory of Edom and its vicinity in biblical poetry
(Judges 5:4; Habakkuk 3:3, 7) and the biblical traditions of Edom’s “brotherhood,” may reflect a
possible close connection—if not an original equation—between Israelite Yahweh and Edomite
Qos.

The best-preserved candidates for Edomite worship places have been excavated not in Edom
proper but west of the Arabah in the southeastern Negev, where Qos is invoked during the late
seventh or early sixth century B.C.E., in an epistolary blessing in the Ḥorvat ‘Uza ostracon
inscription and in dedication inscriptions engraved on vessel rims at the sanctuary site of Ḥorvat
Qitmit. 22 It is at Qitmit that some scholars recognize the most abundant assemblage of evidence
for Edomite worship, including Edomite pottery, ceramic cylindrical statuettes and stands,

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figurines and cultic vessels. 23 At Ein Hazeva in the northwest Arabah, a similar assemblage of
ceramic statues and other objects was excavated from a pit outside the Iron II fortress. 24
Renewed excavations at Busayra (Buseira) by Benjamin W. Porter hold promise for new
discoveries on religion in Edom proper.

How do these kingdoms compare with Israel and Judah on the other side of the Jordan River? As
we have seen, Israel, Judah and these Transjordanian kingdoms are similar in many respects.
Each had its own national god. Each was a tribal kingdom. Each battled against the others over
territory and boundaries. Israel even claimed territory east of the Jordan.

Yet from Israel we do not have a single piece of monumental sculpture comparable to those from
Ammon and Moab. When it comes to inscriptions, the disparity is even more dramatic. The great
inscriptions confirming the history (even the very existence) of Israel and Judah and shedding
light on national (and international) religious life come from kings and kingdoms other than
Judah and Israel—most important, the Mesha Stele, the Tel Dan Stele and the Balaam inscription
from Deir ‘Alla. Go to the archaeological section of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. There is not
a single piece of impressive Iron Age sculpture from Judah or Israel. Even more surprising—not
a single lengthy Hebrew inscription from this period exists.

Why is this the case? Is there some cultural reason that Israel has not produced great visual Iron
Age art? And why aren’t there long inscriptions? Is it simply the luck of the archaeological
draw? Or, is there some deeper cultural or historical distinction between the kingdoms west and
east of the Jordan?

Could it have something to do with the fact that we also have no Ammonite, Moabite or Edomite
Bible?

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Notes

“The Egyptianizing of Canaan”

1
James A. Weinstein, “The Egyptian Empire in Palestine: A Reassessment,” Bulletin of the American Schools of
Oriental Research 241 (1981), pp. 1–28.
2
Mary W. Helms, Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical
Distance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 137–144.
3
Martin Millett, The Romanization of Britain: An Essay in Archaeological Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1990).
4
Millett, Romanization, pp. 69–85, 91–99.
5
EA 289. The abbreviation EA refers to the numbering of the Amarna letters in J. A. Knudtzon, Die El-Amarna-
Tafeln (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1915).
6
Frances W. James and Patrick E. McGovern, The Late Bronze Egyptian Garrison at Beth Shan: A Study of Levels
VII and VIII (Philadelphia: Univ. Museum, 1993) and James, The Iron Age at Beth Shan: A Study of Levels VI–
IV (Philadelphia: Univ. Museum, 1966).
7
The statue and stelae had been moved from their original locations and set up in a room of one of Beth-Shean’s
later temples.
8
Trude K. Dothan, “Deir el-Balah: The Final Campaign,” National Geographic Research 1 (1985), pp. 32–43.
9
EA 294. See n. 5.
10
J. Kaplan, “Jaffa’s History Revealed by the Spade,” Archaeology 17 (1964), pp. 270–276.
11
EA 289, 196. See n. 5.
12
Much of the scholarly confusion about resident governors seems to have arisen from efforts to correlate Akkadian
titles with pharaonic officials. In particular, the occurrence of the Akkadian title “governor” in international
correspondence like the Amarna letters has led some scholars to propose the existence of resident governors whose
Egyptian title was either “overseer of northern lands” (see Hans Wolfgang Helck, Die Beziehungen Agyptens zu
Vorderasien im. 3. und 2. Jahrtausend [Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1971], pp. 250–251) or “royal envoy.” See E.
Edel, “Weitere Briefe aus der Heiratskorrespondenz Ramses’ II. KUB III 37 + KBo I 17 und KUB III 57,”
in Geschichte und Altes Testament, ed. G. Ebeling (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1953), p. 56. More recently, scholars
have recognized that the use of Akkadian titles indicates only that the scribes were unaware of or indifferent to the
officials’ Egyptian titles. (See Michel Valloggia, Recherche sur les “messagers” (wpwtyw) dans les sources
Égyptienne profanes [Paris: Librairie Droz, 1976], p. 240; Donald Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient
Times [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], p. 201.)

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13
Redford, Egypt, p. 201.
14
William F. Albright, “A Prince of Taanach in the Fifteen Century B.C.,” Bulletin of the American Schools of
Oriental Research 94 (1944), pp. 12–27.
15
Kurt Heinrich Sethe, Urkunden IV (18. Dynastie) (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs’sche, 1903–1958), p. 1508.
16
R.D. Whitehouse and J.B. Wilkins, “Greeks and Natives in South-east Italy: Approaches to the Archaeological
Evidence,” pp. 102–126 in Centre and Periphery: Comparative Studies in Archaeology, ed. Timothy C. Champion
(London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
17
Tryggve N.D. Mettinger, Solomonic State Officials (Lund: Gleerup, 1971).

“Warriors of Hatti”
1
Biblical references to the Hittites include: Genesis 15:20, 23:3–20, 25:9–10, 26:34, 27:46, 36:2, 49:29–32, 50:13;
Exodus 3:8, 17, 13:5, 23:23, 28, 33:2, 34:11; Numbers 13:29; Deuteronomy 7:1, 20:17; Joshua 1:4, 3:10, 9:1, 11:3,
12:8, 24:11; Judges 1:26, 3:5; 1 Samuel 26:6; 2 Samuel 11:3–24, 12:9–10, 23:39, 24:6; 1 Kings 9:20, 10:29, 11:1,
15:5; 2 Kings 7:6; 1 Chronicles 11:41; 2 Chronicles 1:17, 8:7; Ezra 9:1; Nehemiah 9:8; and Ezekiel 16:3, 45.
2
Ahmet Ünal, Ahmet Ertekin and Ismet Ediz, “The Hittite Sword from Bogazköy-Hattusa, Found 1991, and its
Akkadian Inscription,” Müze 4 (1991), pp. 46–52; Ahmet Ertekin and Ismet Ediz, “The Unique Sword from
Bogazköy/Hattusa,” in Aspects of Art and Iconography: Anatolia and Its Neighbors. Studies in Honor of Nimet
Özgüç, Machteld J. Mellink, Edith Porada, and Tahsin Özgüç, eds. (Ankara, 1993), pp. 719–725.
3
Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier, “The Mycenaeans in Western Anatolia and the Problem of the Origins of the Sea
Peoples,” in Mediterranean Peoples in Transition: Thirteenth to Early Tenth Centuries B.C.E., Seymour Gitin,
Amihai Mazar and Ephraim Stern, eds. (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1998), pp. 17–65.
4
To Bryce’s bibliographic references to the sword should be added the following articles, which appeared while
Bryce’s book was in press: Eric H. Cline, “Assuwa and the Achaeans: The ‘Mycenaean’ Sword at Hattusas and its
Possible Implications,” Annual of the British School at Athens 91 (1996), pp. 137–151 and “Achilles in Anatolia:
Myth, History, and the Assuwa Rebellion,” in Crossing Boundaries and Linking Horizons: Studies in Honor of
Michael Astour on His 80th Birthday, Gordon D. Young, Mark W. Chavalas, and Richard E. Averbeck, eds.
(Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 1997), pp. 189–210.

“Who Were the Assyrians?”

1
Christopher B. Hays, Hidden Riches: A Sourcebook for the Comparative Study of the Hebrew Bible and Ancient
Near East (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), pp. 161–189.

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“Nebuchadnezzar & Solomon”

1
J.A. Brinkman, Prelude to Empire: Babylonian Society and Politics, 747–626 B.C. Occasional Publications of the
Babylonian Fund, 7 (Philadelphia: University Museum, 1984); Manfried Dietrich, Die Aramäer Südbabyloniens in
der Sargonidenzeit (700–648) AOAT 7 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Butzon and Bercker Kevelaer, 1970); and Grant
Frame, Babylonia 689–627 B.C.: A Political History (Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut,
1992).
2
Jonas Greenfield, “Babylonian-Aramaic Relationship,” in H.J. Nissen and J. Renger, eds., Mesopotamien und seine
Nachbarn: Politische und kulturelle Wechselbeziehungen im Alten Vorderasien vom 4. bis 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr.,
Berliner Beiträge zum Vorderen Orient, 1 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1982), pp. 471–482.
3
Frame, Babylonia, p. 34, and Brinkman, Prelude, p. 11. Brinkman and Frame have also demonstrated how many of
the important larger kin groups came to dominate the civil and religious hierarchy of cities in northern Babylonia
(J.A. Brinkman, “Babylonia under the Assyrian Empire, 745–627 B.C.” in M.T. Larsen, ed., Power and
Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires [Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1979], pp. 237–238, and G.
Frame, “The ‘First Families’ of Borsippa during the Early Neo-Babylonian Period,” JCS 36 [1984], pp. 67–80).
4
Brinkman, “Babylonia under the Assyrian Empire, 745–627 B.C.,” p. 226.
5
Brinkman, A Political History of Post-Kassite Babylonia (Biblical Institute Press, 1968), pp. 266–267, 273–275.
6
On the mistaken identity of Adad-apla-iddina, a ruler of Babylonia, as an Aramean, see C. B. F. Walker,
“Babylonian Chronicle 25: A Chronicle of the Kassite and Isin II Dynasties,” in G. van Driel, ed. Zikir šumim:
Assyriological Studies Presented to F. R. Kraus on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (Leiden, 1982), pp. 414–
415.
7
On the evidence for Uruk, see Bill T. Arnold, “Babylonian Letters from the Kuyunjik Collection: Seventh Century
Uruk in Light of New Epistolary Evidence,” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew Union College, 1985).
8
Brinkman, Prelude, p. 123.
9
Israel Finkelstein, “The Land of Ephraim Survey 1980–1987: Preliminary Report,” Tel Aviv 15–16 (1988–1989), p.
167.
10
Oded Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel: The Evidence from Archaeology and the Bible (Winona Lake, IN:
Eisenbrauns, 1987).
11
Robert P. Gordon, “Who Made the Kingmaker? Reflections on Samuel and the Institution of the Monarchy,” in
A.R. Millard, J.K. Hoffmeier and D.W. Baker, eds., Faith, Tradition, and History: Old Testament Historiography in
Its Near Eastern Context (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1994), pp. 257–260, and Israel Finkelstein, “The
Emergence of the Monarchy in Israel: The Environmental and Socio-Economic Aspects,” JSOT 44 (1989), pp. 59–
61, 63.

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12
The evidence is not unambiguous regarding the ethnic identity of the Neo-Babylonian kings. Though the Bible
and classical authors designate this dynasty as “Chaldean,” the term in these sources is synonymous for
“Babylonian” and may not denote ethnic specificity. We still have no irrefutable proof, for example, that
Nabopolassar was himself a Chaldean, and in this sense, the term is strictly inappropriate when referring to the Neo-
Babylonian empire. See Bill T. Arnold, “Who Were the Babylonians?” SBLABS (Atlanta: Society of Biblical
Literature, 2004), p. 91.
13
M.A. Dandamayev, “The Neo-Babylonian Archives,” in K.R. Veenhof, ed., Cuneiform Archives and
Libraries (Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut, 1986), p. 273; A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient
Mesopotamia (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1977), pp. 94–95.
14
Dandamayev, “Neo-Babylonian Archives,” p. 274; and David B. Weisberg, Texts from the Time of
Nebuchadnezzar, Yale Oriental Series, 17 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980).
15
Dandamayev, “Neo-Babylonian Archives,” pp. 275–276.
16
Bill T. Arnold, “The Neo-Babylonian Chronicle Series” in M.W. Chavalas, ed., The Ancient Near East: Historical
Sources in Translation (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 407–426.
17
Grayson, Chronicles, p. 8; and Bill T. Arnold, “The Weidner Chronicle and the Idea of History in Israel and
Mesopotamia,” in Millard, Hoffmeier, and Baker, eds., Faith, Tradition, and History, pp. 129–148.
18
A.R. George, “Review of K.R. Veenhof (ed.), Cuneiform Archives and Libraries,” JNES 52.4 (1993), p. 303; and
see “Excavations in Iraq, 1985–86: Sippar (Abu Habba),” Iraq 49 (1987), pp. 248–249, and photograph at pl. 47.
19
See Lionel Casson, “The World’s First Museum and the World’s First Archaeologists,” BAR, January/February
1979.
20
Indeed, anthropological studies support the correlation between the rise of bureaucratic states and the use of
writing in general (Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society [Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ., 1986], pp. 89–99).
21
To borrow an expression from William W. Hallo (“The Limits of Skepticism,” JAOS 110.2 [1990], pp. 187–199).

“Making (Up) History”

1
Excerpted from Darius, Bisitun, §12–14; Darius claimed that Cambyses killed his own brother in DB §10.
Translations from the Old Persian are adapted from R.G. Kent, Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon (New Haven,
1953); and R. Schmitt, Bisitun: Old Persian Text (London, 1991). Subsequent references to the Bisitun Inscription
will be cited in the text, abbreviated “DB” with the paragraph (§) number. Parts of this article are adapted from the
author’s “Cyrus and the Achaemenids,” published in Iran 42 (2004), 91–102.
2
See Book 3 of Herodotus’s History.
3
See, for example, P. Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, trans. P. Daniels (Winona

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Lake: Indiana, 2002), p. 111; and A. Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East c. 3000–300 BC (London, 1995), vol. 2, p. 665.
4
Darius also took other measures to secure his legitimacy, such as marrying Cyrus’s daughters Atossa and Artystone
(Herodotus, History 3.88). This ensured that all later Achaemenid kings—indeed all the kings who ruled the Persian
empire, save Darius himself—could trace their bloodline directly to Cyrus the Great.
5
See Briant, Persian Empire, pp. 111, 138.
6
For an overview of archaeological evidence for Anshan and the problems of interpretation associated with this site,
see Yeki bud, yeki nabud: Essays on the Archaeology of Iran in Honor of William M. Sumner, ed. N. Miller and K.
Abdi (Los Angeles, 2003), especially the articles by T.C. Young, David Stronach, and R. Boucharlat (Chapters 22–
24).
7
See David Stronach, Pasargadae. A report on the excavations conducted by the British Institute of Persian Studies
from 1961 to 1963 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 95–97; and “On the Genesis of the Old Persian Cuneiform Script,”
in Contribution à l’histoire de l’Iran: mélanges offerts à Jean Perrot, ed. F. Vallat (Paris, 1990), pp. 195–203.
8
Darius’s claim to have created the Old Persian script has been a contentious issue in modern scholarship, but most
scholars accept Darius’s claim. See Briant, Persian Empire, pp. 111, 138; and Stronach, “Darius at Pasargadae: A
Neglected Source for the History of Early Persia,” Topoi: Orient-Occident, Suppl. 1 (Lyon, 1997), pp. 351–363.
9
For discussion and references, see Elizabeth Carter, “Bridging the gap between the Elamites and the Persians in
Southeastern Khuzistan,” Achaemenid History VIII: Continuity and Change, ed. H. Sancisi-Weerdenburg, A. Kuhrt,
and Margaret Root (Leiden, 1994), pp. 65–95.
10
Column iii, lines 22–24. After A.K. Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles, Texts from Cuneiform
Sources (Locust Valley, NY, 1975), vol. 5, pp. 110–111 and J.-J. Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles, SBL
Writings from the Ancient World (Atlanta, 2004), pp. 238–239.
11
Darius, Susa f §3b and Xerxes, Persepolis f §3; see Kent, Old Persian, pp. 144 and 150; and Schmitt, The Old
Persian Inscriptions of Naqsh-i Rustam and Persepolis (London, 2000), p. 84.
12
For DNc (Naqsh-i Rustam), see Kent, Old Persian, p. 140; and Schmitt, Old Persian Inscriptions, p. 45 and plate
22a.
13
Aelian, Varia Historia XII.43, identified Darius as a “quiver-bearer” (pharetrophoros) for Cyrus.
14
(DNa §2) and Susa (DSe §2) and of Xerxes at Persepolis (XPh §2). See Kent, Old Persian, pp. 138 and 142; and
Schmitt, Old Persian Inscriptions, pp. 25 and 30 (DNa §2).
15
See Briant, Persian Empire, pp. 619 and 685–686.

“Texts from Ugarit Solve Biblical Puzzles”

1
See Shmuel Aḥituv, Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period, trans.
Anson F. Rainey (Jerusalem: Carta, 2008), pp. 249–252.

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2
The Hebrew text adds “Nor steppes of offerings!” This makes no sense. Slight emendation of the Hebrew letters
(sh-d-y t-r-w-m-t) following the Ugaritic (to sh-r-’ t-h-m-w-t) produces a perfect line: “No welling up of the watery-
deeps!” In a footnote, the JPS translation suggests this emendation on the basis of the Ugaritic parallel. With this
emendation, the Hebrew text follows the Ugaritic parallel exactly, invoking both the rain from the heavens and the
springs from the deep.
3
In the Hebrew text referred to below, the Israelite God is called Elohim. The text goes on to say, however, Yah,
short for Yahweh, is his name (Psalm 68:4). See also verses 18 and 20, where the name YHWH is used. Compare
also verse 1 with Numbers 10:35—in the latter of these two almost identical verses, YHWH stands in place of
Elohim.
4
In old translations we often find the rendering “who rides through the desert.” Hebrew ‘arava is a term for
“desert.” However, even before the discovery of Ugaritic, some translated “rider of the skies,” by comparing
verses 33–34 and verses from elsewhere. We now know that the Hebrew term ‘aravot refers not to “deserts” but to
clouds, like the cognate Ugaritic term.

“Piece by Piece: Exploring the Origins of the Philistines”

1
The ceramic connections have been developed in recent times with extraordinary precision in Penelope
Mountjoy, Decorated Pottery in Cyprus and Philistia in the 12th Century BC: Cypriot IIIC and Philistines IIIC, vol.
1 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2018).
2
Lawrence E. Stager, “The Impact of the Sea Peoples (1185–1150 BCE),” in Thomas E. Levy, ed., The
Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land (New York: Facts on File, 1995), pp. 332–348; see also Assaf Yasur-
Landau, The Philistines and the Aegean Migration at the End of the Late Bronze Age (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 2010), pp. 9–33.
3
Guy D. Middleton, “Telling Stories: The Mycenaean Origins of the Philistines,” Oxford Journal of
Archaeology 34.1 (2015), pp. 45–65; Ido Koch, “On Philistines and Early Israelite Kings: Memories and
Perceptions,” in Joachim J. Krause, Omer Sergi, and Kristin Weingart, eds., Saul, Benjamin, and the Emergence of
Monarchy in Israel: Biblical and Archaeological Perspectives (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020), pp. 7–14.
4
Michal Feldman et al., “Ancient DNA Sheds Light on the Genetic Origin of the Early Iron Age
Philistines,” Science Advances 5 (July 2019), pp. 1–10.
5
See, e.g., Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman, “Migration, Hybridization, and Resistance: Identity Dynamics in
the Early Iron Age Southern Levant,” in A. Bernard Knapp and Peter van Dommelen, eds., Hybridisation and
Cultural Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 257–261.
6
Shelley Wachsmann, Aegeans in the Theban Tombs (Leuven: Peeters, 1987); Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year
Civilization Collapsed (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 44–49.

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7
See, e.g., Homer, Iliad 1.1–25; Seymour Gitin, Trude Dothan, and Joseph Naveh, “A Royal Dedicatory Inscription
from Ekron,” Israel Exploration Journal 47.1–2 (1997), p. 11.

“Gods and Kingdoms East of the Jordan”

1
Rudolph H. Dornemann, “The Beginning of the Iron Age in Transjordan,” Studies in the History and Archaeology
of Jordan 1 (1982), pp. 135–140; F. Zayadine, J.-B. Humbert and M. Najjar, “The 1988 Excavations on the Citadel
of Amman—Lower Terrace, Area A,” Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 33 (1989), pp. 357–363
and plates 50–52; Ahmed Momani and Anthi Koutsoukou, “The 1993 Excavations,” in A. Koutsoukou et al., eds.,
The Great Temple of Amman: The Excavations (Amman: American Center of Oriental Research, 1997), pp. 157–
171; Sahar Mansour, “Preliminary Report of the Excavations at Jabal al-Qal‘a (Lower Terrace): The Iron Age
Walls,” Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 46 (2002), pp. 141–150.
2
Joel S. Burnett, “Egyptianizing Elements in Ammorite Stone Statuary: The Atef Crown and Lotus,” in Oskar
Kaelin, ed., 9 ICAANE: Proceedings of the 9th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East
(June 9–13, 2014, University of Basil), vol. 1, Traveling Images (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2016), pp. 57–71.
3
Joel S. Burnett and Romel Gharib, “An Iron Age Basalt Statue from the Amman Theatre Area,” Annual of the
Department of Antiquities of Jordan 58 (2014).
4
The name of Mesha’s father in line 1 is partially restored from the Kerak Inscription fragment, another roughly
contemporary monumental inscription on basalt that preserves the last part of a name ]šyt as king of Moab.
5
This geographically “segmented” kingdom model represented by Moab has been identified by Bruce Routledge,
Moab in the Iron Age: Hegemony, Polity, Archaeology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). For
the Egyptian texts of Ramses II mentioning Moab, see Kenneth A. Kitchen, “The Egyptian Evidence on Ancient
Jordan,” in P. Bienkowski, ed., Early Edom and Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan
(Sheffield: Collis, 1992), pp. 27–28.
6
Routledge, Moab in the Iron Age, p. 150.
7
The most recent study suggests that the black stone may be granodiorite, rather than basalt, and may have once
belonged to a statue. See Heather Dana Davis Parker and Ashley Fiutko Arico, “A Moabite-Inscribed Statue
Fragment from Kerak: Egyptian Parallels,” BASOR 373 (May 2015), pp. 105–120.
8
Kitchen, “Egyptian Evidence,” pp. 26–27.
9
Routledge, Moab in the Iron Age, pp. 178–179; Fawzi Zayadine, “Sculpture in Ancient Jordan: Treasures from an
Ancient Land,” in P. Bienkowski, ed., Early Edom and Moab: The Beginning of the Iron Age in Southern Jordan
(Sheffield: Collis, 1992), pp. 35–36.
10
Routledge, Moab in the Iron Age, p. 182.
11
P.M. Michèle Daviau, “Stone Altars Large and Small: The Iron Age Altars from Hirbet el-Mudēyine (Jordan),” in
S. Bickel et al., eds., Bilder als Quellen/Images as Sources: Studies on Ancient Near Eastern Artefacts and the Bible

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Inspired by the Work of Othmar Keel, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis Special Volume (Fribourg/Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), pp. 125–150.
12
P.M. Michèle Daviau and Margreet Steiner, “A Moabite Sanctuary at Khirbat Al-Mudayna,” Bulletin of the
American Schools of Oriental Research 320 (2000), pp. 1–21, especially pp. 8–14; Paul E. Dion and P.M. Michèle
Daviau, “An Inscribed Incense Altar of Iron Age II at Hirbet el-Mudēyine (Jordan),” Zeitschrift des Deutschen
Palästina-Vereins 116 (2000), pp. 1–13.
13
Chang-Ho Ji, “The Early Iron Age II Temple at Hirbet ’Aṭārūs and Its Architecture and Selected Cultic Objects,”
in Jens Kamlah, ed., Temple Building and Temple Cult: Architecture and Cultic Paraphernalia of Temples in the
Levant (2.–1. Mill. B.C.E.), Abhandlungen des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 41 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012),
203–222 and plates 46–49.
14
Chang-Ho Ji, “Architectural and Stratigraphic Context of the ‘Ataruz Inscription Column” (Presentation at the
ASOR Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, November 16, 2012); Christopher A. Rollston, “The New ‘Ataruz
Inscription: Late Ninth Century Epigraphic Evidence for the Moabite Scribal Apparatus” (Presentations at the
ASOR Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, November 16, 2012).
15
Kitchen, “Egyptian Evidence,” pp. 26–27.
16
Thomas E. Levy, Mohammad Najjar, and Ben-Yosef, New Insights into the Iron Age Archaeology of Edom,
Southern Jordan, 2 vols. (Los Angeles: The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2014).
17
Qausmalak by Tiglath-pileser III (c. 734 B.C.E.) and Qausgabri by Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal (early seventh
century B.C.E.).
18
See the cautious comments of David Vanderhooft, “The Edomite Dialect and Script: A Review of the Evidence,”
in Diana Vikander Edelman, ed., You Shall Not Abhor an Edomite for He Is Your Brother: Edom and Seir in History
and Tradition, Archaeology and Biblical Studies 3 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), p. 151. Qausgabri of Edom is
named among those supplying labor and materials for Esarhaddon’s building projects in Nineveh (c. 673 B.C.E.;
ANET 291) and providing assistance in Ashurbanipal’s wars against Egypt (beginning 669 or 667 B.C.E.; ANET
294).
19
Piotr Bienkowski, Crystal Bennett and Marta Balla, Busayra: Excavations by Crystal M. Bennett 1971–1980,
Monographs in Archaeology 13 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002).
20
Vanderhooft, “The Edomite Dialect and Script,” p. 153.
21
The only exception is the personal name Barqos, “Qos gleamed forth” (Ezra 2:53; Nehemiah 7:55). The name
Kushaiah (1 Chronicles 15:17) has the variant form Kishi in 1 Chronicles 6:29 (6:44, English) and in any case
involves a spelling with shin that is never used for Qos in other texts. See E.A. Knauf, “Qôs,” in Karel van der
Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst, eds., Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 2nd ed.
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 674.

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22
Itzhaq Beit-Arieh and B. Cresson, “An Edomite Ostracon from Horvat ‘Uza,” Tel Aviv 12 (1985), pp. 96–100;
Itzhaq Beit-Arieh, Horvat Qitmit: An Edomite Shrine in the Biblical Negev, Monograph Series of the Sonia and
Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology 11 (Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, 1995).
23
Beit-Arieh, “An Edomite Ostracon”; J. Andrew Dearman, “Edomite Religion: A Survey and an Examination of
Some Recent Contributions,” in Diana Vikander Edelman, ed., You Shall Not Abhor an Edomite for He Is Your
Brother, pp. 121–131; Pirhiya Beck, “Horvat Qitmit Revisited via ‘En Hazeva,” Tel Aviv 23 (1996), pp. 102–114;
André Lemaire, “Edom and the Edomites,” in André Lemaire and Baruch Halpern, eds., The Books of the Kings:
Sources, Compositions, Historiography and Reception, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 129 (Leiden/Boston:
Brill, 2010), pp. 225–243.
24
Rudolph Cohen and Yigal Yisrael, “The Iron Age Fortresses at En Haseva,” The Biblical Archaeologist 58
(1995), pp. 223–235; P.M. Michèle Daviau, “Diversity in the Cultic Setting: Temples and Shrines in Central Jordan
and the Negev,” in Jens Kamlah, ed., Temple Building and Temple Cult: Architecture and Cultic Paraphernalia of
Temples in the Levant (2.–1. Mill. B.C.E.), Abhandlungen des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 41 (Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz Verlag, 2012), pp. 435–458 and plates 63–64.

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