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Displaying 1 - 20 of 83 results
Has David Been Found in Egypt?
A leading Egyptologist has recently suggested that the name of the Biblical king David may appear in a tenth-century B.C.E. Egyptian inscription. If correct, this mention of David dates a hundred years earlier than the mention of the “House...
Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 1999
Wish Upon a Stone
Discovering the idolatry of the even maskit
Leviticus bans the Israelites from bowing upon a maskit stone. But what is a maskit? A recently deciphered Assyrian inscription may hold the key to identifying this mysterious prohibited object.
Bible Review, October 1999
King Hezekiah’s Seal Bears Phoenician Imagery
Not long ago, a clay impression of the seal of a Hebrew king came to light for the first time: The seal of ’Ahaz, king of Judah from about 734 to 715 B.C.E., had been pressed into a...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 1999
Seal of Ba‘alis Surfaces
Ammonite king plotted murder of Judahite governor
Just as archaeological finds flesh out Israelite history, so they also tell us about Israel’s neighbors and sometime enemies. Such is the case with the Ammonites, a people who lived east of the Jordan and fought in league with the Philistines...
Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 1999
Bought on the Market
A gallery
In putting together this issue’s article on the Antiquities Problem (“The Great MFA Exposé”), our thoughts turned to unprovenanced objects that can now be studied by scholars because they were bought on the market. If these important remnants...
Archaeology Odyssey, May/June 1999
The Lowdown on the Riffraff
Do these obscure figures preserve a memory of a historical Exodus?
When the Israelites fled Egypt, they were accompanied by a slew of dubious characters—an odd detail that may lend credibility to the biblical account.
Bible Review, August 1999
Who Really Built the Pyramids?
A surprising discovery lay buried in the sands near the Giza pyramids—a cemetery containing tombs of the workers.
History has not been kind to some of us. We typically refer, for instance, to the Great Pyramid of Giza, built by the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu during the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2575–2465 B.C...
Archaeology Odyssey, May/June 1999
Jerusalem Under Siege
Did Sennacherib attack twice?
Now that so much attention is being focused on the new excavations around the Gihon Spring and Hezekiah’s Tunnel—which was built as a defense against a siege by the Assyrian leader Sennacherib—it may be time to look at the siege itself...
Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 1999
The Image Destroyers
Only non-sacred images were destroyed in eighth-century Palestine
A curious episode in the history of iconoclasm—the destruction of sacred images—took place in eighth-century Palestine (present-day Israel and Jordan). The region’s Byzantine churches were often decorated with colorful mosaic pavements,...
Archaeology Odyssey, November/December 1999
Bringing Collectors (and Their Collections) Out of Hiding
At the end of the late Nahman Avigad’s magisterial Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Sealsa appear a number of indices and lists that are not only helpful to scholars but also interesting to thumb through at odd moments. Leafing through the...
Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 1999
Biran at Ninety
The excavator of Dan recalls growing up in pre-state Israel, great archaeologists he’s known and why he’s a Biblical archaeologist
On October 23, 1999, Avraham Biran, director of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, will celebrate his 90th birthday. He will also...
Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 1999
Sons of God
The ideology of Assyrian kingship
The impact of Mesopotamian religious thought on the evolution of other ancient religious and philosophical thought has never been seriously investigated. What follows are my initial...
Archaeology Odyssey, November/December 1999
“Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land”
The economic roots of the Jubilee
According to biblical law, every 50 years a Jubilee year is to be proclaimed—debts are to be canceled, and property is to be returned to its original owner. How such a year could avoid...
Bible Review, February 1999
Caught Between the Great Powers
Judah picks a side … and loses
Rarely do Biblical texts and extra-Biblical materials supplement one another so well as those that describe the last two decades before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, which marked the end of the Judahite state in 586 B.C.E. As a...
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 1999
The Master from Apulia
Living in southeastern Italy during the late fourth century B.C., the Darius Painter decorated vases with scenes from Greek Mythology—sometimes inspired by Alexander the Great’s campaigns in the East.
The Darius Painter not only recreated the shimmering world of Greek myth on the surfaces of his vases; he also acted as a kind of journalist-bard, painting scenes of historical events as news came in from far-flung places. A Greek-speaker,...
Archaeology Odyssey, May/June 1999
BAS Publication Awards
Bible Review, December 1999
Sacred Geometry: Unlocking the Secret of the Temple Mount, Part 2
We have already established the location of the Herodian Temple in Jerusalem and the altar that once stood in front of it (see the previous installment of this article in “Sacred Geometry: Unlocking the Secret of the Temple Mount, Part 1,”...
Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 1999
Everything You Ever Knew About Jerusalem Is Wrong (Well, Almost)
To say that you should throw out all your books on the archaeology of Jerusalem would be going too far, especially since I wrote two of them.1 But it is true that books on the archaeology of Jerusalem, including my own, now contain a lot of...
Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 1999
The Enigma of Hatshepsut
Egypt’s female pharaoh
The story of Hatshepsut is at first glance simple. She was the daughter of King Thutmose I, wife of King Thutmose II and mother of his daughter, Neferura. Upon her husband’s death (c. 1479 B.C.), she became queen regent of Egypt, ruling in place of the young heir who technically occupied the throne...
Archaeology Odyssey, Winter 1999
The Great MFA Exposé
But will it stop archaeological looting?
Last year, on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s, the lead story on the front page of The Boston Globe was not about President Clinton’s impending impeachment trial in the Senate, nor about Saddam Hussein’s effort to shoot...
Archaeology Odyssey, May/June 1999