Today, I had the opportunity to attend two very interesting meetings.
The first one was in Jerusalem and was organized by the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Hebrew University, and was one of series of seminars on war in antiquity. Today’s session dealt with the Iron, Persian and Hellenistic periods (see here for the Hebrew abstracts). I only managed to attend the first session, but I heard two very interesting lectures.
The first one was by Rona Avissar from the Safi project, who is doing a PhD on archaeological evidence of childhood in Bronze and Iron Age Land of Israel. She discussed the evidence of children during the siege of cities, as seen in the Egyptian reliefs. She suggested a new interpretation which attempts to understand this as reflecting the Egyptians attempting to justify taking the children prisoner.
The 2nd lecture was a fascinating presentation by Yuval Peleg and Naftali Isaac on a Iron Age tomb from a site near Samaria in which the skeleton of a man who had been mutilated, apparently by the Assyrians who conquired the northern kingdom of Israel was found. This apparently is the first physical evidence of the Assyrian torture of prisoners, well-known from the Assyrian documents and reliefs. A brief report on this find already appeared in Qadmoniot, but this was the first public presentation of the find. This is a truly fascinating (though quite grisly) find! The man had been decapitated, had lost his hand, and apparently an ear. Other signs of torture were evident as well!!!
Later on in the afternoon, the crowd headed to Tel Aviv, for an afternoon/evening in honour of Prof. Nadav Naaman’s retirement. There were two sessions: at the first Ch. Uehlinger (on Israel in the Merneptah stela and reliefs), I. Finkelstein (on 14C dating of the entire Iron Age - where the “Aramean” destruction at Safi got a very honorable mention as an important datum line for the 2nd half of the 9th century BCE) and T. Ornan (on the aspects of Israelite iconography) spoke; This was followed by a session at which T. Roemer (on Moses outside of the Pentateuch), E. Ben-Zvi (on ideology of Yehud), R. Albertz (on a suggested pre-exilic, post-Josianic dating of the Deut. legislation) and finally Nadav himself (on the archaeological and historical background of the storey Nabot’s vineyard) spoke. All in all, a very facinating day! Aren
