The purpose of this study is to elucidate Ben Sira’s teaching on
friendship within the religious and cultural context of his time, in
view of the Hellenistic emphasis on philia (“friendship”). While
friendship is of contemporary interest, until recently there has been
little research into the understanding of friendship in Second Temple
Judaism. This study aims to fill the lacuna by focusing on the
apocryphal/deuterocanonical Wisdom of Ben Sira (Sirach). In fact, no
book of the Hebrew Bible says as much about friendship as does the
Wisdom of Ben Sira. The book contains a new preface by the author.
During the 8th-7th centuries BCE,
Israelite and Judahite society witnessed expanded applications of
writing as a communication technology. In particular, the epigraphic
record shows a stark rise in the usage of writing by state and military
bureaucracies to manage bodies and economic matters across time and
space. Previous scholarship has rarely considered how sectors of society
may have perceived writing’s expansion in these administrative
contexts. How did Israelites and Judahites think about and talk about
the increase in bureaucratic writing? This dissertation seeks to answer
this question by investigating administrative writing as depicted in
biblical literature. It assesses the historical value of three biblical
narratives where administrative documents mediate interaction between
sovereign figures and other sectors of society. The three narratives
include Gideon’s use of a name-list (Judg 8:14), David’s census (2 Sam
24:1-25), and Jehoash’s fiscal reforms (2 Kgs 12:4-16). Each narrative’s
portrayal of writing is situated in its literary and historical
contexts while also considered in the light of the epigraphic record,
other biblical depictions of writing, the anthropology of documents and
bureaucracy, and comparative ancient Near Eastern texts and artistic
depictions of bureaucratic writing. Typically, such biblical portrayals
of writing are valued in scholarship for what they might say about the
extent of literacy in ancient Israel and Judah. This dissertation
differs from previous scholarship by instead valuing these depictions
for what they might say about attitudes towards document-mediated
interaction. When the depictions of writing analyzed here are examined
with a full consideration of the evidence, it can be argued that they
reveal suspicious and anxious attitudes towards state-sponsored writing.
Ultimately, it is argued that such negative attitudes stemmed from West
Semitic political culture, which placed an emphasis on political action
rooted in negotiation and persuasion. In this sociopolitical landscape,
administrative documents could function as powerful symbols of coercion
and domination. The three biblical narratives examined here suggest
that writing’s increased usage in bureaucratic contexts of the 8th-7th
centuries BCE thus generated distrust among some factions who had
reservations about the growing centralization of the Judahite and
Israelite states.
This book focuses on the
expressions used to describe Job’s body in pain and on the reactions of
his friends to explore the moral and social world reflected in the
language and the values that their speeches betray.
A key contribution of this monograph is to highlight how the
perspective of illness as retribution is powerfully refuted in Job’s
speeches and, in particular, to show how this is achieved through
comedy. Comedy in Job is a powerful weapon used to expose and ridicule
the idea of retribution. Rejecting the approach of retrospective
diagnosis, this monograph carefully analyses the expression of pain in
Job focusing specifically on somatic language used in the deity attack
metaphors, in the deity surveillance metaphors and in the language
connected to the body and social status. These metaphors are analysed in
a comparative way using research from medical anthropology and
sociology which focuses on illness narratives and expressions of pain.
Job's Body and the Dramatised Comedy of Moralising will be
of interest to anyone working on the Book of Job, as well as those with
an interest in suffering and pain in the Hebrew Bible more broadly.
Stories of sexual violence are central to
the Hebrew Bible. This dissertation examines three of those stories
found in Gen 34, Gen 19 and Judg 19–20 through a feminist critical lens.
The analysis of the three stories focuses on the politics of sexual
violence at play in each of them. It argues that a primary function of
these stories is marking out social boundaries betweenvarious
communities. Furthermore, the dissertation traces the reception of the
three stories in early Jewish literature. It finds that early Jewish
writers recognized the boundary-setting function of the stories and
engaged with them in their own contexts to explore communal boundaries.
The dissertation demonstrates that the biblical and early Jewish
writers’ use of stories of sexual violence as boundary markers is rooted
in a larger phenomenon, historical and modern, of using stories of
sexual violence to mark out boundaries.
The Book of Esther tells the story of a plot to exterminate the Persian
Jews and their great struggle against their enemies. This study locates
these portrayals of violence in the Hellenistic epoch, in the Hasmonean
period (second century BCE). It compares the Hebrew text with the two
Greek Books of Esther, thus providing insights into a dynamic discourse
of violence in Hellenistic and Roman literature.
During the Late Bronze Age (c. 1640/1540 –
1100 BCE), the installation of Egyptian garrisons throughout the
southern Levant made Egypto-Levantine interaction the primary discursive
relationship defining cultural expression in the region. To date, focus
has predominantly been on how elites navigated the new imperial system,
a product of the types of data published by early modern excavations.
To expand upon this past work and assess Egypto-Levantine interaction
across a broader socio-economic spectrum, I utilize new data from the
garrison site of Jaffa (modern Israel) in a practice-based analysis of
garrison foodways. From archaeobotanical and ceramics data, I
demonstrate human entanglements that occurred at the site over the
course of more than three centuries of occupation, discussing how
interaction unfolded on a day-to-day basis in the imperial periphery.
Specifically, I articulate the presence of multiple communities of
practice with roots in both Egyptian and Levantine modes of doing. At no
point in the history of the site did one tradition dominate, but rather
garrison foodways were a complex product of acceptance, accommodation,
indifference, and rejection, resulting in a hybrid foodways inseparable
from the colonial system. The greater part of food preparation was
purely Levantine in character, likely signifying the entanglement of the
local population in the sustenance of the colonial system. And yet,
certain modifications to traditional Levantine foodways seem designed to
accommodate Egyptian tastes. Other elements of foodways—namely ceramics
production/consumption and beer production—attest to a complex cha�ne
op�ratoire with roots in Egypt, with their expression suggesting a
tension between top-down forces provisioning the garrison and local,
bottom-up consumption practices. This especially manifests with dining
practices, as shifting patterns in the use and appreciation of locally
manufactured Egyptian-style or Levantine ceramics correlate with violent
disruptions at the site. While it is not always possible to tie
foodways to specific identities, they reveal a complex picture of mutual
transformation that cannot be separated from the colonial context of
the site, detailing entanglements between locals and imperial personnel
wherein actors from all sides episodically drew upon foodways to
navigate life in an unstable imperial periphery.
La bibliothèque électronique « Ukraïnica » rassemble plusieurs
centaines d’ouvrages disponibles en ligne dont certains concernent
l’histoire et l’archéologie de la mer Noire, principalement le
territoire ukrainien. La navigation est facilitée par l’organisation
thématique des ressources. Une recherche par titre est également
possible.
During the
Third Intermediate and Late Periods, wealthy Egyptians were sent to
theirafterlives in dazzlingly decorated and inscribed coffins nested
like Russian dolls. Current
understanding of these vessels for rebirth comes almost exclusively from
analyses of Theban
coffins, which focuses on dating the coffins primarily through changes
in decorative layout.
Local traditions outside of Thebes have been almost completely neglected
and were assumed
to be merely derivative of the Theban tradition. Thus, the work of
non-Theban artists and
scribes has typically been dismissed as "naive" or "provincial"--even
though, in reality, very little
is known about non-Theban coffin workshops, or about the training of the
artists and scribes
who worked in them.
A large number of coffins datable to post-New
Kingdom pharaonic Egypt are thought tocome from the city of Akhmim,
which lies two hundred kilometers north of Thebes. These
Akhmim coffins present an excellent opportunity to characterize and
evaluate a regional
tradition. Sadly, the cemeteries of Akhmim were thoroughly plundered in
the late 19th century,
and the pillaged pieces were sold on the contemporary art market. Hence,
until now, the
Akhmim coffins have only been datable by means of stylistic comparisons
to the Theban pieces.
This dissertation builds a new typology for coffins from Akhmim,
centered around the
idea of workshops. It re-evaluates the Akhmim corpus, exploring the key
questions of whether
the artists were theologically trained and to what degree the scribes
were literate. Part One
provides the background framework required to understand the next two
parts. It reviews the
current literature and focuses attention on gaps in our understanding
that this dissertation is
designed to fill.
Part Two is a catalogue forming the core of this
work that consists of an in-depthanalysis of the artistic and scribal
hands on twenty-one coffins sets that can be tied to Akhmim
by the owner's titles or by museum records of their
acquisition--preferably by both. Each
individual catalogue entry overviews the provenience and iconographic
program of the pieces
in a given set, and also provides a paleography of characters occurring
on specific elements of
the coffin set. An in-depth analysis of the artistic and scribal hands
is then undertaken with the
aim of answering the questions of how many scribes and artists worked on
the individual items
in the set, whether the items were decorated by the same people, and
whether the scribes
were also the artists.
The coffins in the Part Two catalogue are
arranged in four broad sections based ongeneral characteristics of the
decoration as well as rough dating derived from Theban
typologies combined with Brech's typology of Akhmim coffins. At the end
of each of these
sections, the artistic and scribal hands on the coffins are compared
with each other in order to
hypothesize which pieces were made by the same artisans. The iconography
and layout of the
coffins in the section are compared with each other and with pieces in
previous sections to
propose one or more design patterns--defined as the common layout,
selection and positioning
of texts and vignettes, which typify products of the same workshop.
Artists are then assigned to
particular workshops, and the interrelationship between different
workshops is discussed.
Finally, knowledge of the characteristics of the hands of individual
artists and the design
patterns governing their products is applied to a large corpus of
coffins with unsure or unknown provenience. If possible, these pieces
are assigned to one of the workshops as previously defined.
The
conclusion, Part Three, reviews and summarizes the results that emerged
from thedetailed analysis in Part Two and explores further implications
of these findings. In particular,
the analysis of Part Two established that a local coffin industry
flourished at Akhmim in the 21st
Dynasty as well as the period between the late Third Intermediate Period
and the Persian
Period. During these times, workshops at Akhmim were small,
multi-generational enterprises in
which each coffin set was decorated by one or two people. Though in some
cases there was
division of labor between an artist and a scribe, on several coffin sets
all the text and figural
drawing were executed by the same person. The coffin decorators were
likely affiliated with the
Temple of Min at Akhmim.
A comparison of similar vignettes on coffins of the same workshop
reveals that artists
were copying models and working from memory. The artists were probably
not copying
models of full scenes, however, since no two vignettes in the corpus are
identical. The
variations and substitutions of elements within the vignettes indicate
that the artists knew and
understood the mythology surrounding rebirth. Similarly, the texts on
the coffins were created
using a combination of memorization and copying. Captions and formulae
were memorized,
while specialized funerary texts were most likely copied. Whether the
scribes understood what
they were writing must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Two of the
scribes can be shown
to have been literate, one was certainly illiterate, and the rest seem
to fall on a spectrum of
partial literacy.
This study opens the door to studying regional
coffin traditions at other sites andproposes a flexible methodology for
doing so. It also builds a foundation for further study of the
Akhmim corpus and for exploring how the Akhmim artists might have been
connected to artists
from elsewhere. Ideally, it challenges the idea that art in the Egyptian
provinces was merely
derivative of, and inferior to, art originating in Thebes.
Johnston, K. M. (2022). Unseen Hands: Coffin Production at Akhmim, Dynasties 21-30. UC Berkeley.
ProQuest ID: Johnston_berkeley_0028E_21365. Merritt ID:
ark:/13030/m5gf84nd. Retrieved from
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xp41156
Die Reihe
Internetbeiträge zur Ägyptologie und Sudanarchäologie, kurz IBAES, wurde
1998 von Martin Fitzenreiter, Steffen Kirchner und Olaf Kriseleit als
erste deutschsprachige ägyptologisch-sudanarchäologische Reihe
gegründet, die im Internet veröffentlicht wird. Seit 2016 wird die Reihe
von Steffen Kirchner und Gunnar Sperveslage betreut und herausgegeben.
Ebenfalls 2016 wurde ein Advisory Board zur Qualitätssicherung der
eingereichten Manuskripte eingerichtet.
IBAES-Bände
erscheinen unregelmäßig, aber möglichst kurzfristig nach
Manuskripteingang. Sie erscheinen online auf dieser Plattform sowie als
gedrucktes Buch im Verlag Golden House Publishing von Wolfram Grajetzki
in London.
IBAES soll
eine zeitgemäße Form wissenschaftlichen Publizierens in der
Altertumskunde sein. Ziel ist es, in möglichst kurzer Zeit und zu
geringen Kosten Forschungsergebnisse aus der Ägyptologie, der
Sudanarchäologie und benachbarten Fächern zu publizieren. Im Internet
publizierte Ansichten und Daten sind außerdem mit verhältnismäßig
geringem Aufwand überall reproduzierbar, was für traditionelle
Publikationen aufgrund ihrer Verwahrung in Bibliotheken nicht immer
zutrifft.
Die
Publikationsform in IBAES orientiert sich an der in Printmedien. Die
Referenz-Version des jeweiligen Textes ist im Format PDF (Portable
Document Formate) in einem traditionellen Layout abgespeichert. Diese
Version enthält Seitenzahlen, Abbildungen, Fußnoten und
Literaturverzeichnisse wie in Printmedien üblich und kann nicht
nachträglich verändert werden. Zusätzlich können Hilfsmittel eingefügt
werden, die nur in elektronischen Medien möglich sind, wie die
Verknüpfung von Textstellen mit Abbildungen, Einträgen in Belegtabellen
oder mit anderen Websites. Außerdem können Texte oder Zusammenfassungen
in HTML-Versionen abgespeichert werden, was einen schnellen Überblick im
Browser ermöglicht.Die im Format PDF
abgespeicherte Version ist die Referenz-Version der Publikation, auf die
in jedem Fall zu verweisen ist. Textversionen in HTML, Ausdrucke auf
Papier oder Abspeicherungen auf anderen Speichermedien sind nur Kopien,
denen nicht der Rang der Originalpublikation zukommt. Die Herausgeber
bürgen dafür, dass an der Referenz-Version keine späteren Veränderungen
vorgenommen werden, so dass die hier niedergelegten Daten
Dokumentencharakter besitzen
in Deir el-Bahari