Excavations in 1983 and 1985 at the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B site of 'Ain Ghazal, Jordan, unearthed two caches of carefully buried plaster statues, separated by two to three centuries. This article analyzes the collection of large anthropomorphic representations, which include 15 full figures about I m tall, 12 one-headed busts, and 3 two-headed busts. The style of the two caches of statues is compared and contrasted to determine the characteristic features of the genre and its evolution. Fragments of similar statues recovered in Jericho and Nahal Hemar are reviewed to present a chronology of the origin of monumental plastic art in the Levant. Finally, the three prevalent interpretations for the statues_ancestors, ghosts, and deities_are evaluated in the light of the ancient Near Eastern iconography and tradition.

In his response to the thesis by this author that the ancient Canaanites according to their own reckoning never constituted an ethnos in the usual sense of the word, i.e., with an awareness of being one and a single ethnic group distinct from other ethnic yroups, although sometimes described as such by foreigners, A. E Rainey presents a reading of EA 151:50-51, according to which AbimilEu of Tyre is reporting, not "news from Canaan," but "news heard in Canaan." He introduces abundant documentation to prove his case but disregards the closest parallel to this passage, EA 147:66-69, which obviously with an almost identical vocabulary talks about "news from Egypt." This parallel, as well as other considerations, makes his rendition of the passage in EA 151:50-51 questionable.

The hypothesis that art can illuminate Late Bronze Age political connections between Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean is questioned and ultimately rejected as premature, due to the lack of absolute chronology as well as agreement on the dating and categorization of individual objects and object types. It is argued that more agreement about the cultural characteristics displayed by art must be present before political history can be written from it.

For more than a century the name Achish, the biblical king of Gash, has been associated with that of Ikausu, the seventh- century B. C. king of Ekron known from Assyrian sources. Now, with the discovery in Ekron of the royal dedicatory inscription of 'kys son of Padi, it is evident that the West Semitic spelling of Ikausu was indeed 'kys. The forms Ikausu and 'kys must have been derived from *Ik(h)ayus/s, which eventually leads to'Akhayus, i.e., Achayus, or "Achaean," meaning "Greek." The article also deals with the possible contributions of this reconstruction to the discussion on the origin of the Philistines and to the relation between the names of biblical Achish and that of seventh-century B.C. Ikausu.

During the early Islamic period, the port of Ayla, at the northeastern end of the Gulf of'Aqaba, served as an important commercial center. This article surveys the archaeological evidence for early Islamic occupation in the southern Negev and the Arabah, a region that D. Whitcomb has referred to as Ayla's "hinterland." This evidence indicates that new settlements were established and flourished throughout the region during the 8th to 10th or 11th centuries. Their economic base included large-scale agriculture using sophisticated irrigation systems and the introduction of new crops, copper and gold mining and production, stone quarrying, and the development of a road network used by merchants and pilgrims.