Volume 68, no. 1-2
MARCH-JUNE 2005

A People Transformed:
Palestine in the Persian Period

ON THE COVER:
This local ceramic copy (from Sepphoris) of a Persian rhyton was gilded to resemble golden vessels of the Achaemenid Court. Photo courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

A People Transformed: Palestine in the Persian Period
by John W. Betlyon

DEPARTMENTS

ARTI-FACTS

A Hippopotamus Tooth from a Philistine Temple: Symbolic Artifact or Sacrificial Offering?
by Edward F. Maher

FORUM

Fakes, Forgeries, and Biblical Scholarship

REVIEWS

Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?
Robert D. Miller II

Toward Reflexive Method in Archaeology: The Example at Çatalhöyük
(Louise A. Hitchcock)

4 A People Transformed: Palestine in the Persian Period
by John W. Betlyon

Outside of archaeology, most of what little we know about the Persian period is gleaned from classical Greek texts that have portrayed Persia as a decadent, "oriental" empire. As late as the 1970s, historians looked upon the Persian period as a "dark age" in Syro-Palestinian history. There were few archaeological sites with definitively Persian remains; excavators had shown little intereset in Persian levels primarily because these strata could not illuminate the pages of the Bible. Renewed interest in this poorly documented period has changed all this. So who were the Persians? What was distinctive about Palestinian material culture in the time when Persia dominated the Near East? This article, the latest in NEA's series "Archaeological Sources for the History of Palestine," seeks to answer these questions by exploring the latest data.

61 Forum: Fakes, Forgeries, and Biblical Scholarship

The recent indictments of five people in Israel for allegedly manufacturing and selling forged antiquities have brought to the fore a crisis that has been afflicting biblical scholarship for years. In this edition of Forum, we offer a series of commentaries by prominent scholars, which first appeared recently online in The SBL Forum, on the debate over unprovenanced antiquities.