[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][mk_divider thickness=”1″ margin_top=”0″][vc_column_text]Welcome to The Ancient Near East Today Vol. III, No. 12! In this issue we go from Israel to Rhodes, from Turkey to Denmark, with a stop in Syria.
We begin with Richard Freund’s discussion of the ancient and modern Jewish presence on the island of Rhodes. Mara Horowitz then brings us up to date on the renewed excavations at the enormous site of Alalakh in Turkey, then Flemming Kaul and Jeanette Varberg discuss tiny finds – glass beads – that open entirely new perspectives on trade, between Denmark and Egypt.
As part of our continuing coverage of the cultural heritage crisis in Syria and Iraq, we present a page of important new reports and news links. We also are proud to link to ASOR’s journals, and, as always, to reports from students supported by ASOR scholarships.
As always, please forward articles from The Ancient Near East Today to family and friends, post links to Facebook, and be in touch with the editor. Remember, being a Friend of ASOR is free![/vc_column_text][mk_divider thickness=”1″ margin_top=”0″][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]
Archaeologists frequently talk about ‘long distance trade.’ But sometimes those distances are very long.Early glass was a rare and expensive luxury that was traded along the coasts of the Mediterranean between Egypt, the Near East and Mycenaean Greece in ships like the Uluburun shipwreck, excavated off the coast of Turkey, dating to the late 13th Century BCE.
The vibrant Bronze Age city of Alalakh on the Plain of Antioch may not have been among the largest cities of the ancient Near East, but its strategic importance and unique character made it a star. Ongoing excavations and research directed by K. Aslıhan Yener and sponsored by Koç University are revealing the extraordinary history of ancient Alalakh (Tell Atchana)
[/vc_column_text][mk_divider thickness=”1″ margin_top=”10″][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]The Ancient Near East Today features contributions from diverse academics, a forum featuring debates of current developments from the field, and links to news and resources. The ANE Today covers the entire Near East, and each issue presents discussions ranging from the state of biblical archaeology to archaeology after the Arab Spring.
It is curious how in less than a century, the story of Gertrude Bell has been diminished in history, when the imprint of ‘Miss Bell,’ as she is still called by Iraqis today, on the modern history of Iraq is undeniable. And yet, her relevance to modern Iraq might be as high as it has ever been.
When reading Jewish literature from the Second Temple period (the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods) in light of Nehemiah 8, one gets the impression that the Torah (the Books of Moses)—in one form or another—was the common spiritual denominator accepted by all branches of developing Judaism.
A 2012 WIN-Gallup study found a notable decline in religiosity around the globe, and that 33% of the world’s population describe themselves as non-religious or atheist. A 2012 Pew survey identified similar trends in the U.S. But one aspect of religious behavior remains more popular than ever.
For an accurate and complete understanding of history and culture, it is crucial that written sources be authentic. But what if they are not? The surest way to verify the authenticity of ancient documents is to determine if they were recovered from secure archaeological contexts.
[/vc_column_text][mk_divider thickness=”1″ margin_top=”10″][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]The Ancient Near East Today features contributions from diverse academics, a forum featuring debates of current developments from the field, and links to news and resources. The ANE Today covers the entire Near East, and each issue presents discussions ranging from the state of biblical archaeology to archaeology after the Arab Spring.
There was indeed a “Sumerian bowl” found in the late 1950s near Lake Titicaca, at the site of Hacienda Chúa, about 75 miles north of La Paz. The dark bowl has a prominent rim and a strap handle, is decorated with carved figures and geometric designs and, most significantly, has a sort of cuneiform inscription on the interior.
Why does the Bible matter? Why do we continue to talk about, turn to, and study a diverse assortment of narratives, poems, laws and prophetic proclamations at least two millennia old? The most straightforward answer is that they continue to serve as the sacred texts for two of the world’s major religions, Judaism and Christianity, and as an interlocutor for a third, Islam.
Stretching from Egypt to the Indus River, the Persian Empire was the largest empire yet seen in the ancient Near East. Typically, the Hebrew Bible depicts ancient Near Eastern empires as divine instruments of punishment. But the Persian Empire is an exception: the Persians allowed Judean exiles to return home and rebuild the Jerusalem temple.
Of course, there is no such thing as a Sumerian king list. The text usually referred to as the ‘Sumerian King List’ (SKL) is a composition somewhere between a literary text and a list proper, which deals with the history of kingship in Babylonia from the beginning of time to the early centuries of the second millennium BCE.
Marriage is ubiquitous in human societies. But any examination of marriage in ancient Egyptian society requires us to disengage from modern social and theological norms and reconsider the role of the state in aspects of everyday life.
[/vc_column_text][mk_divider thickness=”1″ margin_top=”10″][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]The Ancient Near East Today features contributions from diverse academics, a forum featuring debates of current developments from the field, and links to news and resources. The ANE Today covers the entire Near East, and each issue presents discussions ranging from the state of biblical archaeology to archaeology after the Arab Spring.
[/vc_column_text][mk_divider thickness=”1″ margin_top=”10″][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Ask a Near Eastern Professional: How the Sumerians Got to Peru
By Alex Joffe
Jerry Cohen asks “Is it true that an ancient bowl was found in Lake Titicaca in Peru that had Sumerian cuneiform writing on it? If so, what was its translation.”
There was indeed a “Sumerian bowl” found in the late 1950s near Lake Titicaca, at the site of Hacienda Chúa, about 75 miles north of La Paz. The dark bowl has a prominent rim and a strap handle, is decorated with carved figures and geometric designs and, most significantly, has a sort of cuneiform inscription on the interior. One scholar translated the inscription, which deals with the Goddess Nia, and believes the bowl was produced by Sumerians and dates to around 3000 BCE.
Fuente Magna bowl
Exterior of bowl
Detail showing figure on interior
Fuente Magna inscription
The problem however is that the object was not found in an archaeological excavation; it simply appeared. Another problem is that the bowl is utterly unlike any Sumerian object of the third millennium BCE, or the millennia before and after. The inscription is comprised of triangles and lines, reminiscent of Mesopotamian cuneiform writing, although not of the Sumerian period. But a closer look suggests the inscription is simply geometric filler or deliberate gibberish. And if anything, the face on the interior looks more like something produced by the local Tiwanaku culture (ca. 200-1000 CE).
Proto-cuneiform tablet
Changes in cuneiform script over time
In short, it’s not Sumerian. It’s either a modern fake or possibly an ancient local oddity (or something in between that has been modified with cuneiformish). So why does the ‘Fuente Magna’ bowl (it is unclear how it got the name) continue to resonate? There are several reasons.
For one thing, there is the question of contacts between the New World and the Old World. This is a vast topic. Humans evolved in the Old World (Africa, actually), left that continent for Asia, and eventually schlepped to the New World. The timing and circumstances of that movement continues to be debated but the evidence points to it occurring by 12,000 BCE.
Contacts after that, however, are hugely controversial, and various claims have been made for Africans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Israelites, Romans, Arabs, Japanese, Chinese, Polynesians, and others visiting or settling in the Americas, all prior to the Norse reaching Newfoundland around the year 1000 CE.
The evidence brought to support such theories is often difficult to judge (such as purported similarities in myths), have alternate explanations (such as independent technological or stylistic developments), or are pretty clear fakes (such as the Phoenician ‘inscriptions’ in Brazil and Tennessee). The best we can say is that such contacts are not impossible but remain thus far unproven.
But how do we distinguish legitimate curiosity from unsavory agendas? Part of the answer here is to simply ask who is raising the questions and why. In the case of the Fuente Magna bowl, the first person to see it having a cuneiform inscription was apparently a Bolivian journalist, Mario Montaño Aragón, whose book Raices semíticas en la religiosidad aymara y kichua (Semitic roots in Aymara and Quechua religion) was published in 1979.
Not having seen the book it is hard to say whether this somewhat bizarre inquiry was in keeping with centuries of research that has sought ‘Semites,’ (including Israelites and ‘lost’ tribes’) as well as other ancient Near Eastern groups, settling around the world, from Britain to the Americas.
The desire to connect local cultures with the presumably ‘superior’ (or at least chronologically anterior) cultures of the Old World has many motives. For ‘British Israelites’ of the 19th century and a few Chinese of the 21st (who see their civilization founded by Egyptians), the exercise is connecting with myths of ancient nobility. Such interpretations may fly in the face of history as we know it (and indignant experts) but are really more articles of religious faith than anything else.
But all too often fringe interpretations have racist motives (the idea that local cultures couldn’t have developed without contact or guidance from ‘superior’ civilizations), or at least racialist ones. For example, the individual who ‘translated’ the Fuente Magna inscription as (proto) Sumerian, Clyde Winters, is a well-known Afrocentrist who believes that the Olmecs descended from Africans.
Here, unfortunately, we step further away from scientific method and consensus and towards the fringes. Winters’ ideas stitch together several theories and use data ranging from Greek mythology to genetics; that the Olmecs were black Africans (or Egyptians), that Atlantis was actually in Libya, that “neo-Atlanteans” founded settlements in Mexico, and much more. Each of these assertions is problematic if not extraordinary, with different types of evidence strung together breathlessly, to create a story that is extremely satisfying to the target audience.
Winters’ ‘translation’ of the Fuente Magna ‘inscription’ is similarly extraordinary, relying on comparisons with a purported Saharan script that was also allegedly in common use in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and West Africa, and which is understood using the Vai script of Liberia, which was created only 1830. This method is completely unfamiliar to conventional scholarship, because it is not scholarly as such but rather a kind of Gnosticism, the recovery of esoteric knowledge with the power of redemption.
Winters’ associations between Sumerian and Vai
And that is part of the appeal of fringe challenges to academic paradigms and scholarly elites. The novelty of method matches the novelty of conclusions, all which sticks it to the mainstream that is either too dumb to recognize the truth or which suppresses it. The truth is out there, as Fox Mulder of the X-Files used to say. This applies to Bigfoot, the alien technologies that built the Pyramids, or the Nazi bases on the Moon. Secret truths are power in the minds of the enlightened few.
Now of course, new discoveries are being made all the time, and previously dismissed theories sometimes come to be recognized as correct. The idea of continental drift was proposed during the 1920s and was ridiculed until proven correct during the 1960s. And Pluto was happily ensconced as the ninth planet until recently when scientists cruelly downgraded it to a ‘dwarf planet.’
In archaeology new data have prompted continual revisions of how early the Americas were peopled. Confidently set at 9500 BCE during the 1960s, the date has marched further back time to the point where some respectable scholars suggest it may even have been 25 or 30 thousand years ago.
There are also gradual shift in paradigms, the result of evidence being patiently cataloged and pointed out by mainstream scholars, sometimes in the face of ridicule. Forty years ago scholars who pointed to the similarity of Greek and Near Eastern mythologies were on the margins, if not the fringe; now the question is how and why borrowings took place.
Non-specialists need to prod scholars who are too often married to (or hostage to, as some marriages are) their ideas. And scholars need to approach data honestly, without ideology or idealizing preconceived conclusions, and to continually reassess and rethink.
Thus far there is no meaningful evidence for Sumerian connections with the New World, and the Fuente Magna bowl, by virtue of being an unconvincing fake that teeters on an edifice of unfounded assumptions, doesn’t help the case. But looking carefully at how and why this case fails to persuade is a useful exercise, precisely for those reasons.
Alex Joffe is the editor of The Ancient Near East Today. He has a longstanding agreement to believe in the Loch Ness Monster if the Loch Ness Monster believes in him.
Lights on the “Dark Age” – Rethinking the Southern Levantine Early Bronze IV after a Century of Archaeological Investigation
By Marta D’Andrea
Societal collapse has always been intriguing. For this reason scholars have been attracted to the Early Bronze IV of the Southern Levant (EB IV, ca. 2500-1950/1920 BCE) since the early 20th century. The EB IV is sandwiched between the collapse of the first cities at the end of EB III (ca. 2500 BCE) and the regeneration of urban society in the succeeding Middle Bronze Age (MBA, 1920-1550 BCE), when new cultural elements – generally connected with the Amorites – took the leading role in the entire Levant. This position saw EB IV as a “Dark Age” of social, political and economic collapse and technological regression. Lately, renewed interest in the EB IV has been fuelled by new discoveries, which allow for substantial re-evaluation of this still elusive period.
Archaeological evidence available for EB IV between the 1950s and the 1980s suggested that radical changes took place in the southern Levant after the collapse of the first cities. The presence of small unfortified villages in place of the fortified sites of the EB II-III periods, the fact that cemeteries outnumbered settlements, and the fragmentation of material culture, with several coexisting repertoires of pots and weapons distributed over limited areas, led scholars to conclude that mobility and nomadism rather than sedentism characterized the period. The diffusion of cultural influence from still urbanized Syria, inferable from the spread of cups and goblets inspired by northern prototypes across the southern Levant, was also taken as proof that people were moving, whether refugees, invaders, or pastoralists.
Map of the Southern Levant during the EB IV. Courtesy Marta D’Andrea.
Southern Levantine cups and goblets (graphic re-elaboration by the author from several sources; M. D’Andrea, The Southern Levant in Early Bronze IV. Issues and perspectives in the pottery evidence. CMAO XVII, Roma 2014, pls XVII:2, 9, XVIII:9-10, 12-13, XIX:7-8, XXI:10-11, 16, XXVIII:1-2, 7-8).
The EB IV was portrayed as a non-urban interlude after the failure of the first urban experiment, which, suddenly at the dawn of the 2nd millennium BCE, made way for the revival of urbanism, likely diffusing from more sophisticated Syria.
But intense field research from the 1980s to the present has revealed a myriad of sedentary EB IV rural villages both east and west of the Jordan River. Rather than a “Dark Age” of decline and recession, the southern Levantine EB IV was a complex phase in which rural components were fundamental. Early research separated phases based on stylistic differences between the ceramic assemblages of different sub-regions. Subsequently, several sites – including Tell Umm Hammad, Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj, Khirbat Iskandar, Bab edh-Dhra‘, Jericho, and, recently, Tell el-Hammam – revealed multiple EB IV strata and evidence for an evolutionary sequence.
EB IV superimposed architecture over EB III mudbrick destruction (courtesy of the Khirbat Iskandar Expedition), end of 2016 season.
EB IV superimposed architecture over EB III mudbrick destruction (courtesy of the Khirbat Iskandar Expedition), end of 2016 season.
Pottery from the first EB IV phase (Phase 1) identified in Area C at Khirbat Iskandar, Jordan, corresponding to early EB IV in the author’s periodization (courtesy of the Khirbat Iskandar Expedition).
Based on this new evidence, scholars have made arguments for the existence of elites and for the social development and technological experimentation, as well as for continuity with the following MBA. Finally, recent studies on ancient landscape, vegetation and climate demonstrated that there were cyclical episodes of aridification between 2500 and 1900 BCE that might have influenced settlement patterns and developments in the southern Levant during EB IV.
My argument builds on new research that reconstructs a progression, from crisis to recovery and growth. Building on the hypothesis that changes in pottery manufacturing techniques observable from one EB IV sub-phase to the next might be used for inter-site correlation, I attempted to piece together the archaeological evidence from different sites and areas, re-examining the published record from almost 150 sites. The study was boosted by first-hand analysis of EB IV pottery in museums and universities and the opportunity to expose more of the long EB IV sequence at Khirbat Iskandar, working with Suzanne Richard, from Gannon University, and Jesse Long, from Lubbock Christian University.
EB IV pottery in situ in Area B at Khirbat Iskandar, Jordan, corresponding to the central EB IV phase at the site (courtesy of the Khirbat Iskandar Expedition), 2013 season.
EB IV pottery from Area B at Khirbat Iskandar, Jordan, corresponding to the central EB IV phase at the site (courtesy of the Khirbat Iskandar Expedition), 2013 season.
EB IV multifunctional complex (“gateway”) in Area C at Khirbat Iskandar, Jordan (courtesy of the Khirbat Iskandar Expedition).
Based on my re-evaluation, I proposed that there was an early EB IV stage of crisis after the downfall of the EB II-III urbanization, a factor likely accounting for its low visibility in the archaeological record. The ephemeral nature of this early EB IV phase might reflect discontinuities, such as the establishment of short-lived settlements shifting from one place to another. The material culture of this archaic EB IV phase seems rather poor, pointing to technological regression and domestic manufacture, possibly mirroring changes in the socio-economic preconditions behind production.
In my interpretation, from a central EB IV stage, a process of continuous recovery and reorganization led to a final phase of growth, which gradually blended down into a transitional Early-Middle Bronze phase towards the end of EB IV. The beginning of renewed development from the central EB IV phase is suggested by the establishment of a network of well-planned sedentary rural villages, interacting with mobile components specializing in several activities in different areas, such as pastoralism, trade, and crafts. Specialized craft production, with the systematic use of the slow potters wheel, and copper mining, smelting, and trade, were resumed. The circulation of these products suggests that interactions between different regions and agricultural-pastoral communities were at work. Elements of “complexity” also began to appear throughout the southern Levant, indicated by the presence of multifunctional “public” areas, and “warrior” burials with metal weapons and ornaments. New styles in material culture point to local interpretation of foreign elements.
Drawing of EB IV Tomb L2 at Jericho, with deployment of metal weapons and ornaments within the burial (redrawn by the author after K.M. Kenyon, Excavations at Jericho II, London 1965, fig. 79).
The big picture emerging from the archaeological data for the central and late EB IV phases of sedentary rural communities dynamically interacting with semi-nomads in an organized manner, based on specialization of economic activities. It was during these phases that regional and inter-regional connections were gradually re-established, which fuelled the diffusion of technology, styles and cultural information from the neighboring areas. Although the central and late EB IV stages were non-urban, it seems likely that the first seeds of the MBA urban regeneration were sown during these phases.
Thus, research over the last three decades has deeply changed our understanding of the southern Levantine EB IV, bringing into sharper focus the existence of the internal developments, from crisis to recovery and growth. So far this is mostly understood in terms of relative phases within a six-century-long period. The refinement of an absolute chronology for EB IV phases is a priority, linking stratigraphy at individual sites, ceramic phases, and absolute dates from scientific methods.
Many questions remain. Did the Early Bronze Age urban crisis occur at the same time and pace at every site and region? When did recovery first start and did it occur simultaneously throughout the region? How do these patterns connect with climatic oscillations between 2500-1900 BCE? And how does the southern Levant during EB IV connect with neighboring areas, such as Egypt, the Lebanon, and Syria, for which absolute chronologies are more refined? These and many more compelling questions might be answered by chronological revisions. Unveiling synchronisms will eventually shed light on the social, political and economic intricacies of the southern Levantine EB IV that we are not able to grasp due to the lack of written sources.
Marta D’Andrea is a research fellow at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, and a co-director of the Archaeological Expedition to Khirbat Iskandar and Its Environs, Jordan and the Madaba Regional Archaeological Museum Project, Jordan.
Table of Contents for Near Eastern Archaeology 80.4 (December 2017)
Subscription Options You can receive NEA (and other ASOR publications) through an ASOR Membership or through an Individual Subscription. Single issues (subject to availability) are available for purchase, with ASOR members receiving a discount. Please email us if you have any questions.
Pp. 212-231: “The Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath Archaeological Project: Overview,” by Aren M. Maeir
The Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath Archaeological Project commenced in 1996 and is one of the largest and longest continuously running archaeological projects in Israel. As the year 2017 marks twenty-two years of research and excavations, it is an apt opportunity to present an overview and reflection on the project in general, and various aspects of the research in particular. The opportunity to do this in two special issues of NEA is an excellent occasion, as this provides an expertly produced medium, read by many interested in the field of ancient Near Eastern history, archaeology, and culture.1 In this, first article of this special issue, I would like to provide an overview of the project and its primary accomplishments.
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 232-240: “Gath of the Philistines in the Bible and on the Ground: The Historical Geography of Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath,” by Yigal Levin
Archaeology is, for the most part, the study of material remains of the past. Archaeologists survey, excavate, analyze and construct a picture of past human life. They do their best to understand the daily life, the economy, the belief systems, the political and social structures, and so much else about long-gone civilizations. And, in many parts of the world and for long stretches of the human past, they do without recourse to written sources, simply because writing did not exist through most of that time. But if and when written records are available, they provide context, specific facts and dates, and much additional information that then give us a more complete picture of the history of the site or area that we are investigating.
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 241-243: “New Insights into Bliss and Macalister’s Excavations at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath,” by Rona S. Avissar Lewis and Aren M. Maeir
By 1899, Frederick J. Bliss was already a well-known archaeologist when he was asked by the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) to excavate the Shephelah mounds. Previously, he dug with William Flinders Petrie at Maidon and then replaced Petrie at Tell el-Hesi (1891–1893). Subsequently, Bliss excavated with Archibald Dickie in Jerusalem on behalf of the PEF (1894–1897). R. A. Stewart Macalister served as Bliss’s assistant field director. He had some experience in archaeological excavations in England, considered himself a photographer, and was “engaged with the architectural profession” as he claimed (Bliss 1894: 2; Albright 1956: 24; Moorey 1991: 26–27; Tubb 2015: 6–7). The site of Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath had been known to scholars for many years prior to the three seasons of excavations conducted by Bliss and Macalister from 1899 as part of the Shephelah mounds (Smith 1894: 142–43; Rey 1871: 123–25; Conder 1879: 153; Petrie 1891: 62; Waston 1915: 117).
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 244-246: “Ancient Environment and Human Interaction at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath,” by Oren Ackermann, Noam Greenbaum, Hendrik Bruins, Avner Ayalon, Miryam Bar-Matthews, Dan Cabanes, Liora Kolska Horwitz, Frank H. Neumann, Mechael Osband, Naomi Porat, Ehud Weiss and Aren M. Maeir
An archaeological site is an integral part of its surrounding landscape. This is one of the main novel approaches in the long-term archaeological project of Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath. The site has interacted with its surrounding for more than three thousand years. It was impacted by the ancient environment, but also had an impact on both the ancient environment and current conditions. The following is a summary of environmental research that has been carried out at the Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath environs from 1999 through 2012. This case study provides important information regarding the ancient landscape and interactions between climate, the environment, and humans.
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 247-254: “The Early Bronze Age at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath,” by Haskel J. Greenfield, Itzhaq Shai and Aren M. Maeir
In 1899, Bliss and Macalister launched a brief but intensive campaign of excavation at the site of Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath and uncovered evidence for a large-scale fortification system and thick deposits from various time periods. While they argued that the majority of remains, including the fortifications, were of Iron Age or later origin, some Early Bronze Age remains also appeared in their reports and collections.
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 255-258: “Animal Food Production and Consumption in Stratum E5 at Early Bronze Age Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath,” by Haskel J. Greenfield, Tina L. Greenfield and Annie Brown
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 259-260: “Microdebris Analysis from the Early Bronze Age Levels at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath,” by Annie Brown and Haskel J. Greenfield
Microdebris are the tiny remnants of activities that are not cleaned up after an activity is completed (fig. 1). Such activities are often archaeologically invisible with standard macrolevel artifact collection and analysis techniques. If microdebris are systematically and spatially collected across surfaces and different depositional contexts, their analysis can help guide excavation strategies (identification where such debris is located, which deposits are worth floating), identify activity areas, pest distributions, when, and which, rooms were used or abandoned, missing food sources that cannot be recovered through hand collections (plants, fish, and smaller remains), and so on (Rainville 2012; Steadman 1996; Rosen 1989; Weiner 2010). The utility of this approach is demonstrated with data from the Early Bronze Age excavations in Area E at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath.
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 261-263: “Isotope Analyses of Early Bronze Age Fauna at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath,” by Elizabeth R. Arnold and Haskel J. Greenfield
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 264-267: “Interregional Trade and Exchange at Early Bronze Age Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath,” by Elizabeth Arnold, Jeremy Beller, Adi Behar, David Ben-Shlomo, Tina L. Greenfield and Haskel J. Greenfield
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 268-269: “Spatial Reconstruction of Selected Finds from the Early Bronze Age Neighborhood at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Area E,” by Tina L. Greenfield and Andrea Squitieri
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 270-272: “Evidence for Administration and Leisure/Recreation at Early Bronze Age Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath,” by Shira Albaz, Haskel J. Greenfield, Tina L. Greenfield and Aren M. Maeir
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 273-275: “Ceramic Vessel Production and Use at Early Bronze Age Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath,” by Jon Ross and David Ben-Shlomo
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 276-278: “Archaeological Science in the Early Bronze Age Levels,” by Adi Eliyahu-Behar
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 279-281: “Early Bronze Age Basalt Vessel Remains from Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath,” by Jeremy A. Beller
Basalt is long thought to have been one of the more valued geological materials from which ground stone objects were manufactured (Ebeling and Rowan 2004: 108; Milevski 2008). Although it was readily available in some regions of the southern Levant, the widespread utilization of basaltic material was likely due to its physical and aesthetic properties. As a quick-cooling, extrusive igneous rock, basalt is dominated by mafic minerals and characterized by a high durability and hardness (Mohs’ scale 7), a fine-grained texture, and a green-black colored appearance (Le Maitre 2002). Furthermore, basalt sheens well and leaves less grit in processed food than other materials (Ebeling and Rowan 2004: 108).
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 282-284: “Building a City Wall: An Administrative Perspective,” by Jill C. Katz
During the Early Bronze Age II/III, Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath was fortified by a city wall. This wall has been exposed now in several areas, stretching from the acropolis in the west (Area F), alongside the central part of the southern ridge (Area P; fig. 1) to the lower slopes in the east (Area J), just below a significant Early Bronze Age neighborhood in Area E. In general, the wall width is approximately 2.5 m, but varies along its length, including periodic offsets that protrude over 0.5 m. The longest stretch of contiguous wall currently visible is 21 m, and a portion of that was exposed all the way to its foundation. This probe revealed that the stone structure itself was comprised of large and medium-sized, roughly-cut, local fieldstones to a height of 10 courses, or 2.4 m (fig. 2). In addition, there was most likely an original mud-brick superstructure on top of the stones as implied by the thick decomposed mud-brick accumulation just outside the wall.
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 285-291: “Walled Up To Heaven! Early and Middle Bronze Age Fortifications at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath,” by Jeffrey R. Chadwick, Joe Uziel, Eric L. Welch and Aren M. Maeir
The Early Bronze Age city at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath was among the largest urban centers in Canaan, or whatever they called their land at that time (Maeir 2012b: 13; Shai et al. 2016). The city and its people are still mostly a mystery to us. We do not know what they called themselves, or their city (but it was almost surely not “Gath”). They did not write, and we are not sure what language they spoke—perhaps an early Canaanite dialect. We do not know the names of any of their kings, as we do in most other periods at the site. But our excavations have taught us some things about them, their architecture, their pottery, and their diet. And we also know a good deal about the massive and extensive fortification wall that they built around their city, and that it must have taken a remarkable amount of organization and resources to accomplish it.
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 292-295: “The Late Bronze Age at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath,” by Itzhaq Shai, Joe Uziel, Jeffrey R. Chadwick and Aren M. Maeir
The story of Canaanite Gath begins with the el-Amarna texts (Na’aman 1979; Rainey 2012; Levin, this issue), where it appears that the city was a major contender in the Shephelah power plays of the fourteenth century B.C.E. While some have contended the connection between Gath, Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi and the Amarna period ruler Šuwardatu (Moran 1992: 384), the petrographic examination conducted on the tablets create a strong link between them (Goren, Finkelstein, and Na’aman 2004: 280–86). In this light, the results of the surface survey prior to the onset of the excavations noted the existence of a large settlement at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath (ca. 27 ha; see:Uziel and Maeir 2005: 56). Yet, the survey results did not allow identification of differences within the Late Bronze Age (LB) between the subphases of the period.
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 296-297: “Late Helladic Imported Pottery at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath,” by Philipp W. Stockhammer
Fragments of thirty-six Aegean-type vessels were found at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath in Areas A, E, F, and P between 1996 and 2014, some of which have already been published (Gadot, Yasur-Landau, and Uziel 2012; Shai et al., this issue) and then subsequently revaluated in a broader context (Stockhammer in press). The earliest import so far can be dated to the Mycenaean pottery phase Late Helladic (LH) IIIA1, which is the late fifteenth and early fourteenth centuries B.C.E. This closed vessel of unclear shape can be considered as one of the early Mycenaean imports to the southern Levant. It reached this region in a time when the spectrum of imports was still dominated by Aegean-type pottery from Crete.
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
Pp. 298-299: “Fragments of Egyptian Writing from Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath,” by Stefan Jakob Wimmer
Some Egyptian inscriptions from Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath are found on amulets, such as a miniature figurine of the goddess Isis suckling the baby Horus and identified on the back pillar with a few hieroglyphs as 3s.t wr.t nb.t “Isis the Great, the Mistress” (Wimmer and Görg in press), and of course on scarabs (e.g., Münger, NEA forthcoming), such as abound on practically all sites in the Levant. Apart from these, traces of Egyptian writing are sparse at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath.
Click here to access the above article on JSTOR (ASOR membership with online access and/or subscription to JSTOR Current Content required).
[/vc_column_text][mk_divider][vc_column_text]To view the entire issue on JSTOR, click here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column border_color=”rgba(170,170,170,0.01)” width=”1/6″ css=”.vc_custom_1496684098866{margin-right: 5px !important;margin-bottom: 20px !important;border-right-width: 2px !important;border-bottom-width: 2px !important;padding-top: 30px !important;padding-right: 10px !important;padding-left: 10px !important;background-color: #ffffff !important;border-right-color: rgba(227,228,228,0.75) !important;border-bottom-color: rgba(227,228,228,0.75) !important;}”][vc_wp_posts title=”BROWSE THE NEWS ARCHIVE” number=”4″][/vc_column][vc_column border_color=”rgba(170,170,170,0.01)” width=”1/6″ css=”.vc_custom_1496684008271{margin-right: 10px !important;margin-bottom: 30px !important;border-right-width: 2px !important;border-bottom-width: 2px !important;padding-top: 30px !important;padding-right: 20px !important;padding-left: 20px !important;background-color: #ffffff !important;border-right-color: rgba(227,228,228,0.75) !important;border-bottom-color: rgba(227,228,228,0.75) !important;}”][vc_column_text]Tweets by ASOResearch [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Societal collapse has always been intriguing. For this reason scholars have been attracted to the Early Bronze IV of the Southern Levant (EB IV, ca. 2500-1950/1920 BCE) since the early 20th century.
Inebriation is a cross-cultural habit whose origins can be traced back to Prehistory. But humans are not the only species fond of the mind-altering effects of certain plants and drinks. Some animals are also attracted to overripe fruits and psychoactive plants.
Across 2000 years of history the residents of Kamid el-Loz, one of the major sites in Lebanon’s Beqa’a plain, lived through: (1) three phases of urbanization, de-urbanization, and re-urbanization; (2) two phases of collapse and the irreversible dissolution of urban life; (3) four episodes of imperialist rule.
This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. What have we learned over the past three score and ten? First, it has become increasingly recognized that we do not have a “library of the Essenes” in the way that it was previously understood.
There is one question that I am asked all the time, which has a short answer but is long on associated implications. The question is simply “Do you get to keep what you find?” The answer is very short: “No.” Whether you’re working in your own country or in a country other than your own, that nation’s antiquities department will have a set of rules.
[/vc_column_text][mk_divider thickness=”1″ margin_top=”10″][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]The Ancient Near East Today features contributions from diverse academics, a forum featuring debates of current developments from the field, and links to news and resources. The ANE Today covers the entire Near East, and each issue presents discussions ranging from the state of biblical archaeology to archaeology after the Arab Spring.
Take a look at the contents of this e-book!
Lights on the “Dark Age” – Rethinking the Southern Levantine Early Bronze IV after a Century of Archaeological Investigation
‘Joy Plants’ and the Earliest Toasts in the Ancient Near East
This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. What have we learned over the past three score and ten? First, it has become increasingly recognized that we do not have a “library of the Essenes” in the way that it was previously understood. Not every scroll found in the eleven caves is Essenic. There are scrolls that reflect the views of one or more Jewish sects or schools, most likely associated with the Essenes, but the corpus of 800-900 scrolls known as “the Dead Sea Scrolls” constitute a heterogeneous collection of manuscripts. Within it are texts that belong to Judaism generally in the late Second Temple period, such as the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls. In the past, scholars have marginalized these biblical scrolls, but there is no evidence that they are sectarian biblical scrolls.
Cave 4Q at Qumran. (Wikimedia Commons)
Aerial view of the Qumran community. (The Orion Center)
Second, the consensus of the Maccabean theory that reigned supreme in the first generation of scrolls scholarship has given way to a different kind of Essene hypothesis, resulting from a reconsideration of the archaeology of Khirbet Qumran and the literary analysis of the different versions of the Rule of the Community from Caves 1 and 4 (1QS and 4QS). A reconsideration of the “communal phase” and the different periods within it by Jodi Magness, and more recently Dennis Mizzi, has led to a re-dating of the origins of the sect to the beginning of the first, rather than the middle of second, century BCE.
One view that has particular merit is what I have described as “the multiple communities theory”. In the past, it was said that there were at least two different orders of the Essenes: the largely male-oriented, and maybe celibate, community of the Yahad at Qumran, and the married, family-oriented community of the Damascus Document (Josephus, BJ 2.120, 160).
John J. Collins moves the view forward by arguing that there are many more Essene communities. The description by Philo and Josephus of some 4000 Essenes living throughout Judaea is consistent with this view. There is not one, monolithic community of Essenes living at Qumran, but several chapters that flourished at the same time throughout Judaea. Collins anchors his theory on the interpretation of the clause of 1QS 6.3, “in every place where there are ten men of the council of the community”, as referring to multiple communities. More specifically, “of the council of the community” should be understood in the partitive, rather than locative, sense. Multiple Essene communities were dispersed in different settlements at the same time throughout Judaea, and not just at Qumran. For him, this explains why different editions of Serekh ha-yahad or Rule of the Community continued to be copied, and why the more primitive form (in the literary and halakhic sense) of 4QSd was not superseded by the more developed version of 1QS.
Living quarters at Qumran. (Wikimedia Commons)
The Damascus Document (Wikimedia Commons)
Third, the sectarians did not have a developed understanding of “canon”, but they did have the concept of “authoritative scriptures”. I have characterized the sectarian view of authoritative scriptures as a dual pattern of authority and gradation of authority. They had a broadly bipartite collection of the Pentateuch and an undefined collection of books of the prophets. These traditional scriptures were interpreted and supplemented by other non-biblical but nonetheless authoritative scriptures, such as the book of Jubilees and the pesharim.
Fourth, the religious ideas of the sectarian communities were drawn from what I have called the “sectarian matrix” of ancient Judaism. The sectarian communities reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls are not to be identified with the earliest followers of Jesus and the early church. However, the use of so many of the same or similar terminology and ideas in their writings suggests a connection between them that is difficult to deny. The identification of the Essene Gate and quarter in Jerusalem is consistent with the view that the communities likely interacted with one another.
The theory of the sectarian matrix posits that the Essenes and the followers of Jesus came upon the same biblical texts and distinctive ideas, but drew different lessons from them. These ideas were absent or ignored in Judaism of the period. For instance, the sectarians and early church were the only ones to have used the concept of “the new covenant” from the prophecy of Jeremiah. Other Jews did not comment on “the new covenant” nor did they use it in their writings. The sectarians of the scrolls, Paul and other Christian authors of the New Testament drew on this religiously significant notion of a new covenant in the prophetic writing, but they understood “newness” differently. The covenanters took newness to be a renewal of the old covenant, whereas Paul and the author of the epistle to the Hebrews saw in the Jeremianic prophecy a new dispensation in the life and death of Jesus. The sectarian matrix is a subset of ancient Judaism with distinctive and overlapping ideas. It is the well from which the Essenes, Christians and other sectarians drew their inspiration.
The Rule of the Community Scroll (Library of Congress)
The Dead Sea Scrolls have often been hailed as the greatest manuscript discovery. On this seventieth anniversary of their discovery, it is worth asking whether they warrant such a description. Why get excited over some dusty rolls and scraps of ancient Jewish writings? In what sense are they “the greatest”? The public often understands by this sensational description something of a paradigm-shifting significance, comparable to the great scientific discoveries in history. For the scholar, however, the superlative description is much more specific. Compared to what were previously available by way of primary sources dating to the centuries around the turn of the era, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been revolutionary. We now know so much more about the transmission of the biblical texts and other Jewish literature, sectarianism in the Second Temple period, and the Jewish background to early Christianity.
Timothy Lim is Professor of Hebrew Bible & Second Temple Judaism, and the author of The Dead Sea Scrolls. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press), the second, updated edition will be published in March 2017. This piece appeared originally at the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh (New College) on 18 January 2017. It is reproduced by permission.
Hebrew as the Language behind the World’s First Alphabet?
By Douglas Petrovich
What is the language behind the world’s first alphabet? For over 150 years, scholars have studied the world’s first alphabetic script, the second millennium BCE Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, found at Serabit el-Khadim in the southern reaches of the Sinai Peninsula.
Map of Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula (Courtesy of Douglas Petrovich)
While surprisingly few scholars have invested themselves into the narrow field of the proto-consonantal script, virtually all of them have agreed that this previously undeciphered script is Semitic. But which Semitic language remains unresolved.
Over 100 years ago, the great Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner convinced the majority of scholars that this script consisted of a number of Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs, that is alphabetic pictographs that represented consonants, using an acrophonic system. Let me illustrate how this works. If English had no script, and we were to create one for it using acrophony, we could draw a picture of a feather, so that whenever an English speaker sees it, he/she would pronounce the f sound. The pronunciation of the n letter could be made by drawing a nose, and so on.
Chart of Pro-Sinaitic signs and alphabetic letter equivalents (Courtesy of Douglas Petrovich)
If we were to draw a feather and a nose together, this would spell any word that uses a combination of those consonants in succession, such as ‘fan,’ ‘fin,’ or ‘fun.’ The difficulty that comes with the world’s oldest alphabet is that no vowels were included, and that the text was written in continuous script, meaning that there was no break between words, and no punctuation. Thus, the sentence ‘Lend me your ears!’ would have been written LNDMYRS. Only one r would appear for the r in ‘your’ and the r in ‘ears,’ because they refused to write the same consonant twice in succession if no differing consonant intervened.
Over recent decades, some of the letters of the original pictographic alphabet have been recognized universally as making a certain consonantal sound, such as the drawing of a house to represent the letter b, since the word for ‘house’ – bayit – begins with b in virtually all Western Semitic languages. Other letters have remained in dispute, such as the fish-pictograph, which some scholars have identified as the letter d, and others have called the letter s.
I have come to believe that Hebrew is the language behind the proto-consonantal script. I came to this understanding by weighing the options systematically and allowing the context of various inscriptions to determine which option is correct. How I came to know that the inscriptions were written in Hebrew is completely accidental. As I was studying the archaeology of the Levant in the Iron Age, I fell into evidence for Israelite presence in Egypt during the middle of the 15th century BCE, the time when—according to biblical history—the Israelite exodus from Egypt supposedly took place.
I then followed a long archaeological trail that led to the identification of what I believe are Semitic Israelites who were living at an important site in Egypt, at the time when biblical chronology indicates that Jacob would have moved his family to Egypt (1876 BCE). This trail included the identification of several biblical figures of that generation, as inscribed on Middle Egyptian inscriptions of the 19th century BCE, which will be detailed in my second book. One of these individuals actually composed a number of inscribed stelae at Serabit el-Khadim, the site of many annual mining expeditions to extract turquoise.
At the bottom of these stelae, he often drew himself seated on a donkey, with his Egyptian attendant to the left and a Semitic child of varying heights, which changed from year to year on the stelae, to the right. Above one drawing, he inscribed his own name and official office. Above another drawing, he named the others. Above the drawing on one of the last of the stelae that he inscribed (Sinai 115), he added a mostly hieroglyphic caption that includes one Canaanite syllabic (or ‘syllable’) and one proto-consonantal letter.
Sinai 115 photograph (Courtesy of Douglas Petrovich)
Sinai 115 drawing (Courtesy of Douglas Petrovich)
This is the oldest attested proto-consonantal letter in the world, dating to Year 18 of King Amenemhat III (ca. 1842 BCE). The oldest inscription completely inscribed in the proto-consonantal script (Sinai 377)—which derives from Wadi Nasb, the nearby water source for mining expeditions to Serabit—dates to only two years later. According to my reading, the caption on Sinai 115 reads, “Six Levantines, Hebrews of Bethel, the beloved.”
This reading of Sinai 115’s caption thus confirms that the engraver whom I previously had identified as a biblical figure from the 19th century BCE is Hebrew. The reference to Bethel is not surprising, because, according to biblical history, that site was the hometown of Jacob when Joseph was taken into captivity, and when Jacob relocated his family to Egypt. Sinai 115 also moves back into time by hundreds of years the oldest attested reference to the Israelite/Hebrew people.
Of the 15 proto-consonantal inscriptions that were full enough for me to translate, five were composed during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, while the other ten were composed during the New Kingdom. Interestingly, the Middle Kingdom inscriptions are almost completely optimistic and positive in their tone, while the New Kingdom inscriptions are almost completely pessimistic and negative in their tone. The number of original alphabetic letters is 22, which conflicts with the long-held conjecture that originally there were 27 letters, probably the result of incorrect extrapolation back from Ugaritic, a Semitic language with more than 22 consonants.
These findings are discussed in my book, The World’s Oldest Alphabet: Hebrew as the Language of the Proto-Consonantal Script (Carta: Jerusalem, 2016). According to my new readings, three of the proto-consonantal Hebrew inscriptions contain references to biblical figures: Asenath (Sinai 376), Ahisamach (Sinai 375a), and Moses (Sinai 361). Each of these names is used of only one individual in the entire Hebrew Bible, unlike more commonly used names, such as Joshua.
Sinai 375a photograph (Courtesy of Douglas Petrovich)
Sinai 375a drawing (Courtesy of Douglas Petrovich)
Sinai 361 photograph (Courtesy of Douglas Petrovich)
Sinai 361 drawing (Courtesy of Douglas Petrovich)
Asenath is the wife of Joseph (Gen 41:45), and Sinai 376 probably refers to her posthumously, since she was born over 130 years before it was composed, and because it refers to the ‘house of the vineyard of Asenath’ honorifically. Ahisamach is the father of Oholiab (Exod 31:6), who was one of the two men reportedly assigned to construct the Israelite tabernacle. Sinai 375a designates Ahisamach with the office of Overseer of Minerals (?), probably signifying that he was responsible for the mineralogical work related to the acquisition of turquoise.
Moses, who needs little or no explanation, is the man attributed with having led the Israelites out of Egyptian captivity (Exodus 12). The Hebrew author of Sinai 361 complained that their bound servitude had lingered, then stated that Moses—whose name appears in the emphatic position—then provoked astonishment, and that this was a year of astonishment, due to Baalath (the female consort of the storm-god deity, and who in Egypt was identified with Hathor).
The thesis of my book challenges many longstanding theoretical constructs that have been created in the fields of biblical and ancient Near Eastern historical studies, such as the Documentary Hypothesis and its derivatives. The thesis also argues against models of Israelite origins suggesting that they migrated from Transjordan, or arose from among pastoralists already present in Canaan’s western highlands.
Despite the strong opposition that already has come against the claims in my book, I felt responsible to publish these findings, fully expecting that over the coming decades, time will prove them able to withstand the rigors of scholarly criticism.
Douglas Petrovich teaches in the history department at Wilfred Laurier University.
In ancient Mesopotamia, people knew how to appreciate a good beer. They appreciated their beer often and often in large quantities. They sang songs and wrote poetry about beer. Sometimes they got drunk and threw caution to the wind.
In his piece for ANE Today, Douglas Petrovich claims some of the thirty or so inscriptions engraved on stone monuments around the Egyptian turquoise mines at Serâbîṭ el-Khâdim in western Sinai mention biblical figures. The following comments refer only to what he has written there.
What is the language behind the world’s first alphabet? For over 150 years, scholars have studied the world’s first alphabetic script, the second millennium BCE Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, found at Serabit el-Khadim in the southern reaches of the Sinai Peninsula.
What stories do we tell about our own origins? What tales do we recount about the origins of others? What happens when our narratives – those about ourselves, and those about others – merge?
[/vc_column_text][mk_divider thickness=”1″ margin_top=”10″][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]The Ancient Near East Today features contributions from diverse academics, a forum featuring debates of current developments from the field, and links to news and resources. The ANE Today covers the entire Near East, and each issue presents discussions ranging from the state of biblical archaeology to archaeology after the Arab Spring.
Take a look at the contents of this e-book!
Rabbinic Tales of Roman Origins
Hebrew as the Language behind the World’s First Alphabet?
A Response to “Hebrew as the Language behind the World’s First Alphabet?”
Potent Potable of the Past: Beer and Brewing in Mesopotamia
(Very) Long Distant Trade – Egyptian, Mesopotamia and Denmark in the Late Bronze Age
The Ancient Near East Today features contributions from diverse academics, a forum featuring debates of current developments from the field, and links to news and resources. The ANE Today covers the entire Near East, and each issue presents discussions ranging from the state of biblical archaeology to archaeology after the Arab Spring.
