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[/vc_column_text][mk_image src=”http://www.asortest.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/social-fb-icon4.jpg” image_width=”42″ image_height=”42″ hover=”false” custom_url=”https://www.facebook.com/ASOResearch/” margin_bottom=”0″][mk_image src=”http://www.asortest.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/social-tw-icon4.jpg” image_width=”42″ image_height=”42″ hover=”false” custom_url=”https://twitter.com/ASOResearch?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor” margin_bottom=”0″][mk_image src=”http://www.asortest.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/social-in-icon4.jpg” image_width=”42″ image_height=”42″ hover=”false” custom_url=”https://www.linkedin.com/company/american-schools-of-oriental-research” margin_bottom=”0″][mk_image src=”http://www.asortest.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/social-ml-icon_7.jpg” image_width=”42″ image_height=”42″ hover=”false” custom_url=”mailto:info@asor.org” margin_bottom=”0″][mk_image src=”http://www.asortest.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/blog-icon3.jpg” image_width=”42″ image_height=”42″ hover=”false” custom_url=”http://asor.org/blog” margin_bottom=”0″][/vc_column][vc_column border_color=”rgba(255,255,255,0.01)” width=”1/6″ css=”.vc_custom_1496683923840{margin-right: 20px !important;border-left-width: 2px !important;padding-right: 20px !important;padding-left: 20px !important;border-left-color: #99422f !important;}”][mk_divider divider_color=”rgba(255,255,255,0.01)” thickness=”1″ margin_top=”3″ margin_bottom=”3″][vc_column_text] [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column border_color=”rgba(170,170,170,0.01)” width=”1/2″ css=”.vc_custom_1487276122024{margin-right: 10px !important;margin-bottom: 30px !important;border-right-width: 2px !important;border-bottom-width: 2px !important;padding-top: 30px !important;padding-right: 30px !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 responsive_align=”left”]ASOR REMEMBERS PHILIP KING
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Philip J. King (1925–2019)
By Joseph A. Greene and Stuart Swiny
Professor Philip J. King, a former president of ASOR, died in Boston, Massachusetts, December 7, 2019, aged 94. He was eulogized by Boston College, where he taught from 1974 to 2001, and by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, where he was ordained a priest in 1949. These memorials were devoted to Phil’s priestly life and his academic formation and subsequent career. This remembrance focuses rather on his many years of service to ASOR—not only as president but in other ways besides—as well as his role as mentor, colleague and friend to those who knew him through those years. In this brief tribute we can touch only on the salient points and offer some personal recollections.
Phil’s formal involvement with ASOR began as a member of the Board of Trustees (1973–1990) during which time he became president of the Albright Institute (1972–1976) and then president of ASOR (1976–1982). Before that, he had spent a fellowship year in Jerusalem as an Albright Fellow at what was still the “American School in Jerusalem.” (It became the “Albright Institute of Archaeological Research,” AIAR, only in 1970.) His time in Jerusalem led Phil to a series of archaeological field projects: Tell es-Sa`idiyeh and Tell er-Rumeith in Jordan (1967), Tell Ta`anach in the West Bank (1968), then Gezer and Hesi in Israel (1968–1973). Nancy Lapp, whose late husband Paul directed the Rumeith excavations, first met him there. Much later she recalled using Phil’s handwritten field notebooks while preparing the final Rumeith report with Tristan Barako (Tell er-Rumeith: The Excavations of Paul W. Lapp, 1962 and 1967. ASOR Archaeological Reports 22 [2015]). In 1986 Phil returned to the renamed Albright Institute as an NEH Fellow. In 1989–1990 he was elected Life Member of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge at the conclusion of a fellowship there.
His academic service was not confined to ASOR. He held the presidency of two other learned societies, the Catholic Biblical Association (1981–1982) and the Society for Biblical Literature (1988), and served on the Board of Governors of the American Research Center in Egypt, ARCE (1982–1985) and the Archaeological Institute of America, AIA (1983–1988).
But it was a ASOR president that Phil made his greatest mark. One instance is emblematic: as ASOR president Phil played a crucial role in the establishment of ASOR’s institute in Nicosia, the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, CAARI. He did much to ensure its financial survival during those difficult early years, at one stage even offering to lend CAARI some of his own money in order to keep it going. Indeed without Phil’s dogged pursuit of funding for CAARI in 1981 and 1982 it might well have closed down. Thanks to Phil’s effort, CAARI survived; and today it thrives as a major force in archaeological and historical research in the eastern Mediterranean.
Stepping down as ASOR president in 1982, Phil turned immediately to researching and writing a chronicle of ASOR first 80 years: American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research (1983). This remains an indispensable account of ASOR’s founding and early years. Many aspects of it recur prominently in what could be called the Deuteronomistic version of ASOR’s history, An ASOR Mosaic: A Centennial History of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1900–2000 (ed. Seger, 2001).
It was Phil’s friendship with the late Leon Levy and with Shelby White, a friendship that developed during Phil’s ASOR presidency, that produced, ultimately, the lasting archaeological legacy of the Leon Expedition to Ashkelon, led by Larry Stager, the late Dorot Professor of the Archaeology of Israel at Harvard. This friendship also resulted in 1997 in the creation of the Leon Levy-Shelby White Program for Archaeological Publications, of which Phil King was the founding director. Under Phil’s leadership and under his successor, Professor Christopher Hallett of the University of California, Berkeley, the White-Levy Program has supported the publication of scores of final dig reports, not just in the Near East but globally.
In 2006 the Leon Levy Foundation established with an endowment to Harvard the Philip J. King Professor “to support an outstanding scholar of the ancient world.” In 2010, Dr. Peter Der Manuelian, an Egyptologist, was appointed the first Philip J. King Professor thereby bringing back to Harvard the study of Egyptology after a hiatus of over 70 years.
This incomplete and too brief account can hardly to justice Philip King’s decades-long contributions to ASOR, but we hope we have called attention to the most important of those contributions.
Joseph A. Greene is Deputy Director and Curator of the Semitic Museum of Harvard University. Stuart Swiny directed the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute in Nicosia from 1980 to 1995 and then became Professor of Anthropology at the University at Albany–SUNY where he taught until his retirement in 2014.[/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]
modeled to depict what is commonly interpreted as people engaged in ritual activities in front of a shrine. The vessel has long intrigued archaeologists working in Cyprus, partly because unambiguous evidence for religious structures and paraphernalia has eluded them in the archaeological record. However, excavations at the Early–Middle Bronze Age site of Alambra in central Cyprus have yielded an artifact that closely resembles the finials placed atop the “throne” depicted in the Vounous Bowl. Its find context—in a room within a domestic structure that also contained a human burial—supports those interpretations of the Vounous Bowl that emphasize its sacred dimensions and its possible connections with the mortuary domain.
It includes a high mound and several lower terraces, ca. 25 ha in area. The site gained notoriety when an imported potsherd bearing an Egyptian royal symbol (a serekh) incised with the hieroglyph of an early ruler, Narmer, was found in Excavation Area D. Large-scale exposure there in the 1950s and 1960s, under the direction of Shmuel Yeivin, unearthed a rather lengthy and complicated stratigraphic sequence that has prompted numerous attempts at correlating its Early Bronze Age strata with Dynasty 0 and the early 1st Dynasty in Egypt. Yeivin’s cursorily published results illustrate only partial and rudimentary plans of the Early Bronze Age strata in Area D, most of which lack elevations. One exceptionally large building boasting seven substantial mudbrick pillars has attracted researchers’ attention, as it likely had a public function. This essay, based on Yeivin’s original, unpublished plans that include elevations, as well as information derived from recent excavations in Area D, offers a detailed reconstruction of the plan of that building, which suggests its likely chrono-stratigraphic ascription to late phases of the Early Bronze I. It further notes its importance for understanding the relationship between Egypt and the southern Levant in this late prehistoric period, and especially the place of Tel ʿErani as one of a growing number of sites in the southern Levant known to yield definitive evidence for the onset of its earliest complex, hierarchical societies in the first centuries of the 4th millennium b.c.e.
engagement with the international maritime trade networks of the eastern Mediterranean. A longstanding scholarly preoccupation with interregional trade has encouraged the development of theoretical models that aim to reconstruct the economy of the island and generally view Late Cypriot coastal sites as gateway communities channeling copper to the eastern Mediterranean. Studies have also highlighted the local and regional significance of these communities and have shed light on their complex economic networks. In this paper, we use data from coastal Tochni-Lakkia, an actively eroding site located near two major Late Bronze Age centers (Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios and the Maroni Complex) to add nuance to smaller-scale regional interaction networks along the south-central coast of the island. To do that, we engage evidence from trial excavations and archaeological and geophysical surveys at Tochni-Lakkia in the form of a preliminary report with theoretical approaches that highlight the potential for and role of regional maritime networks and the concept of coastscape.
The results outline elements in Jerusalem’s nearby woody vegetation, characterized by a mosaic of native Mediterranean maquis-forest species and olive orchards, and possibly pine and cypress stands. The arboreal surrounding of Jerusalem supplied the city with pruned olive branches and other types of agricultural refuse to serve as firewood. Local conifers (pines and cypress) as well as imported conifers (cedar of Lebanon), were used for construction purposes. The results further highlight important issues such as social status and importation of wood. The occurrence of prestigious imported tree species within the charcoal assemblage of the Lower City (e.g., cedar, boxwood) indicates the presence of wealthy residences, standing in contrast to prior assumptions that suggest a low social status for the inhabitants within this area.
At this early date, iron was already used rather extensively for utilitarian purposes at the site, though bronze was not yet restricted to decorative use. The metal assemblage from Khirbet Qeiyafa, therefore, provides a rare glimpse into the transition from bronze to iron at the beginning of Iron Age II. This article presents the typology and spatial distribution of the finds, followed by a discussion of their possible cultural and social implications.
Recent excavations provide the first unequivocal indication that the site was inhabited during the Late Bronze Age as a farm/hamlet, perhaps also a waystation. The main architectural feature is a large partially-excavated structure, whose contents—mainly pottery—were well preserved by a destruction level. We propose that the destruction assemblage dates around the mid-14th century b.c.e. and that the structure was built around 1400 b.c.e., thus somewhat later than Thutmose III’s famed first campaign. Since pottery of this period is known primarily from large/central sites, Tel Esur offers an exceptional glimpse into a 14th century b.c.e. assemblage from the rural Canaanite domain. Currently, it is also the only small site excavated along the ʿAruna Pass between Megiddo and the Sharon, inter alia offering insights about this stretch of the Via Maris during the Late Bronze Age. This is the first synthesis of Tel Esur during this period. We focus on typo-chronology, and on the main characteristics of the ceramic assemblage, including unique phenomena such as storage in Cypriot-Style pithoi and Egyptianizing pottery in a rural setting.
It offers a first glimpse of life at Gordion during the mid-6th century (end of the Middle Phrygian period, Yassıhöyük Stratigraphic Sequence 5A). Greek imports provide a relatively firm date for the deposit and allow a chronologically specific snapshot of locally produced fine, household, and coarse wares. Vessels made of traditional Phrygian black-polished ware were used primarily for drinking. Lydian influence at the site is seen in the large number of burnished gray stemmed vessels, although the size of Gordion’s stemmed dishes and the way in which they were used apparently differ from the Lydian capital, Sardis. Bowls come in a variety of wares, shapes, and sizes, while large jars and jugs are primarily gray-slipped household wares, with some imports. Puzzling is a large terracotta object with pseudomorph appliqués suggesting metal attachments, which may have been a niche for a household cult. This initial presentation of the pottery from the mid-6th-century dump provides insight into multiple concerns and behaviors of Gordion’s inhabitants just before the Achaemenid Persian Empire.
The bulla originally sealed a papyrus document. Thanks to its excellent preservation, it is possible to identify a series of key aspects of the object: the motif and type of seal used to stamp it, the way the bulla was created, and even the way in which the original document was folded and tied. These details allow us to identify the probable origin and date of the seal and contextualize its associated bulla within the site of Qedesh. This evidence, in conjunction with information from the late 5th century b.c.e. Murašû archive in Nippur, allows us to suggest that the seal’s user may have been a person with Tyrian ties—perhaps a member of the Tyrian diaspora—who acquired his seal in Nippur and traveled to Qedesh where he used it to seal a document.
This paper focuses on the latest known period of occupation at Tayinat, which during the Iron Age was the Syro-Anatolian city of Kunulua. In 2004, following a 67-year hiatus, the University of Toronto’s Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP) resumed excavations at the site. Here we present the preliminary results of TAP’s investigations of the Iron Age II and III settlement, including the topography of the 1st millennium settlement, super- and sub-structural remains associated with Building II (a temple first discovered in the 1930s), a second, newly discovered temple (Building XVI), part of a large Assyrian-style courtyard building, and the remains of additional monumental architecture on the Iron Age citadel. The terminal phases of these structures date to the Iron Age III period, or the late 8th and 7th century occupation of Kunulua following the Assyrian conquest in 738 b.c.e., and collectively point to the transformation of Kunulua’s royal citadel into a Neo-Assyrian provincial administrative center, a pattern witnessed at contemporary sites elsewhere in southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria.
