In the Forest of History

Yesterday, I visited the LWL-Museum für Archäologie (Westphalian State Museum of Archeology) in Herne (not far from Bochum). The oldest finds are from about 250,000 years ago, the most recent from 1945. It is set up in a unique way - the permanent exhibition is below ground, as if it were an archaeological excavation. Many of the finds are displayed as they would have appeared when the archaeologists first discovered them. I found the museum rather disturbing at several points, and especially at the end.

As you walk in, you first encounter the "Forest of History" - a number of enormous tree trunks, set up as if they were a wood, that were discovered under water or in gravel pits in this region. They are between 5,000-14,000 years old, and were preserved in the water.

You then wend your way along a path through the museum, traveling chronologically from the distant past until 1945.

In the beginning of the museum there are many many stone tools, if you're interested in seeing their development and the different kinds of stone tools.

Many of the exhibits are taken from excavated graves, and thus include many grave goods - everyday or luxurious objects that were placed into the grave. The museum covers the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture, and includes a couple of dioramas of small agricultural settlements.

Model of an ancient agricultural settlement.

Model of another agricultural community, from the first millennium BCE.

Other finds, from between the sixth and the fourth millennium BCE, included a large variety of earthenware pots, some plain, some decorated.

Sixth millennium pots. The large pot in the middle has some interesting incised designs.

Fourth millennium pots.

The exhibits showed the transition from solely earthenware vessels to bronze and then iron objects. Bronze itself could not be manufactured in this area, because of the lack of copper and tin. Bronze was imported and was then worked on by local metalworkers.

Bronze knives and other objects, from between 2800-700 BCE, also grave goods.

A large bronze beaker, probably acquired through trade.

Apparently, before the Romans came and even for several hundred years after that, most people lived in isolated family farms, not even in small villages. The museum presented one example of a small settlement with bigger houses, where quite a number of families lived. The image below is a photograph of one of those reconstructed houses.

One of the most interesting pieces of historical information that I learned was that while the Romans tried to conquer the whole of Germany, they were unable to. Roman settlement had begun to the west of the Rhine, for example with the establishment of what is now known as the city of Cologne. When they tried to go east of the Rhine, the Roman legions were defeated in 9 CE in the "Battle of the Teutoberg Forest." After several more years of bitter fighting, the Romans decided to stay west of the Rhine, meaning that Bochum (which is east of the Rhine) was part of the area that did not become part of the Roman empire. I'm not particularly knowledgeable about Roman history outside of what is now Israel, so I had had the image in my head that the Roman legions were always victorious (since they put down at least three Jewish revolts - in 66-73, 115-117, and 132-135). The Germanic tribes, however, were better organized and much stronger than the Jewish rebels, so they were able to keep the Romans west of the Rhine.

But this did not mean that there was no contact with Rome. The museum catalog says, "All the same the Germanic tribes must have still had contacts with the Romans since in every Germanic settlement archaeologists find goods from the Roman Empire" (Das Museum, 2004, p. 43).

The region east of the Rhine came under the rule of Charlemagne in the eighth century, and he brought Christianity to the tribes in the east. As the catalog says, "At the end of the 8th century Charlemagne, king of the Franks, integrated the region of present-day Westphalia into his kingdom and had the inhabitants converted to Christianity." In the museum, to mark this event, one walks into a small room containing a "forest" of upright spears, and hears sounds of battle, including people's anguished cries, signifying the battles between Charlemagne and the Saxons.

The path then brings one into the Middle Ages, feudal manors, the building of castles, and then to the European voyages of discovery and the Renaissance. Much less space is devoted to these events than to the Roman and early Christian periods.

What came next was very disconcerting. The path leads one abruptly into the mid-20th century, and then you see several posts from the fence of a concentration camp that was established in Witten in 1944, as well as items from prisoners in the camp - identity disks, plates, and cutlery used by the prisoners. (Witten is a town right next to Bochum).

The camp housed prisoners who worked in local factories. About 750 prisoners were originally brought there from Buchenwald (the Witten camp belonged to the larger system of camps affiliated with Buchenwald), but many died due to ill-treatment, starvation, illness, unheated buildings, and inadequate clothing.


                                                         

On the left are the bowls, a pitcher, and cutlery.








To the right are the prisoners' identity tags.

I did some online research about the camp, and my next post will provide more information about the camp. There is now a memorial in Witten, in the location of the camp, and I'd like to visit there soon.


The final part of the path passes by items discovered in the rubble from Allied bombing of this part of
Germany. After the war, the bombed out sections of towns were rebuilt, which meant that the bomb rubble was covered by subsequent building. To right, in the glass case, are metal stamps used to make ration cards.

The museum was not what I was expecting. I thought it would be a more conventional museum, with exhibits in glass cases with explanations next to them. Instead, it was much more experiential. There were different sounds throughout the room. As you first walked in, through the ancient trees, you could hear the sound of lightning. Next to the cases filled with stone tools, there was the persistent sound of tapping. Leaving the small room the upright spears, in the doorway, a voice was reciting the Nicene Creed in German. In the enclosed "tent" with religious objects, there was the sound of church music and chanting. At the end, there were sounds of bombing.

This museum did not leave me with the feeling that history was safely in the past, and that when I left the museum I left the history behind, locked up in the building. No, history followed me out of the building, it came with me - the agricultural settlements in the woods, the battle in the forest between the Roman legions and the Germanic fighters, Charlemagne's armies converting people to Christianity, the Allied bombing and the inmates of the local concentration camp. It's all still here.

US Supported Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen destroys regional archaeological museum

I received this notice from the Agade list serve and thought it was worthwhile to reproduce, about the human and historical consequences of the current war in Yemen. The US is supporting the Saudis in their campaign against the Shia Houthis. This is from the Portable Antiquity Collecting and Heritage Issues blog, written by Paul Barford, who is a British archaeologist "living and working in Warsaw."

Dhamar, Yemen Museum Destroyed

The Dhamar Regional Museum in Yemen, the main museum of the Dhamar governorate, has been destroyed in a Saudi airstrike last Thursday. The Museum, built in 2002, is the repository of all work done in the province. Together with the building, it is not clear how much of the collection of pre-Islamic antiquities, including a number of dedicatory stelae and also the material produced by the Chicago Oriental Institute's work from 1978 onwards (see here too) have been lost. Some of the museum's artefacts were recently digitalised by CASIS an EU-funded project.

Saudi Arabia has been bombing Yemen in the last 62 days to bring its ally, fugitive president Mansour Hadi, back to power. The airstrikes have killed, at least, 3,912 Yemenis, according to FNA's independent tally. According to a recent report by Freedom House Foundation, most of the victims of the deadly Al Saud campaign are civilians, including a large number of women and children. Thousands of residential buildings have been destroyed, and hundreds of civil and public facilities were reduced to rubble as a result of the bombardments by Saudi warplanes on the Yemeni cities and towns, the group said.

The city of Dahmar, 100 km to the south of Sana'a, was one of the famous Arabic and Islamic culture and scientific centres in Yemen. 

We decry the many atrocities committed by Da'esh - massacres of Yezidis, Christians, Shiites and others in Syria and Iraq, their enslavement of Yezidis and Christians, taking women as sex slaves, and their destruction of antiquities that are part of the historical heritage of all humanity - but our supposed allies are bombing in Yemen in such a way as to kill many civilians, destroy residential buildings, and now also destroy antiquities.

Lilith, women, and magic

Last night, I gave a talk on "Women in early Jewish magic" at the Conservative Center in downtown Jerusalem. I talked about my research, with an emphasis on the figure of Em, the mother or foster-mother of Abaye, the fourth century Amora from Babylonia, who is knowledgeable about many matters of health and illness, and is also an expert on incantations and the use of amulets. I compared her with some of the women who are named in the Aramaic incantation bowls, looking at one bowl in particular, Bowl #17 in James Montgomery's Aramaic Incantation Texts (1913, available in full text online), where Komish bat Makhlafta exorcises the liliths from her household by means of divorce formulas known from the get, the Jewish divorce document. The point of the talk was to show how rabbis in the Talmud both blamed women for being involved in sorcery and were at the same time willing to learn from Em on healing and the use of amulets and incantations, and to compare her to a woman known from a non-rabbinic Babylonian text who uses rabbinic ritual formulas to rid her household from demons.

It turned out that at the same time I was giving the talk, Israel's television Channel One was broadcasting a television show where I appear, talking about Lilith!

Today, in the National Library, Professor David Weiss Halivni, whom I first met when had a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia from 1996-1998, and who now lives in Israel and comes to the Judaica Reading Room of the National Library to do research, came up to me and said that he saw me on Israel television yesterday, just before the Channel One news. This was very surprising, to say the least.

It turned out that episode 9 of season 3 of the "Naked Archaeologist" (made by Simcha Jacobovici in 2010) was shown last night on Channel One. (A trailer for the episode is available on Youtube). It was called "Queen of the Night" and is about Lilith. I was interviewed for the show a few years ago, when I was in Jerusalem, talking about a variety of things, including the image of Lilith in the Alphabet of Ben Sira - as both a demon and as a rebellious woman whom some contemporary feminists take as a role model. I also talked about how Lilith is blamed for the death of children and for seducing men in their sleep.

The show interviews Dr. Dan Levene, who teaches at the University of Southampton and has written extensively about the Aramaic incantation bowls. The show (not Dr. Levene) claims that all the magic bowls were found at Nippur (which is not true, although later in the show Jacobovici says that all the bowls are from Babylon, which is true), and that after the Iraq War, hundreds of the bowls, looted from Iraq, made their way to the antiquities markets in Jerusalem (I don't know if this is true). Jacobovici is shown in an antiquities shop in the Old City looking at one bowl. It's not particularly visible on the screen. The owner of the shop says that of course it's authentic, but we have no way of knowing that.

At this point, Jacobovici says, "This is kabbalah!" and an image of the kabbalistic Tree of Life is shown on the screen. In fact, the Aramaic bowls have nothing to do with medieval kabbalah. Jacobovici then turns to the question of how the image of Lilith found its way into Christian art. He shows us a medieval carving somewhere in Europe depicting the creation scene, with Lilith coming out of the top of the Tree of Knowledge in between Adam and Eve; her top is a beautiful woman, while below she is a snake, wrapped around Adam and Eve. He finds the source of this image in the Gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi, by equating Lilith with Sophia in Gnostic mythology. As far as I know, there is no relation whatsoever between Lilith and Sophia!

In between the interviews there are lots of clips from what look like movies from the 1940s and 50s depicting vampy actresses (who I suppose are supposed to be Lilith), kitschy images of ghosts, and other irrelevant images that jazz the show up. Jacobovici does present some of the research on Lilith accurately, but the show is marred by the mistakes he makes and his attempts to create links where none exist. It's entertainment, not archaeology or scholarship.

If you'd like to see a photo of an incantation bowl, here's one that Dan Levene has published (I took the image from this site that he maintains: http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/5331/2/M59B.JPG):

This bowl is from Dan Levene, 2003, A Corpus of Magic Bowls: Incantation Texts in Jewish Aramaic from Late Antiquity, New York pp. 31-38

Photos from the Galilee - Carmel, Jezreel, Beit Shearim, and Sepphoris

I've posted some of my photos to Picasa, and below are some examples - a link to the whole album is just below. 

Galilee, June 28, 2011

Carmel Forest - trees burned in the Carmel fire.

Fish ponds in the Jezreel valley.

At the Alexander Zaid property in Kiryat Tivon, looking down to one of the fish ponds.

Alexander Zaid statue - he was one of the founders of Ha-Shomer, created before WWI to protect Jewish agricultural settlements.

One of the sarcophagi at the ancient Jewish cemetery at Beit Shearim - in a burial cave.

Menorah carved out of the rock of one of the burial caves at Beit Shearim.

Mosaic floor at the Sepphoris synagogue (ancient Roman Jewish city) - the sun being drawn on his chariot, in the middle of the wheel of the Zodiac.

One of the seasons, pictured in the corner of the Zodiac panel in the Sepphoris synagogue - this is Summer.

Two of the signs of the Zodiac - Scorpio and Sagittarius.

Basket of first-fruits, which were brought to the Temple in Jerusalem when it still existed.

The "Mona Lisa of the Galilee," found on the mosaic floor of a Roman villa in Sepphoris.

Menorah on the mosaic floor of the synagogue, with a shofar on the right under the menorah.

Image of an Amazon riding a horse and about to throw a spear, at the Nile House at Sepphoris.