A new permanent exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology draws on artifacts from excavations spanning much of the century to reveal the daily lives of the Bronze and Iron age inhabitants of Canaan and ancient Israel.
By Todd Pitock
University of Pennsylvania Museum excavations at Gibeon, clearing debris in pool, directed by James B. Pritchard (1956-1962). (inset) Grotesque coffin lid. Beth Shean, Israel. Early Iron Age (c.1175 BCE). The rendering of the quite exaggerated facial features in high relief is termed “grotesque” by archaeologists in order to draw a contrast to the naturalistic lids on which the faces are roughly life-size and portrait-like.
Megiddo, a small town in Israel, is at the crossroads of what was once a major land route between Asia and Africa. Historically, whoever controlled it controlled trade, so it was a constant battleground. Situated on a hill, or har in Hebrew, it was known as Har Megiddo until the Greeks wrested control and hellenized the name by attaching the suffix -on. Biblical prophets believed Har Megiddo would be the locus of a catastrophic, final conflagration.
Today, the word Armageddon conjures a frightening image of the world’s end. The place itself is obscure — not even a pin prick on an atlas — except to archaeologists, who still mine the area for artifacts.
The etymology, though, illustrates how Biblical ideas that seem like visions inspired within a mystic void more often than not come from a particular set of circumstances. In fact, for many people, even religious people, the Bible is something of an abstraction — parable and poetry, prayer and prophecy — that is divorced from its historical context.
Archaeologists try to restore that context by piecing together artifacts to form a picture of daily life that texts like the Bible don’t really provide. As Dr. Barry Gitlin, a Penn-trained archaeologist who is now head of the Hebrew University of Baltimore’s archaeology department, puts it, “We need artifacts because using the text alone would be like inferring daily life in America from reading the Congressional Record.” In the best of cases, the array of disinterred objects offers glimpses of ordinary lives, giving such mundane but revealing details as what people wore, what tools they used, even what issues concerned them.
A first-of-its-kind permanent exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, “Canaan and Ancient Israel,” which opened October 18, reconstructs life in the Bronze and Iron Ages and suggests what shaped the identities of the Bible’s people. Five hundred artifacts, including jewelry, statuary, pottery, inscribed seals, weapons, and coffins, were selected from the Museum’s 15,000-plus collection, one of the largest outside of the Levant, the Biblical lands encompassing Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon. The exhibit draws together material culled from six excavations over a period of more than 60 years. It also features replicas and texts.
“We’ve assumed most visitors can connect with the objects through their background in the Bible,” says Dr. Bruce Routledge, the James B. Pritchard Assistant Curator for the Museum’s Near East section and co-curator of the exhibit. “Our educational goal is to pick up on this connection and get people to ask what life was like [in Canaan and ancient Israel]. We want to convey the idea that identity is complicated and formed over time.” The exhibit doesn’t necessarily provide hard-and-fast answers. Archaeology can be like a jigsaw puzzle with many missing parts. Penn’s collection, though, is particularly good not only because of its scope but because Museum archaeologists documented their discoveries in diaries, daybooks, photos, even watercolors that provided much-needed background in the days before color photography. “Without that documentation, you can say an object is beautiful, but there’s no way to know where it came from — a house, say, or a grave — so you lose the story, the point of the artifact,” observes Dr. Linda Bregstein, co-curator and research associate at the Museum.
The new exhibit has some unusual highlights, including a life-size replica of a Bronze Age house. One wall has been removed, so you view it in profile. There are two human mannequins, one grinding wheat into flour and the other spinning wool. A loom shows weaving, and an oven shows bread-baking. A goat mannequin illustrates the role animals played in daily life. The house, which is based on actual houses excavated in the Jordan Valley, dates to the eighth century BCE. It’s a typical domestic house in Israel, Judah, and Jordan, and the purpose is to show the basic rhythms of daily life. Most of the objects inside were found in the houses. The loom and oven are replicas.
“The house is typical of what archaeologists tend to find on digs,” says Routledge. “We don’t find many whole Egyptian temples, but we do find a lot of evidence of houses and daily activity. It’s really central to what life was like in those places.”
Other extraordinary pieces include a series of offering stands, which held vessels used to burn incense. The stands feature elaborate iconography with snakes, birds, and people. Modern observers can only guess at their meanings, with some suggesting that the birds are messengers and the snakes represent some connection with the underworld. In general, the best guesses come from examining objects in light of written documents, but even then, explains Routledge, “Sometimes there is a disconnect between literature and art. There are symbols and myths but they don’t always go together neatly or in ways we understand.”
Most of the collection comes from Beth Shean, a Pompeii-like archaeological preserve in Israel at the intersection of the Jordan and Jezreel Valleys. Beth Shean is a classic tel, an artificial mound that grew as succeeding civilizations built on top of one another over the course of centuries. It provides a historical record that allows archaeologists to dig, quite literally, through time.
Following World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled the Levant for four centuries, the League of Nations endorsed British rule of Palestine in what came to be known as the “British Mandate.” For American Biblical archaeologists, the period was a Golden Age. The political climate was favorable and America itself was opening up to the world and making money available for scholarly and cultural activities. The University Museum, which also sent teams to Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Egypt, seized the opportunity, funding an excavation in Beth Shean, in what was then Palestine, in 1921.
Penn’s first excavation was prolific. In the next 13 years, led by three distinguished field directors — Clarence Fisher, who was followed by Alan Rowe, and then Gerald Fitzgerald — the teams found temples, a garrison, burial plots, eventually digging through 18 city levels, unearthing 7,500 artifacts and uncovering a complete sequence of civilizations that went back to the late Neolithic or Chalcolithic periods, or 4,000 BCE to 900 BCE. (During part of the time the excavation was under way — from 1928 to 1933 — a Haverford team was working at nearby Beth Shemesh, finding family and communal tombs, among other things. It consulted the Penn team, which it paid with artifacts.) The scale of the excavation, which ended in 1934, was unprecedented.
The Museum’s 1920s excavation at Beth Shean, Israel. Removal of the “Lion and Dog” stone panel (14th century BCE), with the tel in the background. (insets from left) Shrine house. Beth Shean, Israel. Iron Age (c.11th century BCE). Probably used as a stand to support a vessel in which incense was burned, this shrine house is modeled in the form of a two-story temple building. The man in the window may represent a worshipper, priest, or Canaanite god. Naturalistic coffin lid. Northern Cemetery, Beth shean, Israel. Early Iron Age (c.1175 BCE). Sarcophagi discovered at Beth Shean, influenced by Egyptian burial customs, are decorated with human faces in realistic or grotesque styles.
After the dig concluded, there were no other excavations until 1956, when a professor of religious thought, Dr. James B. Pritchard, Gr’42, Hon’91, who had done his doctorate at Penn but was employed by the Church Divinity School at Berkeley, began directing an excavation at a site near Jerusalem called el-Jib. Pritchard identified the area as Gibeon, which is mentioned in biblical narratives. (See the Book of Joshua, Chapter 10: “Gibeon was a great city, as one of the royal cities…” To frighten the Amorites, who threaten the city, Joshua orders the sun to stand still.) Here, Pritchard found a winery with underground rock-cut vaults, which kept the wine cool, and jugs with inscribed handles identifying the vineyard’s owner and actually naming the site. The subterranean complex, moreover, indicated industrial-scale wine production (about 25,000 gallons), which was unusual in the period. The Gibeon dig lasted until 1962.
In 1964, Pritchard went to Tel Es-Sa’idiyeh in the Bekah Valley, on the east bank of the central Jordan Valley. Sarcophagi found there showed how itinerant craftsmen from different cultures had intermingled during the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages. Here, the artifacts challenged the Bible’s emphasis on strongly defined — and separate — cultures. A mask sealing a clay sarcophagus, for example, is reminiscent of Egyptian material. The objects buried with the coffins, though, show a mix of local Canaanite pottery and imported objects from Greece and Egypt. The man who was laid to rest, archaeologists theorize, was probably not an Egyptian because the bulk of the objects were local, which would be unusual for an Egyptian. Rather, he was likely a Canaanite in the employ of Egyptians or possibly a Philistine, as indicated by the headdress, which is feathered — an image that in Egyptian reliefs represents seafaring peoples.
“The Bible wasn’t necessarily denying that different people mixed,” observes co-curator Bregstein, “but it was looking to create an Us versus Them mentality, which is something we still do.” Even so, Routledge adds, the Bible itself shows influences in books like Psalms, where poetic styles imitate Egyptian verse of the same period.
The 1967 War ended the dig and put the Jordan Valley off-limits, so in 1970 Pritchard went to Sarafand, Lebanon, to the site of ancient Sarepta, a Phoenician city. While evidence of the peripatetic Phoenicians was scattered from the Levant to Spain, little until then had been found in their heartland in what is now Lebanon. In Sarepta, Pritchard discovered workshops, the remains of a shrine, and inscriptions that named the city. That excavation ended with the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1974. (One powerful resemblance between ancient and modern history in the region is, sadly, conflict.) The last dig, headed by Dr. Patrick McGovern, Gr’80, an archaeologist who trained under Professor Pritchard, occurred in the Baq’ah Valley near Amman, Jordan, from 1981 until 1987.
Between the Beth Shean and the other excavations, there were many methodological and historical changes. Earlier in the century, archaeologists tended to dig as much and as widely as they could and hunted for the best preserved objects. Their successors learned how to get more information with less digging. They paid more attention to fragments and took a wider variety of samples, including soil samples and seeds. You could say they had also acquired a greater respect for the future, leaving material for the next generation, confident that methods and techniques will improve over time.
More germane to the Museum exhibit, however, antiquity export laws had changed. At Beth Shean, the excavators were allowed to keep half of what they found. In contrast, by the 1970s export restrictions on antiquities had become so tight that only sample studies were permitted to leave. Consequently, the exhibit’s best pieces are from the earliest dig. Even unspectacular pieces reveal more information because, as Bregstein notes, “you can line up five objects and see how they relate to one another.”
Until now, the public has had little opportunity to glimpse the trove of material. Some artifacts were on display in what was intended as a temporary exhibit in the Museum, and others from Haverford’s Beth Shemesh excavation were on show in a Haverford library. The greater part of the collection was stored in the Museum basement. In the early 1990s, a visiting professor from Israel, Eliezer Oren proposed building a permanent gallery. In 1993, the Museum got grants for an exhibit, and it followed up by endowing the Pritchard Assistant Curatorship, which it filled in 1996 with the arrival of Routledge, a Toronto native, who along with Bregstein selected pieces and conceived of the gallery’s design.
At 1,800 square feet, the new gallery is spacious but obviously could not accommodate the entire catalogue. In choosing which objects to include, Routledge and Bregstein used two essential criteria. An artifact had to be extraordinary, or unique in terms of the archaeology of the area, or it had to be typical of a particular time and place. “We chose things that would tell a story,” says Routledge.
Instead of following a chronological path, the exhibit follows its unifying theme of personal identity, with sections dealing with various aspects of society, including politics and religion, domestic life, trade and commerce, death and burial, and the roles of different groups of people like women and the elderly.
Each section contains objects from a range of periods and many features are intended to provoke questions that visitors are not likely to have considered before. How, for example, did the Phoenicians, whom Homer and the Bible record as great craftsmen and traders and who sailed all the way from their original home in Lebanon to Spain, conduct international trade before there was even such a thing as coins or any sort of monetary standard? Since the Bronze Age represented the beginning of the city-state — little fiefdoms controlled by powerful families or small elites — what kind of contact did different peoples have with one another? And still more basic: how did these people make bread and clothes and houses, or even name their children? The questions raised in the gender section deal with how women’s roles were defined in a patriarchal society.
Group outside Beth Shean expedition house, December 1926. Dr. Alan Rowe, expedition director, is the second man standing in from the right (arms folded). The man next to him (far right) is Gerald Fitzgerald, who succeeded Rowe as field director. (insets from left) Plaque figurine: Goddess with lotus flowers. Beth Shemesh, Israel. Bronze Age, (c.1539-1175 BCE). This mold-made figurine features the Canaanite goddess Astarte, the goddess of love and war (the Canaanite counterpart of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar), holding a lotus plant in each hand. Judean pillar figurine; detail of head. Beth Shemesh, Israel. Iron Age, (c.8th-7th century BCE). Ceramic figurines were a prominent part of daily Israelite religious practice. This depicts a goddess of fertility, Asherah,worshipped probably by women. Stele with goddess and worshipper. Beth Shean, Israel. Late Bronze Age, (c.1250 BCE). This limestone stela depicts a female worshipper before the principal Canaanite deity (Astarte) or the Egyptian goddess Hathor. Cylindrical stand fragment with portrait of Canaanite male. Beth Shean, Israel. Late Bronze Age, (c. 1250 BCE). This cylindrical stand, perhaps used in the Canaanite religious cult, features a careful rendering of a bearded male wearing a high, fluted feather headdress. The headdress may be related to the headgear of the Sea Peoples, of whom the best known are the Philistines.
The introductory section is about politics and bureaucracy. The artifacts exhibited symbolize prestige and power, and include weapons and warrior burials from the middle Bronze Age. There are door lintels with titles and blessings in hieroglyphics, royal seals, standardized weights.
The exhibit proceeds into a section on religion, particularly Egyptian and Canaanite religions at Beth Shean and then in Canaan and Israel in relation to the Bible. The period introduced the idea of a temple as the house of a deity, and there is a feature on Solomon’s Temple and evidence of competing religions. “A lot of stuff is foreign to the popular understanding of the Bible,” Routledge comments. “We don’t have early manuscripts, so we have a text panel with photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and amulets with Biblical quotes. They detail the Bible as an object itself.”
The full-scale house shows domestic life, and it is followed by a section on technology and crafts, which covers agriculture, wine- and olive-oil-making, jewelry and handicrafts, and pottery, and ends with a feature on the Phoenicians that illustrates the extent to which technology and craft skills gave them their identity.
In a section on trade and commerce, the exhibit shows how people exchanged things before coins were introduced. A large interactive map shows how objects came from different parts of the Middle East into Canaan and Israel. Examples are on the map, with fragments that visitors match to the regions. Another feature shows how craftsmen in one place were influenced by designs brought in from others. Again, it points to the extent of cultural interaction.
The section on personal identity features a series of figurines depicting women. In one, a pregnant woman holds her belly and appears to be smiling. Another is a nude. The late Bronze Age pieces are called Astarte figurines after the Canaanite fertility goddess. Identifying particular pieces depends on informed guesses. One piece may be Qudushu, a goddess imported from Egypt. One may be Anat, a Canaanite goddess often associated with hunting and warfare. In some figures, elements of all three goddesses blend. Though the figures tend to have a fertility aspect, the intention of their Bronze Age creators remains unclear. Were they reenacting coitus, expressing fertility concerns, or even simply expressing concern for changing seasons? Still, the naturalistic expressions do show what women looked like, though it’s impossible to know whether these particular women were typical or ideals of beauty.
The curators wanted to raise the rather modern question of gender roles. With archaeological evidence limited mainly to toiletry articles, jewelry, and the figurines, the curators decided to present text alongside those artifacts that would stir conversation. “We don’t solve the question but raise it,” says Routledge. “We ask critically just who is defining the roles, and of course we recognize that these were strongly patriarchal societies.”
The exhibit closes with a dramatic section on death and highlights two types of burials. One, a communal or family burial, dates from the Middle Bronze Age (1600 BCE) in Beth Shemesh and shows how families used the tomb over a long period of time. As one person died, he or she was put in with offering bowls and the tomb was sealed until the next burial.
That burial is contrasted with a burial from Beth Shean and dates to the Egyptian occupation around 800 BCE. A clay sarcophagus with a mask cover (the mask is of a man’s face) is mounted vertically. On the wall next to it, the coffin is outlined with pottery that the deceased would have been buried with. The effect is that you can see what the object was and also how and what objects were buried with people.
For the Museum, the exhibit fits neatly with other Bronze and Iron Age collections, including galleries on Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the ancient Greek world. Every collection is of course tailored to its strengths, and whereas the others have a great deal of material pertaining to death, the Canaan and ancient Israel exhibit focuses more on daily life in the periods.
In archaeology circles, word of the exhibit has been received enthusiastically. Dr. Gitlin, who got his doctorate in archaeology at Penn under Professor Pritchard’s tutelage, says he heard about it this summer. “It gives the public a chance to visualize and conceptualize their general knowledge of the Bible in three-dimensional terms.”
The curators wanted to make the biblical period relevant to the average lay visitor. The Museum’s audience consists of Philadelphia school students, the Penn community, and a third, less defined group of people who just like to go to museums. While tours can be arranged, most visitors will experience the gallery on their own, so the curators tried to use titles and lead sentences that summarize text panels. “Things like the house provide opportunities for object lessons,” Routledge says. “I hope some tour groups, especially those with urban school kids, won’t be there just to learn about Canaan and ancient Israel but to see what’s involved in going from wheat to bread. How did you get clothing when there were no stores? What role did animals play when you lived with them all the time?”
“This isn’t a gallery about biblical religion but about the biblical way of life,” adds Bregstein. “It’s not an archaeologist’s perspective. The types of artifacts that get archaeologists excited are not what enthuse the general public. I want people to come away with what life was like.”
Todd Pitock, C’87, is a writer whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The San Francisco Examiner, and The Toronto Globe & Mail. He was formerly assistant editor of The Journal of Israeli History, a Tel Aviv University publication.
