A new series inspiring dialogue, connection, and activism about the most pressing issues of our time.
SERIES KICKOFF: April 26, 2023 | 5:30 pm | 21+ ECO-SCIENCE SOCIAL
Short talks from Penn experts Susanna Berkouwer, Ph.D., Wharton; Barri Gold, Ph.D., Environmental Humanities; Jon Hawkings, Ph.D., Earth and Environmental Science; and Kathy Morrison, Ph.D., Anthropology • Local vendors and action groups Tour the CAAM Labs • Zero-waste bites and drinks (first drink on us)
SPECIAL GUEST: JOY HARJO
Internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and U.S. Poet Laureate, 2019–2022
Members of the Fellows Circle and above receive complimentary admission, a copy of Joy Harjo’s memoir Poet Warrior, and a chance to meet her during a post-event book signing. To join the Fellows Circle, visit www.penn.museum/membership.
Co-sponsored by Environmental Innovations Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania and CxRA. Ms. Harjo’s participation is made possible by Carrie Cox, PAR, and members of the Director’s Council.
www.penn.museum/seeds
By Virginia Herrmann and Adam Smith58 Prayer and Protection
RITUAL ACTS AND MAGICAL OBJECTS IN THE ANCIENT EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN
By Eric Hubbard By Joanna S. Smith66 Family Portraits
FROM PALMYRA TO PHILADELPHIA
By Lauren Ristvet By Joanna S. Smith74 Archaeology, Archives, and Empire
By David MulderWINTER 2023 | VOLUME 64, NUMBER 3 DEPARTMENTS
By Joanna S. Smith By Joanna S. SmithPENN MUSEUM 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6324 Tel: 215.898.4000 | www.penn.museum
The Penn Museum respectfully acknowledges that it is situated on Lenapehoking, the ancestral and spiritual homeland of the Unami Lenape.
Hours Tuesday–Sunday: 10:00 am–5:00 pm. Closed Mondays and major holidays. Museum Library Call 215.898.4021 for information.
Admission Penn Museum members: Free; PennCard holders (Penn faculty, staff, and students): Free; Active US military personnel with ID: Free; K-12 teachers with school ID: Free
Adults: $18.00; Seniors $16.00; Children (6-17) and students with ID: $13.00; Children 5 and under: Free.
EXCAVATING BETH SHEAN IN BRITISH MANDATE PALESTINE By Eric Hubbard
86 On the Rim of a Volcano
A WORLD WAR II STORY FROM THE ARCHIVES
By Janessa Reeves2
Above: Cylinder Seal, Beth Shean, 1500–1250 CE (29-104-138).
On the Cover: Opening weekend visitors taking in the scale of the restored sarcophagus from Beth Shean in the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery. See page 36. Photo by Eddy Marenco
GUEST EDITORS
Lauren Ristvet, Ph.D.
Virginia Herrmann, Ph.D.
Eric Hubbard
Joanna S. Smith, Ph.D.
PUBLISHER
Amanda Mitchell-Boyask
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER
Emily Holtzheimer
ARCHIVES AND IMAGE EDITOR
Alessandro Pezzati
GRAPHIC DESIGNERS
Colleen Connolly
Christina Jones
COPY EDITOR
Page Selinsky, Ph.D.
ACADEMIC ADVISORY BOARD
Marie-Claude Boileau, Ph.D.
Richard Leventhal, Ph.D.
Simon Martin, Ph.D.
Janet Monge, Ph.D.
Kathleen Morrison, Ph.D.
Lauren Ristvet, Ph.D.
C. Brian Rose, Ph.D.
Page Selinsky, Ph.D.
Stephen J. Tinney, Ph.D.
Jennifer Houser Wegner, Ph.D.
Lucy Fowler Williams, Ph.D.
CONTRIBUTORS
Jessica Bicknell
Marie-Claude Boileau, Ph.D.
Jennifer Brehm
Kris Forrest
Jo Tiongson-Perez
Alessandro Pezzati
PHOTOGRAPHY
Francine Sarin
Jennifer Chiappardi
Colleen Connolly
(unless noted otherwise)
INSTITUTIONAL OUTREACH MANAGER
Thomas Delfi
© The Penn Museum, 2023 Expedition® (ISSN 0014-4738) is published three times a year by the Penn Museum. Editorial inquiries should be addressed to expedition@ pennmuseum.org. Inquiries regarding delivery of Expedition should be directed to membership@ pennmuseum.org. Unless otherwise noted, all images are courtesy of the Penn Museum.
THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN GALLERY, opened November 19, 2022, celebrates the Penn Museum’s history of excavation and research in the cultural crossroads that includes modern-day Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Syria, Lebanon, and Cyprus. This special commemorative issue of Expedition includes essays by curators and graduate students that shed new light on this region—from essays about excavations in the 1920s and 1940s to new analyses of “Phoenician” ivories.
Initial discussions about the intellectual trajectory of this gallery came out of a working group in 2016 and 2017 that included professors and researchers from across Penn. Many who contributed to those discussions— including Professors Robert Ousterhout, C. Brian Rose, Thomas Tartaron, and Julia Wilker—broadened the chronological and geographical scope of the project, expanding the focus from the previous “Canaan and Ancient Israel” gallery to the region as a crossroads, encompassing the Eastern Mediterranean from the Late Bronze Age to the Islamic period.
After a hiatus, our curatorial team of four began meeting regularly with Museum staff to plan the gallery in January 2020. Suddenly, a few weeks later, the COVID lockdown barred all of us from the Museum for months and continued to limit access to the objects, archives, and libraries for more than a year. We quickly switched to an online workspace, which worked well for brainstorming, putting together narratives, and working on design, but not for working with and researching objects. The library became available via extended access to digital publications and eventually books by mail. Objects and archives, however, needed other solutions.
We were lucky that Yael Rotem photographed and documented many of the objects in the collection during her curatorial fellowship in 2016–2018. Without her work, it would not have been possible to design this gallery during lockdown. But there were still objects that we needed to see before we could include them in the gallery. Eventually, we came up with a way to do this at one-step removed, with a few pieces at a time. Online study sessions became invaluable. Registrar
Elizabeth Caroscio, Near East Section Keeper Katherine Blanchard, and Mediterranean Section Keeper Lynn Makowsky were allowed to come to the Museum a few days a week. They live-streamed objects on Zoom, took measurements, answered our questions, and generally provided key information about the objects. In the Archives, Alessandro Pezzati and Evan Peugh filmed themselves leafing through archival folders so that we could see what they contained and photographed key documents for us. In this way the team devised an enormous list of over 600 objects, which we eventually winnowed down to the approximately 400 objects displayed in the gallery.
One of the co-curators, Joanna Smith, is grateful that she had studied in person many objects related to the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery in years prior to 2020. She had engaged in research projects with the Museum’s collections of Cypriot objects and taught two History of Art seminars in the Museum during 2016 and 2017: one about ancient textiles, the other about a hypothetical Cyprus gallery for the Museum. There are echoes of these seminars in the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery, especially in the displays about sea trade, textiles, copper, and the sanctuary of Apollo at Kourion on Cyprus. All of us are grateful to the graduate students from AAMW, Religious Studies, NELC, and Art History who, with their specializations in periods and cultures across the gallery’s expanded scope, were key to telling the region's complex story.
Other members of the gallery team faced unusual challenges as well, which they overcame creatively. In Conservation, Jessica Byler and Lynn Grant found ways to document and treat each object despite the closure of their laboratory during the opening months of the pandemic. Similarly, Director of Exhibitions Jessica Bicknell and Director of Preparation Ben Neiditz came up with
workarounds when supply chain problems made procuring casework, especially glass, nearly impossible.
The Eastern Mediterranean Gallery showcases a region that has long been a crossroads of diverse peoples and cultures, as well as a center of innovation. Designing this gallery in 2020–2022 brought home to us the significance of connections and creativity in the present and inspired us to look at the past in new ways. The rapid global spread of COVID-19 reinforced how interconnected our modern world is, while the ongoing shortages of goods and of essential workers and their expertise let us see what happens when those connections break down. These conditions encouraged us to improvise and innovate, to find new ways of telling old stories. The Eastern Mediterranean Gallery is a product then of many of the same processes it studies; it would not have been as rich if we had created it during a different time.
We hope you enjoy this issue of Expedition and that you have a chance to visit the new gallery in the coming months.
In our last issue of Expedition, I looked forward to welcoming you to our newly reimagined Eastern Mediterranean Gallery; now it’s my privilege to introduce this special issue devoted to this immersive new exhibition. You’ll hear from the curators about the historical, social, and cultural contexts for the region’s world-changing innovations (Virginia Herrmann and Adam Smith on the alphabet, page 12), and about the process of building the gallery itself (Joanna S. Smith on displaying a Late Bronze Age ship, page 24). You’ll also learn more about the socio-political context of the excavations which produced many of the artifacts in the gallery—as in the article by Janessa Reeves about the political tensions around the excavation site of Kourion, in Cyprus, before, during, and immediately after World War II. The depth, range, and scholarly detail on display in these pages makes them a fitting companion piece to the gallery itself. I hope you’ll turn to them, before and after you visit, to immerse yourself more fully in a region that has been so central to the development of the human story.
It was a great pleasure to see so many of you during Member Previews and the Opening Weekend. Amid enjoying Middle Eastern food and wine and watching friends and families playing drums and learning traditional dances, I took a moment to walk through the new gallery myself. I was struck by how close I felt to the ancient Eastern Mediterranean; this is a testament to the excellent work our curators and Exhibits team have done to make the gallery immersive and engaging, but also to the many interconnections between this ancient era and our own. An increasingly global civilization, riven by conflict but rich with intercultural exchange: this description could apply just as easily to our world as it does to theirs. Since becoming Williams Director, I’ve stressed that our Museum must demonstrate the relevance of the past to the problems of the present—and I can’t think of a better example than this newly reimagined gallery, which presents the enormous potential for human innovation in a multicultural world.
As 2023 gets underway, I'm looking forward to the months ahead, which will be pivotal for the Museum. We’re embarking on a Strategic Visioning process: a comprehensive consideration of all aspects of our institutional mission. At the heart of this process is a museum-wide interpretive plan: a series of common themes that will guide our exhibitions and programs in the years to come. The first fruit of this process will be the renovation of our Egypt and Nubia Galleries; the construction phase of these galleries will begin before the end of the year, eventually creating a stateof-the art home for one of the most important parts of the Museum’s collection and an educational resource for Penn, our larger community, and audiences from around the world.
Looking back on 2022 and considering what’s to come, I want to take this moment to thank you for the support you give the Museum, and for being a part of our programs and exhibitions. It’s a privilege to be on this journey of discovery together.
Warm regards,
CHRISTOPHER WOODS, PH.D. WILLIAMS DIRECTOR
LAUREN RISTVET, PH.D., Lead Gallery Curator, is the Robert H. Dyson, Jr. Associate Curator in the Museum’s Near East Section. Dr. Ristvet earned her Ph.D. in Near Eastern archaeology from the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the emergence of early states, the intersection of religion and politics, and the rise of ancient empires. She founded and is co-director of the Naxcivan-Archaeological project in Azerbaijan (from 2006 until the present) and was associate director of excavations at Tell Leilan, Syria from 2006 to 2011.
VIRGINIA HERRMANN, PH.D., Gallery Co-Curator, earned her Ph.D. in Near Eastern archaeology from the University of Chicago. Her research on the Ancient Near East focuses on the construction of state and social identities through monuments and the development of ancient cities in periods of state formation and imperialism. She has been the co-director of excavations at Zincirli, Türkiye since 2014.
ERIC HUBBARD, Gallery CoCurator, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology whose research interests focus on Bronze Age settlement and water dynamics in the Middle East and South Central Asia; remote sensing applications to archaeology; and cultural heritage politics. Eric is a member of the Penn Museum's Graduate Advisory Council and a Graduate Guide. He earned his M.A. in anthropology from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in archaeology from the College of Wooster in Ohio. He has participated in fieldwork spanning the U.S. Midwest, Israel, Palestine, Cyprus, and Azerbaijan.
JOANNA S. SMITH, PH.D., Gallery Co-Curator, is a Consulting Scholar in the Museum’s Mediterranean Section. Her other museum projects include reinstallations of Cypriot art at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dr. Smith specializes in interconnections among the arts of the Mediterranean, Near East, and Egypt from the Bronze Age to the Hellensitic period. She codirects the Princeton University archaeological fieldwork project at Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus. Dr. Smith earned her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College.
ADAM SMITH, PH.D., is Keeper and Associate Curator in the Museum’s Asia Section, and teaches courses in the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn. He specializes in the study of Chinese excavated manuscripts and inscriptions dating from the beginnings of literacy in China in the 2nd millennium BCE through to the early medieval period.
DAVID MULDER is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of the History of Art. His research focuses on the art of ancient Mesopotamia, with particular interests in Early Dynastic seals and sealings and in terracotta figurines and mold-made plaques of the 3rd through 2nd millennia BCE.
JANESSA REEVES is a Masters student in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Program. She has excavated at a Roman site in Romania, a historic site in West Philadelphia, and at Gordion in Turkey. She is a Graduate Guide, currently leading tours of the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery. Her research interests include Roman art and archaeology, social identity, and ancient glassmaking.
In November 2022, a series of events celebrated the unveiling of our reimagined Eastern Mediterranean Gallery—a wonderful opportunity to invite old friends and new visitors to experience the full range of activities that the Museum has to offer.
At the Opening Celebration Weekend on November 19 and 20, visitors enjoyed opportunities to hear from the gallery curators and were invited into the Museum Archives to see up-close documentation of historic excavations throughout the world, to enjoy demonstrations of cutting-edge archaeological techniques in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials, and to learn about cylinder seals and try their hand at making their own (cork versions). Our galleries were full of rhythm and laughter, as families also enjoyed performances and workshops by Middle Eastern dancers and musical ensembles.
A week of previews began with a Golden Gala, held Friday, November 11, and continued with preview events for Penn students, Museum members, and the press.
Our Golden Gala on November 11, co-chaired by Cason Crane and Fran McGill, and Alice and Herb Sachs, felt particularly festive this year because it was our first in-person gala celebration since 2019. After exploring the gallery’s rich displays and interactives and enjoying Eastern Mediterranean wines and a buffet of grilled meats and vegetables, guests followed a band of musicians and dancers to the Sphinx Gallery, where Williams Director Chris Woods spoke about the curators’ vision and the gallery’s main themes, connections between this ancient region and our own, and where the Eastern Mediterranean fits in the Museum’s ongoing transformation. We were particularly honored that Penn President Liz Magill joined us for the celebration, adding some thoughts of her own about the importance of the region to world history, and about the Museum’s important position within Penn as a whole. After this introduction, guests reconvened in the Museum’s Rotunda for a Mediterranean feast, followed by drinks and dancing in the upper-level Egypt Gallery.
On November 15, Visionaries and Supporting Circle Members were invited for an exclusive first look at the newly reimagined gallery. The event included an introduction from Lead Curator Dr. Lauren Ristvet, giving greater scholarly context about the gallery. This was followed by a tour of the gallery itself, including helpful guidance from graduate students, who were on hand to offer expertise in their fields of interest; the information they provided sparked many conversations about the objects on display. Attendees also enjoyed Mediterranean food and drink, including desserts featuring special flavors from the region, like quince and pistachio. There was also a preview for all Members on November 18; the Museum was open late, to give members an opportunity to take a leisurely look at their own pace, immersing themselves in features like the precise replica of a merchant ship’s cargo hold, modeled after an ancient Phoenician shipwreck.
November 19 and 20 marked the gallery’s Opening Weekend, where the public had their first chance to see the new gallery, to hear more background on the exhibit from scholars and archivists, and to enjoy music and dance performances and workshops. Curators provided talks on some of the gallery’s main themes and important objects, giving more context to this fascinating region, which served as an ancient hub for cross-cultural exchange. Children in attendance had the chance to make crafts based on artifacts in the gallery, like cylinder seals, while the drumming and dance workshops brought families together with movement and music. The two-day event was an enormous success, bringing visitors from across the region and beyond to draw, dance, and explore in our galleries.
On November 16, Penn graduate and undergraduate students were invited to their own gala as part of the Museum’s Academic Engagement program, which seeks to make the Museum a hub for Penn’s larger academic community. After tours by Penn Museum Graduate Guides, they heard brief remarks from Williams Director Chris Woods and Lead Curator Lauren Ristvet about the unique role of the region in the story of human development. Students had a chance to sample spices that were traded throughout the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, to take candid shots in a portable photobooth, and to enjoy drinks and dancing in the Egypt Galleries.
The Penn Museum Eastern Mediterranean Gallery would not have been possible without the outstanding leadership of the following supporters:
The Giorgi Family Foundation
Naming Donor
David Berg Foundation
McLean Contributionship
Elizabeth R. McLean, C78
National Endowment for the Humanities
Gretchen P. Riley, CGS70, and J. Barton Riley, W70, PAR
From its Eastern Mediterranean birthplace, the alphabet spread across Asia through trade, religion, and empire. The map detail at left illustrates the locations of important early alphabetic discoveries; map inset by Virginia Herrmann.
The alphabet*—it’s a seemingly simple invention with a deeper history and longer journey than many people realize. The ancestor of most alphabets used today was invented in the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean coastal region), and the Penn Museum’s new Eastern Mediterranean Gallery showcases this invention as one of the region’s most influential legacies for the modern world. In the three stories that follow, we highlight little-known chapters of the alphabet’s amazing history.
In comparison with the earliest writing systems, Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, whose signs convey multiple sounds or whole words and are read differently depending on context, an alphabet has far fewer signs and takes less time to learn. Instead of hundreds of signs, students of alphabetic writing only need to learn twenty to thirty letters to spell out the basic sounds of their spoken language.
To those raised in an alphabetic environment, this writing system appears so logical and self-evidently advantageous that it is no surprise that the alphabet has spread far and wide. As continued prominence of
a complex writing system like Chinese hanzi shows, however, widespread literacy does not require an alphabet, and some argue that expressive nuance and creative potential are lost in an alphabet’s simplicity.
Many people know that the Latin alphabet used for English and other languages today developed from the Greek alphabet, and that the Greeks adapted theirs from the Phoenicians. Our first story follows the alphabet’s history back further, to its murky and hotly debated origins in encounters between ancient Egyptian and Levantine people and explores why it took a millennium to come into widespread use. The second story spotlights a remarkable find whose decipherment revealed how both the form and the order of the alphabet we use today could have taken a different path. Finally, the third story takes us off the well-worn road from the Phoenicians to the modern West and follows instead the alphabet’s long eastward journey through Asia, where it played a role in Mongolian and Chinese empires, the Silk Road, and the spread of Buddhism and Christianity.
These remarkable episodes in the long life of the first alphabet show that its present global dominance was far from inevitable but depended on the twists and turns of history.
Herodotus recounts that the Phoenicians taught the alphabet to the Greeks, and, at least on this point, the sometimes fanciful ancient historian has been vindicated by archaeological discoveries. The earliest known
Greek alphabetic inscriptions date to the 700s BCE, when Phoenician ships sailed the Mediterranean. For the alphabet’s earlier history, pure speculation was for centuries the only option, until exploration in the Sinai desert led to a breakthrough. Now, a rash of recent discoveries has fed new ideas about how the alphabet
came to be and why it took so long to take hold.
In 1905, pioneering archaeologists Flinders and Hilda Petrie explored the Egyptian turquoise mines and Hathor temple at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula. Among many Egyptian hieroglyphic and hieratic inscriptions there, they also recorded a few dozen unusual pictographic carvings—their signs were similar to certain hieroglyphs, but the inscriptions could not be read as Egyptian. A few years later, Egyptologist Alan Gardiner realized that these were the pictographic prototypes for the linear Phoenician alphabet! Each letter’s sound-value had been derived from the first consonant of the West Semitic word for the object illustrated by the pictograph (a principle known as acrophony): for example, a human-head hieroglyph (read in Egyptian as tp) became the letter r, because the West Semitic word for “head” was raʾsh (later Hebrew rōʾsh). In fact, most Phoenician letters retained the names of their pictorial inspiration—ʾaleph for the ox-head sign, bēt for the house, etc. Since these turquoise mines dated to the 2nd millennium BCE, the Sinai alphabet was a plausible precursor for the Phoenician alphabet written centuries later. Other evidence showed that many Canaanites native to the southern Levant worked the mines in the Pharaoh’s service, placing West Semitic speakers on the scene for the earliest known alphabetic writing.
The “Proto-Sinaitic” alphabetic inscriptions, as they came to be known, could only be partially understood, but most scholars accepted Gardiner’s theory that Canaanite predecessors of the Phoenicians had invented the alphabet with the inspiration of Egyptian hieroglyphs, possibly as early as 1800 BCE. One specialist argues that the inventors were previously illiterate Canaanite miners seeking to express devotion to the goddess of turquoise in their own tongue. Later excavations in Israel and Palestine turned up several more early-alphabetic inscriptions, dated to 1700–1100 BCE and scratched or written in ink on pottery and stone, that showed the letters’ development toward their later abstract linear forms.
Recently, new discoveries of early-alphabetic inscriptions outside the southern Levant hint at hitherto unsuspected chapters in this now century-old story. First, two inscriptions were found at Wadi el-Hol, Egypt, a rocky valley west of the Nile. The alphabetic inscriptions were carved next to Egyptian inscriptions and graffiti dating to the late Middle Kingdom, ca. 1900–1800 BCE. This discovery supported an early date for the Sinai inscriptions, but also raised the possibility that Egypt itself had been the alphabet’s birthplace, rather than the Egyptian-Levantine border. Nearby Egyptian inscriptions mention the leader of a Levantine mercenary force, and much other evidence points to a large migration from the Levant into Egypt during the Middle Kingdom that culminated in the rule of northern Egypt by “Hyksos” kings of Canaanite ancestry. Perhaps, then, Canaanite expatriates immersed in Egyptian culture were the ones who devised a way to write their own language.
Then came another startling revelation. In an archive from Babylonia dating to ca. 1500 BCE, several cuneiform tablets had short linear alphabetic inscriptions along one edge—the earliest known instance of the practice of writing an alphabetic filing label, or “docket,” on a tablet for easier reference by bilingual scribes. Scholars were amazed that the alphabet had already traveled to Mesopotamia by this early date, and not as an imported novelty, but as a casual expedient in a multilingual setting. This evidence hints that our knowledge of the alphabet’s early use is the tip of an iceberg.
Finally, last year a new study of clay “tags” excavated in a tomb at Umm el-Marra, Syria, cautiously made the case that the inscribed linear symbols are related to the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet. This is a sensational claim, given that the tomb securely dates to ca. 2400–2300 BCE, five to six centuries before the Sinai and Wadi el-Hol inscriptions! Though these inscriptions are short and the letters’ resemblance could be coincidental, if future discoveries uphold this date for the earliest alphabet, it would upend prevailing theories about its invention in the intensive Egyptian-Levantine interactions of the Middle Kingdom and bring it substantially closer to the advent of cuneiform and hieroglyphs between 3400 and 3100 BCE.
In the 13th century BCE a document at Beth Shemesh, Israel, possibly recording a quantity of wine given to several named people, was inked on a fragment of pottery. By this date, the letters had become more abstract and their origins as pictographs harder to detect. Left: Puech, E. 1986. Origine de l’alphabet. Documents en alphabet linéaire et cunéiforme du IIe millénaire. Revue Biblique 93(2): 161–213, fig. 4:5; Right: Grant, E. 1931. Ain Shems Excavations (Palestine), 1928-1929-19301931. Part I. Haverford, PA: College Press, Pl. X.
These new finds do more than extend the early alphabet’s age and geographic range. They also heighten the long-standing mystery of why we have so few alphabetic inscriptions for a millennium (or more) after the script’s invention. The thread of continuity in the alphabetic tradition across centuries appears remarkably flimsy. Once someone made the breakthrough to create a simple phonetic system, why don’t we see an explosion of literacy, littering the soil with grocery lists and postcards to grandma and grandpa? Part of the answer must be the organic material (namely, papyrus) that the alphabet was designed for, whose perishable nature (outside of extreme conditions) has obliterated most documents from this period. But the rarity and terse character of early inscriptions compared to those from the 1st millennium BCE is nonetheless striking. Some propose that alphabetic writing arose and spread
widely within circles of professional scribes, serving as a practical but unofficial script for centuries without breaking through to the vast majority who lacked formal training. Social and political conditions were not yet ripe for widespread literacy. The same scribal community who perpetuated the alphabet were also guardians of the established traditions of cuneiform and hieroglyphs, whose complexity increased the value of their skills. It took the upheaval of the end of the Bronze Age around 1200 BCE, in which Eastern Mediterranean empires fell or retreated and many smaller kingdoms disappeared, to break the dominance of old traditions in the Levant and let a script designed for local languages thrive.
Gardiner, A.H. 1916. The Egyptian Origin of the Semitic Alphabet. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 3:1–16.
Koller, A. 2018. The Diffusion of the Alphabet in the Second Millennium BCE: On the Movements of Scribal Ideas from Egypt to the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Yemen. Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 20:1–14.
Sanders, S.L. 2009. The Invention of Hebrew. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Schwartz, G.M. 2021. Non-Cuneiform Writing at ThirdMillennium Umm El-Marra, Syria: Evidence of an Early Alphabetic Tradition? Pasiphae 15: 255–66.
The 1933 excavations at Beth Shemesh in present-day Israel unearthed a most unusual clay tablet that has raised as many questions as it has answered about the early history of the alphabet. Just four years earlier, an alphabetic type of cuneiform script dating to the 13th century BCE had been discovered in Syria, and experts quickly realized that the Beth Shemesh tablet bore the same type of writing.
By the 2nd millennium BCE, cuneiform writing, invented in Mesopotamia, was in widespread use by the royal courts of the Eastern Mediterranean. Cuneiform, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, was a complex script with hundreds of signs that took years to master. In the north Syrian city Ugarit, scribes trained in cuneiform also learned the linear alphabetic script and creatively adapted it to the cuneiform wedges produced by a stylus on clay, thereby inventing the first and only cuneiform alphabet. While they used the regular cuneiform script to write foreign correspondence in the Mesopotamian Akkadian language—the lingua franca of the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean in that period, used for example in the Amarna letters—they wrote epic literature and religious texts in their own Ugaritic alphabet and language (related to later Phoenician and Hebrew). When Ugarit was destroyed ca. 1185 BCE, the cuneiform alphabetic tradition died with it; however, the linear alphabet lived on.
The Beth Shemesh tablet was the first discovery of alphabetic cuneiform so far south, over 500 km from
Ugarit, but many things about it were peculiar. The signs looked backwards, some were non-standard in form, and they ran counter-clockwise around the edge of the tablet instead of making neat lines. Scholars even wondered if the tablet—elongated and flat on one side, instead of the usual rectangular pillow shape—had been formed in the mold for a metal axe. It is no wonder, then, that the first
attempts to decipher the inscription came up with rather odd, and ultimately incorrect results—a prayer to cure stammering, written in mirror-writing for magical effect, or an incantation addressed to the birth-goddess.
Fifty years passed before Russian scholar A.G. Lundin recognized the Beth Shemesh text for what it was: an abecedary (a text giving the alphabet in
Above: The signs of alphabetic cuneiform are here written right-to-left instead of left-to-right and wrap around the tablet from the top right to bottom right. The letters follow the halaḥam order instead of the more familiar ’abgad order and show some variation in their shapes from the standard cuneiform alphabet. Drawing after Puech 1991: 47, annotated by the author. Left: Abecedaries (lists of the letters in order) of the Ugaritic and Phoenician alphabets, which used the ’abgad order and ultimately became a-b-c-d in the Latin alphabet, and the Old South Arabian and Beth Shemesh tablet alphabets, which used the halaḥam order still found today in Ethiopian languages. Letters with extra signs symbolize consonants not found in English. Letters in brackets would fall in the damaged part of the Beth Shemesh tablet.
order for teaching or study), with a twist. Instead of the more familiar ʾ(a)-b-g-d…(ʾabgad) letter order used by the Ugaritic and later Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets—from which our a-b-c-d… derives—the Beth Shemesh letters had the order h-l-ḥ-m…. This was not a random sequence, but the standard letter order used by abecedaries first attested a millennium later in South Arabia. The Old South Arabian script developed as a distinct southern branch of the alphabet and spread to Eastern Africa, where Ethiopian scripts still use a variant of the h-l-ḥ-m… order today.
Lundin’s brilliant realization at once sparked three new insights:
1. the South Arabian alphabetic tradition was at least as old as the Ugaritic/Phoenician one, not derivative of it, as previously believed;
2. it had been used not only in Arabia, but also alongside the ʾabgad tradition in the Levant, where it may even have been invented; and
3. its early use there was significant enough to warrant its adaptation to cuneiform for writing on clay tablets.
Subsequent discoveries of another halaḥam cuneiform abecedary (halaḥamary?) at Ugarit itself and possibly a third such abecedary found in Egypt and dating even earlier confirmed Lundin’s deductions
and showed that the Beth Shemesh abecedary was not a one-off experiment but part of a robust alternative alphabetic tradition.
Major questions remain about this fork in the early history of the alphabet, which, if it had gone a different way, might have resulted in millions of preschool children today singing a very different alphabet song. Where and why did the split between these two competing alphabetic orders occur? Where and how did the alternative halaḥam order survive to resurface in South Arabia centuries later? Was it associated already in the 2nd millennium BCE with particular Semitic languages—possibly South Semitic languages like those of Yemen and Ethiopia? And why would someone form a tablet for alphabet study in an axe mold? At the moment, our evidence is silent on these points. But any day, another new discovery like the Beth
Abecedary: A listing of the letters of the alphabet in a traditional sequence, usually used for teaching and learning.
Acrophony: The pictorial representation and/or naming of a letter by a word whose initial sound that letter represents.
Alphabet: A set of letters, or written signs, that each represent one of the basic phonemes (distinct units of sound) of a language.
Consonantal writing: A writing system that does not represent vowels, but only the consonants and “semi-consonants” (like w and y) of a language. Both Egyptian hieroglyphs and the early Semitic alphabets use consonantal writing.
Cuneiform: A writing system that used a reed stylus to impress wedge-shaped signs into clay. Cuneiform was invented in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BCE and used to write a variety of languages until the 1st century CE. Although a cuneiform alphabet was
Shemesh tablet could revolutionize our understanding of the alphabet’s complex history.
Pardee, D. 2006. The Ugaritic Alphabetic Cuneiform Writing System in the Context of Other Alphabetic Systems. In Studies in Semitic and Afroasiatic Linguistics Presented to Gene B. Gragg, C. L. Miller, ed. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 60. Chicago: Oriental Institute, 181–200.
Puech, E. 1991. La tablette cunéiforme de Bet Shemesh: premier témoin de la séquence des lettres du sudsémitique. In Phoinikeia Grammata. Lire et écrire en Méditerannée. Actes du Colloque de Liège, 15-18 novembre 1989, eds. C. Baurain, C. Bonnet, and V. Krings. Liège, 33-47.
developed at Ugarit, most cuneiform writing used sets of hundreds of signs that could be read either phonetically, as syllables, or logographically, as whole words. Each sign had multiple possible readings depending on its context.
Hieroglyphs: A pictographic writing system such as that used by the ancient Egyptians beginning in the 4th millennium BCE and continuing until the 5th century CE. In Egyptian hieroglyphs, the symbols could be read either phonetically, as one or more consonants, or logographically, as whole words. Each sign had multiple possible readings depending on its context. Egyptian hieroglyphs were a consonantal writing system.
Pictograph: A symbol in a writing system that graphically represents a physical object. Sometimes also called a pictogram.
Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite: The earliest known alphabet, a consonantal writing system used to write Semitic languages in the Levant and Egypt in the 2nd millennium BCE. The form found in the Sinai Peninsula is called Proto-Sinaitic, while inscriptions found in the Levant are called Proto-Canaanite.
Early photograph (before 1896) of an ink-squeeze rubbing being taken of the 781 CE Syriac Christian stone inscription, Xi’an, China. The monument was thrown down and lost during a persecution of foreign religions in the 9th century, and then rediscovered in the 17th century; 19122.
Around the same time that the Greeks were adapting Phoenician letters to write their own language, speakers of Aramaic, a language closely related to Hebrew, did the same. The Greeks initiated the spread of the alphabet westwards around the Mediterranean and ultimately all over Europe. The use of Aramaic by the Greeks’ rivals, the Achaemenid Persian Empire, established its use throughout the Near East and gave rise to a dazzling cascade of further borrowings and adaptations that over the course of two thousand years reached regions as far away from the Mediterranean as Manchuria and Beijing, and languages as diverse as Mongolian, Sogdian, Uyghur, and Gāndhārī.
The Achaemenid Empire and the reach of the Aramaic alphabet extended east as far as the Indus and Central Asia. After the fall of the Achaemenids, the conquests of Alexander in the 4th century BCE brought the Greek language and its alphabet to those same regions. The two cousin alphabets, Greek and Aramaic, appear together in a famous bilingual rock inscription near Kandahar, Afghanistan, carved for the Indian king Ashoka in 260 BCE, half a century after Alexander. Ashoka carved monumental inscriptions on exposed rock surfaces and stone pillars all over the
Indian subcontinent, in scripts tailored to regional linguistic variation. Alongside Greek and Aramaic, the most northerly inscriptions are in an Indian language, written in the Kharoṣṭhī alphabet. The letter forms and sounds of Kharoṣṭhī are easily matched to those of Aramaic from which this Central Asian variant derived. Ashoka’s inscriptions throughout the rest of India are written in yet another alphabet, Brāhmī. The first appearance of the Brāhmī alphabet, in inscriptions by a king who also used Aramaic, suggests that it too may have been inspired by an Eastern Mediterranean alphabet. The letter forms are much harder to match convincingly, and however, for that reason the origins of Brāhmī and connections to Aramaic are unresolved. Whatever its origins, Brāhmī developed into the alphabets for countless languages of South and Southeast Asia and Tibet.
There were still Greek kings in Central Asia, in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, with Greek names and using the Greek and Kharoṣṭhī alphabets, for more than two centuries after Alexander. The name of King Menander I (2nd century BCE) appears on the coin seen in the center of this page. Like Ashoka’s Kandahar inscription, the legend on the coin is bilingual, with Greek on one side and the Aramaic-derived Kharoṣṭhī alphabet on the other.
Buddhist tradition recognizes King Ashoka as the great early patron of Buddhism, who distributed the Buddha’s relics (bodily remains) in commemorative monuments across his Indian empire. King Menander also appears in Socratic dialog with the Buddhist sage Nāgasena in an early text, “The Questions of Milinda,” the title of which uses an Indian version of his name. The Kharoṣṭhī alphabet used by both kings was also the medium for Buddhist literature. The earliest Buddhist manuscripts that survive today are written using the Kharoṣṭhī alphabet in Gāndhārī, another Indian language.
The creation of the Chinese script around 1300 BCE was completely independent of the alphabet and other
Near Eastern writing systems. For about two thousand years, Chinese was the only script that most people in East Asia would ever encounter. During the early medieval period, foreign communities that settled in the Chinese-speaking regions that are now the People’s Republic of China often brought their languages and their Aramaic-derived alphabets with them.
The Sogdians dominated Silk Road trade between the medieval Chinese states and Sogdian homelands in Central Asia. Sogdians living in Chinese cities in the 6th century CE were commemorated upon their deaths with epitaphs inscribed in their own Iranian language using the alphabet. Syriac Christians similarly brought their language and script with them when they established a community in the Tang dynasty’s capital city, Chang’an. Their most famous monument is a stone inscription erected in 781 CE. Most of the inscription is in Chinese, commemorating the arrival of Syriac Christians during the reign of the Taizong emperor a century earlier and listing their core religious beliefs. A shorter text appears in the Syriac alphabet together with a list of priests’ names.
The Turkic-speaking Uyghurs adopted and modified the alphabet of the Sogdians,
and it was Uyghur scribes that brought literacy to the Mongol empire of Genghis Khan and his successors. Unlike earlier Aramaic-derived scripts, the UyghurMongolian script runs top-to-bottom in vertical columns, like the traditional Chinese script. It is only ever written cursively, with ligatures (connecting lines) joining letters and flourishes at the start and end of words, which set it apart visually from the earlier alphabets from which it evolved. The Mongolian alphabet is still an important part of cultural identity for Mongolian speakers in the People’s Republic of China and Mongolia today.
The Manchu Qing Dynasty conquered and ruled China from the palace halls of the Forbidden City in Beijing from the 17th century until 1911. Like the Mongols, they were an ethnolinguistically distinct ruling class in the Chinese-speaking world. The use of the Mongolian alphabet to write their Manchu language (unrelated to Mongolian and Chinese) was the last major step in the spread of the Aramaicderived alphabets in East Asia. Most subjects of the Qing empire never spoke or wrote any Manchu, but
they would have seen it in symbolic or ceremonial uses, rather like the use of Latin in the United States on coins, mottoes, and diplomas. The Qing government sometimes rewarded loyal service with documents in Chinese and Manchu bestowing elaborate honorific titles on the recipient’s deceased parents. Qing coins also had legends in Chinese and Manchu, representing the only Manchu writing that most Chinese people would ever encounter. Manchu writing would have evoked for them the distinctive identity of the ruling dynasty, but its remote origins among the alphabets of the Eastern Mediterranean millennia ago would have been as illegible as the script itself was for most readers.
Daniels, P.T. and W. Bright (eds.). 1996. The World’s Writing Systems. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keevak, M. 2008. The Story of a Stele: China’s Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625-1916. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Salomon, R. 1998. Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the other Indo-Aryan Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
sea-going trade expanded in the Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600–1100 BCE). The catastrophes that led to the sinking of ships— including foul weather, perilous rock formations, and pirates—created deposits that preserve glimpses into the movement of people and cargoes. The Eastern Mediterranean Gallery includes a display of a merchant ship that frames objects that could have been carried on and used by those who sailed these ships.
A shipwreck preserves objects that sank at one moment in time. By contrast, the objects displayed in our ship at the Penn Museum span the Late Bronze Age. Objects from shipwrecks—the ships, the personal effects of sailors, and the ship cargoes—were in transit over long distances at the time of their sinking. Objects on land could also have traveled over long distances, but they are found in more localized use contexts, such as houses, workshops, administrative buildings, storage rooms, temples, and tombs. Creating the ship display for our exhibition brought out similarities and differences among the forms, functions, and values of objects found underwater and similar objects that come from sites on land in Jordan, Israel, Cyprus, Egypt, and Greece in collections of the Penn Museum.
Merchant sailing ships in the Late Bronze Age traversed the Mediterranean, connecting Egypt and the coast of Western Asia with Cyprus, Greece, and places further west. Merchant vessels could carry luxury gifts sent from one ruler to another or could carry goods for other forms of exchange.
The structure of the ship displayed in the Penn Museum draws especially on evidence from Syrian merchant sailing ships portrayed in the New Kingdom tomb of Kenamūn at Thebes, Egypt, and a 15-meter-long (50 ft) ship that sank ca. 1335–1305 BCE off the southern coast of Turkey near Uluburun. Smaller ships thought to be of similar design
sank ca. 1200 BCE off the coast of Point Iria in Greece and near Cape Gelidonya on the southern coast of Turkey. Our ship display gives visitors a sense of the size and scale of a merchant ship, but does not recreate any particular ship, a specific cargo, or a crew’s origin or final destination. A full-sized ship would not fit in the gallery, hence the ship is a cut-away view of one end of a hull, unspecified as to whether it is the bow or the stern. An unfurled sail hangs above. The emphasis is on the cargo hold, thus details of the deck, railings, and rigging have been omitted.
George F. Bass was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania when he directed the pioneering excavation of the Cape Gelidonya ship in 1960, the first to employ techniques of land excavation at an underwater site and the first excavated by archaeologists also trained as divers. Underwater excavations of merchant ships have documented ship parts, cargoes of finished products and raw and/or recyclable materials, and personal belongings of the crew. The Penn Museum’s collections from sites in the Eastern Mediterranean region do not include objects found during the excavation of a ship or parts of a ship vessel. Objects in our display that compare with the personal belongings of Late Bronze Age merchant ship sailors come mainly from two inland sites in Israel: Beth Shean, the site that
is at the core of the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery (see Hubbard, page 74), and Beth Shemesh. Each of these cities had a population of Canaanites who lived under Egyptian rule in the Late Bronze Age. Objects in our ship that compare with the cargoes of Late Bronze Age ships are from many sites that formed parts of the Eastern Mediterranean long-distance trade network. In addition to Beth Shean and Beth Shemesh, the objects are from the coastal towns of Gournia on Crete, Greece, and Kourion-Bamboula, Cyprus. There is also one object each from Tell el-Amarna in Egypt and the Baq’ah Valley in Jordan.
People from many regions sailed on merchant ships. A drawing in the gallery includes two men from a hypothetical crew. Weight sets suggest that there were three or four merchants on board the Uluburun ship who served as crew and captain.
Merchants carried weights for measuring out quantities of precious metals. Next to the ship display is a case about merchants that includes hematite weights. One weight (29-107-627) at 27.72 g is the equivalent of three shekels, a widely used standard of weight between 9.3 and 9.4 g.
Merchants also carried seals, small objects worn as amulets and used to make impressions in clay as a kind of signature. A north Syrian cylinder seal, made of faience ca. 1600–1400 BCE, in the ship display has a carved design that includes a pair of lions and two men worshipping a sacred tree, emphasizing divine protection for the wearer.
Seals could be strung like beads. Beads similar to a round faience bead in our display (49-12-279) have been found all around the Eastern Mediterranean and were carried also as cargo on ships.
Sailors also wore amulets with symbols of their gods, similar to two gold pendants in our ship. One with an incised eight-ray star disk represents the star of Ishtar (Venus) (29-105-93). A crescent-shaped pendant may represent the moon god. Venus and the moon would have been important to sailors in navigation.
Crews would have used ceramic vessels for meals and terracotta oil lamps for light on board ship. Traces of burning are still visible on the pinched nozzle of a bowlshaped lamp in the ship display.
Much of a ship’s cargo, like fruit, wine, oil, and likely also textiles was shipped in containers. As on land, rarely are vessels found with their contents intact. A typical Late Bronze Age olive oil shipping container has two stirrup-shaped handles. Stirrup jars originated in Mycenaean Greece. Potters elsewhere copied the design, creating vessels like the one from Beth Shean in the ship display (32-15-146).
Stirrup jars were shipped all around the Eastern Mediterranean, often being reused, sometimes for a different commodity. A squat stirrup jar in the ship display was made in Greece, but was found in the Baq’ah Valley, Jordan (81-14-641). A larger, coarser example with an octopus design was made on Crete, but it was found at Kourion-Bamboula, Cyprus. On one handle is an undeciphered Cypro-Minoan mark, perhaps added by a Cypriot merchant.
Enormous Cypriot storage vessels called pithoi served as shipping containers. They compare in shape and size with large ones from land sites, where pithoi stood on floors or were placed in pits cut into the floors. Due to their size, none of the many whole pithoi found at Kourion-Bamboula were exported to Philadelphia.
Goods were also shipped in Canaanite jars. The only complete Canaanite jar in the Penn collections (29-103168), reconstructed from many fragments, was not stable enough to be put on permanent display. A crew member in a drawing that accompanies the ship display carries one of these vessels. Its pointed base could be stuck into soft ground to stabilize it on land and these vessels were stacked inside cargo holds, often with the pointed base of one resting on the flat shoulder of another vessel below. For an idea of the size and shape of these shipping containers, the gallery instead features a transport amphora (54-41-41) from ca. 600–500 BCE in a display about Phoenicians placed next to the ship and a pithos from Roman-period Kourion (see Smith, page 49).
A drawing in the gallery shows a deck that covers a ship’s cargo hold, but the deck likely would not have covered the cargo hold entirely. Cargo was stacked tightly. George Bass described the stacking of raw copper ingots from Cyprus
and scrap metal in the form of broken bronze plowshares in his Cape Gelidonya field notebook. In his publication he cited an example from Beth Shemesh (61-14-2570) as a close parallel for some plowshares from his excavations.
Bronze vessels like one from Kourion-Bamboula in our display were carried as finished products or scrap metal, but their thin bodies do not survive well underwater, often leaving only the thickened rims behind.
Raw metals like copper were shipped in much larger quantities in standardized shapes of similar weight called ingots. Finding a whole ingot on land is rare in the Eastern Mediterranean. Copper “oxhide”-shaped ingots with four protruding handle-like corners are porous rather than solid, making it possible to divide them with a blow of a hammer. The ship display includes one of four fragments of ingots found at Gournia, Crete (MS4563B). Scientific analysis showed that the ingot fragments from Gournia were made of copper mined in Cyprus.
The ship display also includes a fragment of a blue glass ingot (E845.24). It retains part of the flat surface of the ingot made in a disc-shaped, slightly conical mold.
The Eastern Mediterranean Gallery has many finely crafted luxury objects that might have been carried on merchant ships. For conservation reasons, the small ivory cosmetic box lid in the ship display (4912-245) will alternate with another, similar example to preserve their delicate material. Removing one to return to storage and replacing it with the other also symbolically allows the ship in the gallery to unload and load cargo periodically. Their circular shapes measuring 5.6 and 5.8 cm in diameter show how they were made from slices of hippopotamus tusks. Ivory was also shipped in the form of tusks, but on land it is rare to find a whole one.
Cypriot table wares come from many sites around the Eastern Mediterranean. They could be carried as ship ballast to add weight after other more intrinsically valuable cargoes were unloaded. On land, as at Kourion-Bamboula, Cyprus, Cypriot white-slipped and hard-fired bowls (49-12-248) and jugs (49-12-316) with ring-shaped bases served as colorful and often shiny table wares.
Outside Cyprus, similar vessels might have been valued as exotica or antiques, as suggested by two vessels in the ship display. A hard-fired Cypriot jug with a ring-shaped base found at Beth Shemesh and a Cypriot jug with a shaved surface and pointed base found at Beth Shean (29-102-764) were likely manufactured a century or more before their final use.
People used the objects that we have selected for the ship display in their daily lives—at home, at work, and in worship—before losing, breaking, or deliberately burying them.
Residents of Kourion-Bamboula would have consumed the contents of the Cretan stirrup jar. They also placed vessels—the white-slipped bowl, bowl and jug with ringshaped bases, and the bronze bowl—in tombs as parts of funerary dining equipment. Family members there also offered the ivory cosmetic box lids and the faience bead as gifts for the dead.
A glass-worker likely discarded the glass ingot fragment in a workshop at Tell el-Amarna. The Gournia excavation notes make no mention of copper ingots. Possibly they were thought to be slag, the waste material from metalworking. The only mention of slag appears in notes for “House of the Sword Maker”, termed House Aa and published as House Ea. There slag was found in a storage space among pithos vessels, which compares with the find locations of several other copper ingots and
their fragments on Crete. Recent excavations at Gournia have discovered evidence for bronze-working in the same part of the ancient town. Most likely a bronzesmith stored these ingot chunks, which could be melted down and made into tools, weapons, or other objects.
People at Beth Shean lit their house with the Canaanite lamp. Mercantile activity required the use of the hematite weight—among others—in a forerunner of the commander’s house. Also from Beth Shean are the small Cypriot jug with a pointed base, the Syrian faience cylinder seal, and the pendant amulet with the star of Ishtar. They were found in a temple (see Hubbard, page 58), placed there as dedications or used as temple equipment.
Someone at Beth Shemesh buried the crescent-shaped amulet as part of a hoard of gold and precious stones buried in a house. Elihu Grant, director of the Haverford College excavations at Beth Shemesh, described this find as a “thief’s loot.” We now understand this hoard— contained in a ceramic jug—to be one of many similar burials of precious materials from the end of the Late Bronze Age. The crescent likely was no longer valued as an amulet, but as one of many bits of precious metal and stone stored in the pot as a kind of currency. The owner likely had every intention of retrieving it rather than leaving it buried for millennia.
The objects that fill the Penn Museum ship provide views into the dynamics of merchant shipping and the consumers of the objects carried on board ships. The condition of these objects at the time of discovery and their find contexts reveal overlaps and divergences in the function and value of similar objects during transit and these objects at their final destinations.
The author would like to thank Cemal Pulak for sharing his thoughts about reconstructions of the Uluburun ship and Moritz Jansen for comments about studies of the copper ingots found at Gournia.
Bass, G.F. 1967. Cape Gelidonya: A Bronze Age Shipwreck. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series vol. 57, part 8. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society.
Benson, J.L. 1972. Bamboula at Kourion: The Necropolis and the Finds, Excavated by J. F. Daniel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Fotou, V. 1993. New Light on Gournia: Unknown Documents of the Excavation at Gournia and Other Sites on the Isthmus of Ierapetra by Harriet Ann Boyd. Aegeaum 9. Liège: Université de Liège.
Grant, E. 1932. Ain Shems Excavations (Palestine) 19281929-1930-1931, Part II. Biblical and Kindred Studies
4. Haverford: Haverford College.
Jackson, C.M., P.T. Nicholson, and W. Gneisinger. 1998. Glassmaking at Tell el-Amarna: An Integrated Approach. Journal of Glass Studies 40:11–23.
James, F.W., and P.E. McGovern. 1993. The Late Bronze Egyptian Garrison at Beth Shan: A Study of Levels
VII and VIII. University Museum Monograph 85. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
McGovern, P.E. 1986. The Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages of Central Transjordan: The Baq’ah Valley Project, 1977–1981. University Museum Monograph 65. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Palaima, T.G., P.P. Betancourt, and G.H. Myer. 1984. “An Inscribed Stirrup Jar of Cretan Origin from Bamboula, Cyprus.” Kadmos 23.1: 65–74.
Pulak, C. 2008. The Uluburun Shipwreck and Late Bronze Age Trade. In Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C., edited by J. Aruz, K. Benzel, and J.M. Evans, pp. 288–385. New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Wachsmann, S. 1998. Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Late Bronze Age Levant. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press.
Watrous, L.V. et al. 2015. “Excavations at Gournia, 2010–2012.” Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 84.3: (2015) 397–465.
Wheeler, T.S., R. Maddin, and J.D. Muhly. 1975. Ingots and the Bronze Age Copper Trade in the Mediterranean: a Progress Report. Expedition 17 (summer):31–39.
Assemblage and stratigraphy are fundamental concepts for understanding archaeological sites and these ideas bookend the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery. At one end is a mosaic made up of many small pieces of cut stone called tesserae. This object embodies the idea of horizontal proximity, the association or assemblage of objects found together in one context. At the other end of the gallery is an interactive display that engages the visitor in vertical stratigraphy, the layering of soils, architecture, and objects—sequences of contexts—at a site over time.
These principles also help us to understand objects, such as stone seals that were refashioned for new owners. The gallery displays seals of many shapes, sizes, and materials. Seals were closely tied to their owners’ identities because seals were used as a form of signature, by stamping or rolling the object in clay to make one’s mark for legal or administrative purposes. They were also used as amulets (see Hubbard, page 58).
A display about object reuse features recut Late Bronze Age cylinder seals from Kourion, Cyprus, one of which was illustrated in Expedition 64.2. Other seals in the Eastern Mediterranean gallery also have layers of carving. A display about royal greeting gifts includes a
reworked cylinder seal found at Beth Shean, Israel. This tiny object is 1.5 cm in height and less than a centimeter in diameter. Its colorful blue stone, lapis lazuli, comes from Afghanistan. Looking closely at this seal shows how it changed as it passed from owner to owner in Mesopotamia, Syria, and the southern Levant.
On the seal and in its modern impression, one can detect two scenes. Two figures are sharply cut with some depth into the stone. Between their backsides is a more shallowly engraved floral design flanked by connected spirals. While this pattern and the figures are now visible together, forming one viewing context, these two scenes were made at two different moments in time.
There are several clues to the object’s use life. First, the more angular figures visibly differ in carving style from the more curvilinear patterns. Second, the part of the seal with the two figures is taller than the portion with the floral and spiral patterns. On that part of the seal, the surface is worn down and the original design is no longer visible, possibly from wear over time but more likely due to purposeful abrasion. Third, the ends of the seal reveal that the hole drilled through the object is off center, positioned more toward the shorter side of the object. To redesign the seal, a carver worked more on the side with the floral and spiral patterns than on the side with the two figures, creating an asymmetry in the object’s shape.
Seen in impression, the two figures are a king with his right arm across his chest facing left and a female goddess, called lama, facing right with her two forearms raised up. These figures are characteristic of Mesopotamian seals
known as Old Babylonian. Usually, an inscription appears with these two figures. Likely this original design on the seal was cut in the 18th century BCE. The more shallowly engraved spiral and floral pattern is characteristic of Syrian seal carving. Parallels for parts of the floral and spiral design date as early as the late 18th to 17th century BCE, but its closest parallels are Late Bronze Age, close to the date of the object’s 15th to 14th century BCE find spot at Beth Shean. The spiral and floral pattern forms a new layer in the object’s history. It was carved over and fills the space where the inscription would be expected. Perhaps the inscription meant nothing to the new owner, leading to the seal’s alteration.
The seal’s edges are well worn from handling and the seal must have changed hands several times before its final deposit at Beth Shean between 1470 and 1300 BCE. During its lifetime, it also changed from a seal into a bead, perhaps valued most for its exotic blue color and less for the carvings on the seal. A cylinder seal’s piercing normally allowed the wearer to suspend the seal vertically on a cord, usually attached to the clothing with a toggle pin. Thus, it was on one’s person, but easily accessible for making impressions. Looking at the ends of the seal, however, there is one more clue to the object’s history. The wear on the hole itself is off to one side. This detail shows that someone likely wore this seal horizontally on a necklace at some point. It might still have had value as an amulet, but on a necklace it would have been much harder to use as a sealing tool.
Aruz, J., K. Benzel, and J.M. Evans, eds. 2008. Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Collon, D. 2005. First Impressions: Cylinder Seals in the Ancient Near East. Revised edition. London: The British Museum.
Smith, J.S. 2018. Authenticity, Seal Recarving, and Authority in the Ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean. In Seals and Sealing in the Ancient World: Case Studies from the Near East, Egypt, the Aegean, and South Asia, edited by M. Ameri, S.K. Costello, G. Jamison, and S.J. Scott, pp. 95–124. Cambridge: University of Cambridge.
It is rare that an artifact lets us put a face on antiquity, making a museum visitor feel that they are standing directly before a person from the remote past. While every object in the Penn Museum’s Eastern Mediterranean Gallery tells a story about the people who made, used, altered, or even destroyed or discarded it, the anthropoid coffin lids from Beth Shean are uniquely compelling because they seem capable of returning their viewer’s gaze. In a case in the center of the gallery lies a single, complete sarcophagus, restored from fragments, much as it would have lain in situ in one of the rock-cut tomb chambers in Beth Shean’s Northern Cemetery when it was first interred (between 1200 and 1000 BCE). It is a great hollow cylinder with a domed top, large enough to contain a human body. Some 50 such sarcophagi were excavated at Beth Shean between 1922 and 1931, and more examples from around the same period have also been uncovered at sites in northern Israel, the Negev, and Gaza. The concept of burying the dead in this type of coffin would have arrived in Canaan from Egypt, where mummies had been buried in anthropoid sarcophagi since the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2040–1650 BCE).
Whereas Egyptian coffins were typically wood or stone, those found at Beth Shean are ceramic. It would have taken immense skill and ingenuity for local artisans to adapt the anthropoid coffin form to this new medium. The potters certainly would have been working on a scale they had never attempted in their usual production, even for a large handmade pithos like the one displayed at one of the gallery entrances. The sarcophagi were too large for firing in conventional kilns, and the variable temperatures of the open fires in which they were baked are likely responsible for the uneven surface coloration. Some examples began to show cracks after firing and had to be repaired with plaster or string bindings.
To create the overall form of the coffin, the potters built up walls of clay coils, which they then smoothed with their fingers. Next, they cut holes into the clay body: one in the base, sometimes three more in the back to let out fluids from the body as it decayed, and one in the top to make a lid.
Onto the lids the potters then applied clay faces, arms, and hands. The arms of the restored coffin in the gallery are crossed in the typical pose of Egyptian mummies, but the long, splayed fingers are distinctive. The face was rendered with high cheekbones, thin lips, and long, lanceolate eyes. This particular lid exemplifies what the first publications of the Beth Shean sarcophagi
called the “naturalistic style”: the facial features are subtly modeled, cohesive, and organic, notwithstanding a certain degree of abstraction.
On the other side of the case, the visitor encounters a wall of six disembodied faces, lids for which the rest of the sarcophagi could not be completely restored. On the left are four more “naturalistic” faces, exhibiting noticeable variants in the presence/absence of beards and the rendering of the ears and eyes, but using the same technique of modeling as the lid of the restored example.
Contrast these with the two lids on the right side, where we find an entirely different mode of rendering the face. In these examples, the features are not so gently and seamlessly combined into a face at the center of the lid. Instead, long, thin coils of clay denote the sharp contours of the eyes, the eyebrows, the ears, and the protruding nose. The ridge-like lines they form are arrayed all over the lid’s surface, creating a wide, flat, jack-o’-lantern-like
visage. These lids’ unnaturalistic distortions of the face earned them the moniker of the “grotesque style.” The terms “naturalistic” and “grotesque” have stuck in the current scholarship, although they require the caveat that today, at least, they are intended as merely descriptive and do not imply a value judgment that the naturalistic was the better of the two.
Why are two markedly different artistic styles both represented in the Beth Shean sarcophagi? Some scholars have proposed that the styles reflect change over time or different ethnic identities of the makers or occupants of the coffins. In particular, the headdresses of the “grotesque” lids look very similar to those worn by figures in certain New Kingdom Egyptian reliefs,
which represent groups of migrants from the Aegean region whom the Egyptians called “Sea Peoples.” According to the Egyptians, these Sea Peoples tried to attack Egypt, but the pharaoh Rameses III (1187–1156 BCE) defeated them and resettled them along the Eastern Mediterranean coast. Might the “grotesque style” coffins then be the burials of Sea Peoples stationed as mercenaries in the Egyptian garrison at Beth Shean? While conclusive evidence still eludes us, the parallels in the Egyptian reliefs and the reported presence of Sea Peoples in Egyptian imperial outposts point toward that identification.
The “naturalistic” coffins also invite questions over the identities of their occupants. The hairstyles, folded arms, and beards of their lids are all reminiscent of Egyptian coffins, which could suggest that personnel of Egyptian origin stationed in the garrison commissioned them as a way of approximating the burial customs of their native land. But the Beth Shean coffins show important differences from those of Egypt. For one thing, the dead at Beth Shean were not mummified but left to decompose inside the coffins. For another, grave goods were often placed within the terracotta sarcophagi, whereas Egyptian burials typically kept such materials in the tomb chambers outside the coffins. Because Egyptian mortuary customs were so firmly codified, especially with regard to the preservation of the individual, these deviations hint that the occupants of the Beth Shean tombs were not native Egyptians trying to replicate the mode of burial they knew, but rather local Canaanites who had been incorporated into the Egyptian imperial administration, emulating and adapting Egyptian practices for the prestige that came from their association with the ruling elite. The Egyptian-born officials who served at Beth Shean may have preferred to be returned home for burial rather than spend eternity in a foreign land.
The likenesses on the coffin lids, even of the “naturalistic” type, tend to be heavily schematized, but they have just enough particularizing features to make us think that we are looking at specific individuals (a pointed chin here, a pinched mouth there, a distinctive hairstyle, round cheeks, heavy brows, and so on). Are we wrong to view them as mimetic portraits in this way? We do not know which features, if any, were modeled
Terracottas placed inside the sarcophagi included both Egyptian-style ushabtis and simpler handmade figurines like this one; 31-50-110.
after individual faces and which were mere artistic idiosyncrasies, or whether some of these characteristics had a symbolic value beyond their reference to real people. Hairstyles, for instance, might signify social positions or connect the deceased with a divinity, like the Egyptian-style wigs and Osiris beards visible on some of the lids from Beth Shean.
But even if the sense we might have that we are looking at true likenesses of ancient individuals may be illusory, we must admire the artists’ abilities to conjure the impression of a personal presence. And when one stands in the gallery in front of these faces from the past, it is hard not to imagine that their mouths could open at any moment and divulge their secrets.
McGovern, P.E. 1994. Were the Sea Peoples at Beth Shean? In N.P. Lemche and M. Müller, eds., Fra dybet: Festskrift til John Strange, pp. 144–156. Forum for bibelsk eksegese 5. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanus and University of Copenhagen.
Oren, E.D. 1973. The Northern Cemetery of Beth Shean. Leiden: Brill.
Pouls Wegner, M.-A. 2015. Anthropoid Sarcophagi of the Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age in Egypt and the Near East: A Re-Evaluation of the Evidence from Tell El-Yahudiya. In T.P. Harrison, E.B. Banning, and S. Klassen, eds., Walls of the Prince: Egyptian Interactions with Southwest Asia in Antiquity, pp. 292–315. Leiden: Brill.
Rakic, Y. 2014. Anthropoid Coffin Lid. In J. Aruz, S.B. Graff, and Y. Rakic, eds., Assyria to Iberia: At the Dawn of the Classical Age, pp. 44–45. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The great cylindrical shaft known as the “pool of Gibeon” after a reference in the Bible was cut into the bedrock under the town of Gibeon in ancient times to give access to the spring water below. A spiral staircase around the edge ended in an underground tunnel leading to the water chamber below; Gibeon, Expedition Records.
In Gibeon, Where the Sun Stood Still, James B. Pritchard, director of the Penn Museum’s 1956–1962 excavations at this site (modern el-Jib, Palestinian Territories), gave clear expression to what he found to be the ultimate significance of his discoveries there:
“The results of the excavations at el-Jib are unique in that they can be related with a high degree of certainty to specific events described in the Old Testament.…The tangible results of the archaeologist can both measure the trustworthiness of tradition and supplement it with additional information, which for one reason or another has been rejected or neglected in the written tradition.” (1962, ix).
The biblical archaeology of Pritchard’s day was motivated—in reaction to biblical skeptics—by a desire to empirically test the historicity of the events described by the Hebrew Bible. In 45 references in these texts, the town of Gibeon, only 5 miles from Jerusalem, appears as the setting of dramatic events in the biblical stories surrounding the rise of the kingdom of Israel. Pritchard considered that a material foundation for the basic veracity of these stories was supplied by his discoveries
at el-Jib: a fortified town of the right period, inscriptions mentioning Gibeon, and even a large water shaft that he equated with the “pool of Gibeon,” where the rival factions of David and Saul’s son were said to have clashed (2 Samuel 2:12–17.)
Today, however, most scholars consider archaeology a better tool for identifying long-term patterns in social and economic life and cultural history than for detecting short-term events. They also acknowledge how subjective readings of ancient texts can influence archaeological interpretation. In the decades since the excavations at Gibeon, archaeologists and historians have found more of interest in the broken objects discarded in the debris filling in that great cylindrical shaft–part of that “additional information” mentioned by Pritchard. Among this “trash,” stamped and inscribed jar handles and figurine fragments of the 8th to 6th centuries BCE play an important role in reconstructions and debates about a pivotal period in the history
Above: This storage jar handle bearing a lmlk (“belonging to the king”) stamp impression was found in the filling of the “pool” of Gibeon and probably dates to the late 700s or early 600s BCE. A winged scarab is framed by Old Hebrew letters reading lmlk above and mmšt below; 60-13-74.
of ancient Judah when it fell under the domination of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires. Here, a closer look at the many stamp impressions attesting one aspect of Judah’s administrative system in this period will demonstrate how such fragments can be assembled to tell part of a larger story.
In the early 1st millennium BCE, Israel and Judah were among the many small Eastern Mediterranean kingdoms that developed in the power vacuum resulting from the fall or decline of previously dominant great empires. However, it was not long before Assyria, in northern Mesopotamia to the east, recovered strength and began to assert its power over neighboring kingdoms. By the late 700s BCE, the Assyrians were knocking on the door of Israel and Judah, and when Israel resisted, the kingdom was conquered and annexed, with many of its people deported to other lands. After its own nearly disastrous attempt at resistance, Judah fared better in the 600s BCE through compliance
with Assyrian demands for tribute and loyalty. The Babylonians of southern Mesopotamia then conquered Assyria in 612 BCE and sought to take over its former subject territories in the Eastern Mediterranean. Finding Judah again resistant, in 586 BCE they sacked Jerusalem, burned its temple, and deported much of the population to Babylonia. When Cyrus the Great of Persia (modern Iran) then conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, he sought to win over former Babylonian subjects by reversing earlier policies. This included allowing many exiles, among them the Judeans, to return to their homeland and rebuild. Judah became a largely self-governing province called Yehud. The demands and depredations of imperial domination, together with the expansion of trade and cultural connections that these empires helped bring about, had a profound effect on Judah, not only politically, but also on its economy, society, and religion. More than ever before it was connected to the wide world beyond its borders; in reaction Judeans developed a distinctive identity and historical consciousness.
The most impressive sight at Gibeon today is the great cylindrical cut down into the bedrock, 37 feet in diameter and 35 feet deep. A staircase cut into the living rock spirals down the sides and then continues in a tunnel below the pool’s floor a further 45 feet down to a chamber into which natural spring water flows. Since there is no water in the cylindrical shaft, “pool” is a bit of a misnomer. Pritchard speculated that the original plan to continue the open cylindrical shaft further was abandoned due to a change in leadership or local circumstances and the project finished in a less ambitious form. This water system allowed the inhabitants of ancient Gibeon to access their spring from behind the safety of the town’s fortification walls, even while they were under siege. It was dug sometime in the early Iron Age (1200–950 BCE) but later supplanted by a straighter stepped tunnel that ran under the city wall and down the hill to the spring.
When the circular water shaft went out of use sometime in the 600s to 500s BCE, it was filled in with earth and stones. The long and laborious process of emptying it again came 2,500 years later, when 40 men of el-Jib village passed baskets up the spiral stairs in two shifts from sunrise to sunset during the summer of 1957. In the process, the excavators recovered many broken fragments from the life and livelihood of the ancient
town over the preceding centuries that had been discarded or shoveled in with the filling debris. Among all kinds of pottery vessels, clothing pins, cosmetic applicators, and tools, 56 pottery jar handles with scratched Hebrew inscriptions, 87 royal and official stamp impressions, also on jar handles, and 124 fragments of ceramic figurines depicting female figures and animals stood out as particularly significant, and Pritchard quickly documented and published these. When put into the larger context of Judean society in this period, each type of find has an interesting story to tell. The royal and official stamp impressions show us how Gibeon fit into a newly centralized administration that was adapting to meet the demands and opportunities of the day.
Dating between the 8th and the 2nd century BCE, thousands of storage jar handles—impressed before firing with official stamps—attest a unique Judean administrative practice. The system was innovated under local rule but persisted through the land’s domination by successive empires. Mapping the location of stamps from different periods lets us follow ups and downs in the official reach of the kingdom—later, province—of Judah. Dozens of the earlier types of these
impressions were found discarded in the “pool” of Gibeon, suggesting that the town hosted a significant administrative presence in the 8th to 6th centuries BCE. The earliest impressions date to the late 700s and early 600s when Judah’s kings were under pressure from the Assyrian Empire. They proclaim royal authority with their Old Hebrew inscription lmlk (pronounced “lemelech”), meaning “belonging to the king,” and royal symbol of a four-winged scarab beetle or a two-winged sun-disc. Both of these symbols originated in Egypt as solar symbols of rebirth associated with the sun-god and the king, and the winged disc also became a royal symbol in the Near East. Their use by the king of Judah draws on these international royal and divine connotations. Below the symbol appears one of four place-names—Hebron, Socoh, Ziph, or mmšt (pronunciation and identity unknown)—apparently associated with either the production of the jars or the products stored in them.
Concentric circles incised with a metal compass and, in the late 600s, a rosette stamp succeeded the lmlk stamps as royal symbols in this administrative system, although the inscriptions disappeared. After the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its king and many of its people by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, it was once believed that the land was practically deserted and its traditions in ruins. However, recent research has shown that certain settlements, such as Gibeon, survived and so did the system of marking jars. Two stamps showing a lion found in the “pool” seem to date to this period of Babylonian provincial rule. The rampant lion, a motif from Neo-Assyrian art where the lion is typically shown being stabbed by the king, was adapted in Judah to stand alone as a symbol of political or divine authority. Other evidence, such as a Persian-style gold ring, suggests that Gibeon continued to be settled under Persian rule. However, as none of the typical Persianperiod stamp impressions that simply bear the name of the province in Aramaic, “Yehud” (yhwd), was found there, the town may have been abandoned by the end of the 500s BCE, not long after Persian rule began.
What was this durable, long-lived official system of marking jars for, and why was Judah the only land to use it? Since neither the contents of the jars, nor many administrative documents from this period survive,
scholars have interpreted the indirect clues of the jars themselves and their distribution across Judah in different ways. The jars are of a four-handled, narrownecked type suitable for the storage and transport of wine and olive oil, two liquids produced abundantly in the limestone hills and valleys of Judah. The three known locations mentioned on the lmlk stamps were villages in this period, while most of the stamped handles were found at larger centers distributed throughout the kingdom, but not beyond its borders.
Two rival theories about the operation of this system seem to fit this evidence:
1. that the jars were sent for filling with wine and oil at large royally owned agricultural estates; or
2. private vineyard or orchard owners filled the royal jars with a portion of their own produce as taxation.
In both scenarios, the jars were then disbursed for consumption of their contents by administrators, royal family members, and military officers across the kingdom, presumably including people at Gibeon. Additional stamps bearing Hebrew personal names found at Gibeon and other sites—apparently part of the
lmlk jar system—may give us the identities of some of the officials involved in the collection of goods, such as Naḥum, (son of) Hiṣṣilyahu and Meshullam, (son of) Elnathan. Whichever explanation is correct, this system of supplying the local administration could have been taken over from the royal house by the administrators of the imperial province of Judah, with a corresponding change in the symbol of the stamp.
The Judean stamping system is an ingenious solution to the problem of how ancient states could administer and account for goods in a largely premonetary and low-literacy agrarian society. It may have been spurred by the region’s specialization in grape and olive cultivation in this period. Many other types of evidence also point to the systematization and centralization of the political economy of Judah in the 700s and 600s BCE under Assyrian overlordship. Debate lingers about how direct a role the Assyrian Empire played in catalyzing this system. Was Judah forced to raise silver to pay imperial tribute by selling its valuable agricultural products, as some argue? Or did the pressure imposed by the empire, together with new opportunities from its creation of a vast unified trade region, stimulate economic growth?
Some jar handles bear stamps with the names of individuals, possibly officials involved in the administrative system. Stamp in Old Hebrew lnḥm hṣlyhw "belonging to Naḥum, (son of) Hiṣṣilyahu" on a handle found in the "pool" of Gibeon; 60-13-129.
Like the stamped handles, the incised inscriptions on the handles of smaller decanter-type jars also found in the Gibeon “pool” seem to relate to wine production, in this case by private producers. In addition to growing literacy, these speak to growing specialization and commercial marketing of products in an integrated Eastern Mediterranean economy. Meanwhile, the female and animal figurines (the majority of which probably represent horses) from Gibeon and elsewhere fuel debates about when strict monotheism, with a single God worshipped
in the Jerusalem Temple, arose in Judah, and the possible widespread persistence of other private ritual practices. But recent research has also shown that the Judean type of female and horse figurines were part of a wave of similar figurine types spread across the Near East in the Neo-Assyrian period and later. This suggests that the great empires also spread religious ideas that were then adapted to local traditions and beliefs. In this highly interconnected world, new tensions arose that pitted cosmopolitan identities against local traditions.
The broken and unspectacular finds from the Gibeon “pool” are tiny fragments of the much larger pattern of Iron Age Judean society that has been painstakingly pieced together and argued over by archaeologists and epigraphers like Pritchard across decades of excavation and study. Though biblical connections capture more headlines, this kind of archaeology is much more typical today and ultimately more instructive about long-term social and economic change and the broader background to the development of the biblical narratives.
Darby, E. 2014. Interpreting Judean Pillar Figurines: Gender and Empire in Judean Apotropaic Ritual.
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Faust, A., and E. Weiss. 2011. Between Assyria and the Mediterranean World: The Prosperity of Judah and Philistia in the Seventh Century BCE in Context. In Interweaving Worlds: Systemic Interactions in Eurasia, 7th to 1st Millennia BC, edited by T.C. Wilkinson, S. Sherratt, and J. Bennet, pp. 189–204. Oxford: Oxbow. Lipschits, O. 2021. Age of Empires: The History and Administration of Judah in the 8th–2nd Centuries BCE in Light of the Storage-Jar Stamp Impressions. College Park, PA and Tel Aviv: Eisenbrauns and The Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University.
Pritchard, J.B. 1959. Hebrew Inscriptions and Stamps from Gibeon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Pritchard, J.B. 1962. Gibeon, Where the Sun Stood Still: The Discovery of the Biblical City. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
People from all over the Mediterranean traveled to a sanctuary at Kourion, Cyprus, to worship, consult, and seek the protection of the god, Apollo. People would place objects as votive dedications to stand in for them before their god.
At Kourion’s Sanctuary of Apollo, an area or precinct made sacred to the god, many of the votives are small terracotta figurines of people and animals. Among the dedications were also sculptures of stone and bronze, pottery vessels, and—no doubt—votives made of cloth and wood that have left no trace in the archaeological record. These people and their votives crowded together, creating a dynamic whole, a community made up of individual parts.
Greek and Roman Apollo is the god of shepherds, music, dance, prophecy, plague, and healing. He and his twin sister, Artemis, were both gods of archery. At first only named in inscriptions at Kourion as “the god,” he is called Apollo by the 4th century BCE. By the 3rd century BCE, Apollo at Kourion is specified as “Hylates” (of the woodland).
In the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery, the sanctuary of Apollo display uses as a backdrop a photograph of the Roman period palaestra, a building for athletic competitions. Pilgrims entering by the Kourion gate would pass by this building on their way into the sacred precinct (see Hubbard, page 58). Today the sanctuary is
partly reconstructed. The monumental buildings were sponsored by the Roman emperors Nero (54–68 CE) and Trajan (98–117 CE). A limestone paved street points the way to the Temple of Apollo.
During the Roman expansions of the sanctuary, many thousands of earlier dedications were cleared away and buried or simply built over. Worshippers had dedicated these votive objects in a more open-air precinct. The Penn excavations at Kourion (1934–1954) documented over 3,000 terracotta figurines, most from the Sanctuary of Apollo, as well as hundreds of other votives. Luigi Palma di Cesnola (1874) unearthed and Diana BuitronOliver and David Soren (1978–1984) recorded many more dedications there. The total of votives brought to light is estimated to be over 10,000.
In the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery, 23 terracotta votive figurines stand together in the display about the Sanctuary of Apollo and 9 other dedications found there and made of stone, terracotta, faience, and bronze appear in other parts of the gallery. A limestone statue in Assyrian dress on display may have been found nearby (54-28-22). A further 14 objects—terracotta figurines, limestone and marble sculptures, as well as lamps and arrowheads—from the Sanctuary of Apollo are on display in the Greece and Rome Galleries.
The Penn excavations found terracotta figurines mainly in two deposits. One is a semicircular altar in the area known as the Archaic Precinct, used from around 800 to 475 BCE. The figurines on view connect with Apollo’s many roles: an archer (54-28-118), worshipper (54-28-114), lyre player (54--28-109), and ring-dancers, as well as a man (shepherd?) with an animal, a woman with a plant (54-28-116), a six-toed figurine that may be Artemis, and a centaur with a thick snake-like tail (5428-106). The centaur is half man and half horse, possibly representative of Apollo’s foster son Chiron. Only the woman with the plant was made outside Kourion, at nearby Amathus.
A deposit from around 100 CE known as the Votive Deposit represents a massive clearing away of votives that had been dedicated over the course of seven centuries. This 13-foot wide, semicircular pit was given a prominent position on the east side of the entry to the street leading to the temple. This placement perhaps was in recognition of the history upon which the new Roman edifices were being built.
Figurines on display from the Votive Deposit include a lyre player (54-28-101) and a squat figure (54-28-97) from 500 BCE or earlier, a bust of the Hellenistic period Queen Arsinoe II (54-28-92) on view in the gallery’s display about Hellenistic and Roman Cyprus, and an early Roman figurine of a maltese dog (54-28-98). The majority of the figurines, however, represent horses (5428-94) and men, both warriors on horseback (54-28-49), some carrying dedications like a ram (54-28-48), and charioteers. Their bright colors and dynamic features bring this miniature army to life.
Kourion grew into a pan-Mediterranean destination. The warriors on display were made at Kourion, Amathus, and the island’s north coast. One found in the
Bert Hodge Hill and excavation workers re-erecting a column at the Sanctuary of Apollo, December 1947; PM Image 252021.28.
street leading up to the temple was made at Paphos (5428-127). Outside Cyprus, one likely was made in Syria (54-28-93) and people brought terracotta figurines from Greece, some of which were used to make new molds at Kourion. The faces of some men riding the horses are based on these Greek images of non-horsemen (54-2875), including youths or women (54-28-63), and the gods Pan and Eros (54-28-66). Although the faces were made in molds, the handmade bodies and alterations to the molded parts make each figure unique.
Figurines crowd together in the precinct and the pit. Singly, the details of each figurine are fascinating to look at from all sides. Their small size invites handling, making them seem easy to manipulate. Yet, the visitor to a sanctuary experienced these objects as a group rather than singly. In such crowds, people must overcome the distances that usually separate them. A tension develops between the unity of the crowd and those outside. These figurines acted and act in unison, attracting the attention of the god, drawing in worshippers, and now engaging the attention of visitors to the Penn Museum.
The impact of these miniatures at Kourion, including a miniature army that grew over time, felt and feels large. They form an interesting contrast with the Roman period tendency at this place for grand architecture and larger-scale dedications. On view in the Penn
Left
with added bits of clay on yokes; chariot with wheels with large hubs, made on the north coast of Cyprus, handmade with moldmade faces for riders, 525–475 BCE, Votive Deposit; 54-28-81. Horse and rider with fillet, hood, upward gaze, large lips, and right arm extended with palm out, made at Amathus, handmade with moldmade face for rider, 500–300 BCE, Votive Deposit; 54-28-32. Horse and rider with cap that covers horns and ears of Pan; holds stone in right hand and has shield with gorgon head, handmade with moldmade shield design and face for rider, his face based on a Greek original of the god Pan, 320–300 BCE, Votive Deposit; 54-28-69. Horse and rider with mitra, two studs, lappets, handmade, 550–500 BCE, Votive Deposit; 54-28-30.
Museum’s Rome Gallery, for example, is a marble head from a statue of a goddess or a member of the Roman imperial family (54-28-21). Another large dedication of the Roman period was found in the Temple to Apollo. It is a storage vessel (pithos), large enough for a person to squeeze inside. Large dedications before the Roman period come from several Cypriot sanctuaries, but at Kourion’s Sanctuary of Apollo they are few in comparison with the thousands of smaller objects.
Prior to the Roman period, votive dedications included other miniature objects called seals as well as unusual examples of them made large. Seals were highly personal objects that people wore as amulets and used to make impressions in clay in administrative and legal contexts. The Penn Museum team at Kourion found many seals in
George H. McFadden, III, sponsored the Penn Museum’s excavations at Kourion. On the first day of excavation at the Sanctuary of Apollo, November 6, 1935, the first object he recorded in his notebook was part of a large ceramic pithos storage vessel. The fragment he recorded joins with part of the same pithos found 60 years earlier by Luigi Palma di Cesnola. Today all the pieces are at the Penn Museum (55-9-1) (see Byler, Expedition 64:1).
A text in the Greek alphabet inscribed on the shoulder of the vessel tells us that Polyktetos, son of Timon, made it and dedicated it to Apollo Hylates and a second Apollo that is reconstructed by comparison with other inscriptions as Apollo Caesar. Apollo Caesar refers to a Roman Emperor, likely Nero (54–68 CE) or possibly Trajan (98–117 CE).
The Eastern Mediterranean Gallery includes both the original pithos fragment, in the gallery’s display about the alphabet, and a replica, next to which is a cut-away view of what the full vessel may have looked like, reconstructed to be nearly four feet in height. This reconstruction derives in part from measurements of the surviving fragments, which give us the thickness and diameter of its rim and upper body.
The proportions of the lower body and the vessel’s height can only be determined through comparison with similar pithoi. A rare complete example comes from a well at Corinth, Greece; it is tall rather than squat and has a knob-shaped base. It was made about 400 years before Polyktetos lived, but it compares closely with the surviving parts of his pithos.
The handmade techniques for crafting pithoi have changed little from antiquity to today. Pithoi ( pitharia ) made on Cyprus into the 20th century also have knob-shaped bases, share some details of the Kourion vessel’s shape, and frequently bear inscriptions on their upper bodies. Comparisons with these other vessels helped to suggest what the full size of the enormous jar Polyktetos dedicated to Apollo Hylates might have been.
the street leading up to the temple. Most take the form of an Egyptian scarab beetle, less than two centimeters in length, and have minute designs that are hard to see, like one in the gallery’s display about Phoenicians.
At the Sanctuary of Apollo, however, there are seals of double or nearly triple the length of a scarab and of much larger dimensions overall. They have bold, deeply carved designs that are easily seen from a distance. In the gallery’s display about the Iron Age city-kingdom of Kourion are a large cylinder-stamp seal showing a scene of combat (54-28-8) and a multi-sided rectangular stamp seal with a flying scarab on one side. These seals may have been displayed as badges of office, either worn on the body or prominently displayed in the sanctuary. Such large seals might instead have been made as seals of the god, as in the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires.
Sanctuaries were places for competition among worshippers. People would display their wealth at the Sanctuary of Apollo by offering objects made of costly materials, like the bronzes in the gallery’s display about the kingdom of Kourion: a warrior in a short kilt and pointed cap (54-28-3), part of a votive plaque with a sphinx or a griffin at a votive tree (54-28-4), and part of a large bronze vessel with a deer perched on the rim. The gallery’s display about Hellenistic and Roman Cyprus includes a bronze figure of Artemis (54-28-1). Athletic competition was popular at Kourion in the Roman period, with crowds enjoying gladiatorial fights, races in a stadium, and games in the palaestra next to the Kourion gate. The gallery’s display about the
city-kingdom of Kourion includes small oil containers (aryballoi) from the 6th century BCE. One is of typical Corinthian Greek form and another was made in Egypt (54-28-229). Athletes used aryballoi to spread oil on their bodies. Such dedications suggest that athletic competition was a feature of life for the crowds who assembled at the Sanctuary of Apollo long before the Romans monumentalized it.
Above, clockwise from top left: Bronze young male deer on a plaque for attachment to a bronze vessel, 325–300 BCE, Street 1; 54-28-2. Faience oil flask (aryballos) in the shape of a Corinthian Greek aryballos with cross-hatched decoration, 550–500 BCE, Street 1; 54-28-227. Chalcedony scarab with a scene of lions attacking a stag, papyrus background, 700–500 BCE, Street 1; 54-28-13.
Left: Soft dark stone multi-sided stamp seal with scenes of a flying scarab (same sized body as chalcedony scarab shown above), fish, bearded head or mask, Egyptianizing man with staff, and palm tree, 700–500 BCE, Street 1; 54-28-9.
Boggess, E.M. 1970. A Hellenistic Pithos from Corinth. Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 39.1:73–78.
Buitron-Oliver, D. 1996. The Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion: Excavations in the Archaic Precinct. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology 109. Jonsered: Paul Åströms.
Canetti, E. 1960. Crowds and Power. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Cesnola, L.P.di. 1877. Cyprus: Its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples. London: John Murray.
Connelly, J.B. 1989. Standing Before One’s God: Votive Sculpture and the Cypriot Religious Tradition. Biblical Archaeologist 52:210–218.
London, G. 2020. Wine Jars and Jar Makers of Cyprus: The Ethnoarchaeology of Pitharia. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology and Literature Pocketbook 188. Nicosia: Astrom Editions.
Mitford, T.B. 1971. The Inscriptions of Kourion
Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
Parmenter, C.S. 2021. Egyptianizing Faience from the Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates, Kourion, Cyprus. Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 29:39–51.
Soren, D. 1987. The Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion, Cyprus. Tucson: The University of Arizona.
Young, J.H., and S.H. Young. 1955. Terracotta Figurines from Kourion in Cyprus. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
The Eastern Mediterranean Gallery that opened in November 2022 significantly augments the number of Cypriot objects on permanent display in the Penn Museum. On exhibit in the gallery are 78 objects found on the island of Cyprus. A further four objects in the gallery were made on Cyprus but found at other sites in the Eastern Mediterranean—a copper ingot fragment found at Gournia in Crete and Cypriot ceramics found at Beth Shean and Beth Shemesh in Israel as well as the Baq’ah Valley in Jordan. By contrast, the Canaan and Ancient Israel gallery (1998–2021) exhibited only seven Cypriot objects, none
of which came from the Museum’s scientific excavations on the island.
The Eastern Mediterranean Gallery represents a strong collaboration within the Museum, bringing the ancient world together across modern as well as ancient boundaries. Most objects in the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery, and in the previous Canaan and Ancient Israel Gallery, come from the Museum’s Near East Section. The collections of Cypriot objects, however, are in the Mediterranean Section. At the time of the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery’s opening in November 2022,
34 additional objects found on Cyprus or of Cypriot manufacture were also on view in the museum’s Greece, Rome, and Classical World galleries. Past exhibitions have also put the spotlight on the Museum’s Cypriot collections, most recently an exhibition curated by students supervised by Mediterranean Section Associate Curator Ann Brownlee, Kourion at the Crossroads (2016–2017). The Museum also hosts the online resource “Digital Kourion,” a portal into its collections of objects and archives from Kourion.
Seventy Cypriot objects in the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery come from the Penn Museum’s excavations at Kourion (1934–1954) sponsored by George H. McFadden, III. Over half of that number come from McFadden’s excavations at the Sanctuary of Apollo at Kourion (see Smith, page 44). Twenty more pottery, bronze, and ivory vessels, as well as seals, textile working tools, and a bead come from John Franklin Daniel’s excavations at a Late Bronze Age settlement of Kourion, Episkopi-Bamboula, and its tombs. Additional ceramic and bronze vessels, a lamp, and gold leaves from funerary wreaths come from other Kourion cemeteries, Episkopi-Kaloriziki and Episkopi-Agios Ermogenis, both near the base of the city’s acropolis. One lamp was found in the theater atop the Kourion acropolis, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea from the south coast of Cyprus
The largest part of the Museum’s Cyprus collections come from Penn’s first excavations on the island. The Penn Museum commissioned Bert Hodge Hill to locate a suitable site for excavation and acquire a permit for excavation. He began excavations at Lapithos on the north coast of the island in 1931. This project was the first American scientific excavation on Cyprus. It took place at the tail end of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition (1927–1931) that set the standard for scientific excavations on the island. On display in the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery from Lapithos are a bronze weapon from the Early to Middle Bronze
Age cemetery in the locality of Vrysi tou Barba and five ceramic vessels from two Iron Age burial grounds, the “Lower” and “Upper” Geometric cemeteries. Financial difficulties suspended the project in 1932. Hill acquired a new permit for excavations after McFadden announced his support for a project at Kourion.
Gifts, purchases, and exchanges also added to the Penn Museum’s Cyprus collections. Of note among the earliest acquisitions are objects purchased from Max Ohnefalsch-Richter. Ohnefalsch-Richter first arrived on Cyprus in 1878 as a journalist at a time when the island remained part of the Ottoman Empire, but had been ceded to Britain for administration. He quickly changed his focus to archaeology, becoming a prominent excavator-for-hire and seeking buyers for the collections he amassed. In 1893, curator Sara Yorke Stevenson agreed to purchase a selection of these objects for the Penn Museum, most of which come from an Early to Middle Bronze Age cemetery at Agia Paraskevi. The Eastern Mediterranean Gallery features a terracotta shrine model Ohnefalsch-Richter reportedly found at Amathus (see Object Highlights: Eric Hubbard in Expedition
64.2, page 29) and a Roman funerary bust he wrote was unearthed at Idalion.
The history of the Cypriot collection at Penn has even deeper roots going back to the earliest years of the Museum. In 1890, one of the founders of the Museum, Francis Campbell Macauley, gifted Cypriot pottery and other antiquities to the Museum. In a list of objects for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, curator Stevenson labeled selections of pottery and terracotta figurines from Macauley’s gift as “Cesnola collection.” It is possible that all of Macauley’s Cypriot
collection came from Luigi Palma di Cesnola’s collection that he found or acquired during his years as American Consul on Cyprus (1865–1876). For example, one of Macauley’s objects is a limestone sculpture fragment of a hand holding a bird (MS292) that compares with similar pieces from Cesnola’s explorations of a sanctuary at Golgoi. Cesnola sold much of his collection to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and was later appointed as that museum’s first director (1879–1904). Many objects from his collection were later deaccessioned and sold.
The Penn Museum later acquired ancient Cypriot pottery directly from The Met, such as a bichrome barrel-shaped jug decorated with a bird and flowers on view in the Penn Museum’s Classical World gallery (MS5711). The last vessel acquired from The Met, in 1955, is part of a large storage vessel (pithos) from the Sanctuary of Apollo at Kourion that joined with a fragment found in the Penn excavations (see Smith, page 44). Second in number only to The Met, in North America today the Penn Museum’s Cypriot collections are unique in being mostly from scientific excavations.
Anonymous. 2016. Kourion at the Crossroads: Exploring Ancient Cyprus. Expedition 58.1:4.
Brownlee, A.B., and A. Pezzati. Digital Kourion (https:// www.penn.museum/sites/kourion/) Accessed Oct. 27, 2022.
Davis, T.W. 1989. A History of American Archaeology on Cyprus. The Biblical Archaeologist 52.4:163–169.
Karageorghis, V., and T.P. Brennan. 1999. Ayia Paraskevi Figurines in the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Pezzati, A., J. Hickman, and A. Fleischman. 2012. A Brief History of the Penn Museum. Expedition 54.3:4–19.
Pilides, D. 2008. ‘Welcome, Sir, to Cyprus,’: The Local Reaction to American Archaeological Research. Near Eastern Archaeology 71.1–2:6–15.
Romano, I.B. 2006. Classical Sculpture: Catalogue of the Cypriot, Greek and Roman Stone Sculpture in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
BY VIRGINIA R. HERRMANN
Browsing through the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery, a casual visitor might be struck by the strongly Egyptian flavor of a small, relief-carved ivory panel that was found in Nimrud, Iraq, capital of the Neo-Assyrian empire, and wonder why it is not in the Middle Eastern Gallery with other Assyrian artifacts, or in the Egyptian Galleries instead. A hieracosphinx—a creature with a falcon’s head and lion’s body that could represent the fearsome strength of the Pharaoh —crouches and raises its human arms, palms outward; its head is crowned by the solar disc with encircling uraeus cobra that symbolizes the sun-god Re, and it wears the pharaoh’s nemes headcloth. An Egyptologist’s expert
eye, however, would notice the artist’s deviations from Egyptian visual norms: the raised wings, the squashing of the solar disc by the tightly fitting frame, and the peculiar use of human arms on a falcon-headed sphinx. In fact, this lack of fit with the artistic traditions of either Assyria or Egypt was the key to reconstructing the fascinating history of this and thousands more carved ivories excavated in the Assyrian palaces.
Like the sphinx panel, many of the ivories found at Nimrud bear motifs of Egyptian derivation, like the god Horus seated on a lotus, the eye of Horus, or a winged scarab, with only details of style and iconography giving away their non-Egyptian manufacture. Given their close political and economic links with Egypt since the 3rd millennium BCE, the Levantine cities of the Eastern Mediterranean coast—especially those of Phoenicia, in modern Lebanon— are the most likely place of origin. Such ivories have not yet turned up in the limited excavations possible in the still densely populated Phoenician cities. However, pieces with quasi-Egyptian designs have been found in Israel, Syria, Turkey, and Cyprus, and other finds show that the Phoenicians, too, keenly adopted elements of Egyptian culture for their own purposes. The panels from Nimrud once gleamed with gold leaf and colorful
inlaid glass and stones; they decorated royal thrones, couches, horse equipment, and cosmetic containers. When the Neo-Assyrian empire (912–612 BCE) conquered the small, wealthy kingdoms of Syria and the Levant, many ivory tusks and decorated objects were taken as tribute or booty, and reliefs show soldiers carrying off furniture from conquered cities. One way the Assyrians could demonstrate their dominance was by literally depriving Levantine kings of their thrones, which were made of costly materials and covered in symbols of abundance and divine protection, and piling them up, stripped of their gold, in the vast storehouses of Assyria.
Before it became a trophy of Assyrian conquest, what was the significance of the hieracosphinx panel for the people who made it? Comparing this carving with other ivories and objects from Egypt and the broader Near East shows us one way Levantine people incorporated Egyptian motifs into their own conceptual world and changed their meaning in the process.
The Penn Museum purchased this panel (together with others on
display in the Middle Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean Galleries) from the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, which had sponsored the excavation of a large military palace at Nimrud nicknamed Fort Shalmaneser. The excavators found the hieracosphinx panel among more than a thousand other ivory fragments in Room SW 37 of this palace. These include similar panels showing sphinxes with human or ram heads, as well as further hieracosphinxes. In place of the solar disc, they wear a compressed version of the Egyptian double crown (the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, worn by the pharaoh). These sphinxes, too, raise their human arms from the elbow, palms outward, in a gesture of adoration common to both Egypt and the Levant. In Egypt, humanheaded sphinxes were sometimes given human arms instead of lions’ paws, but these were virtually never empty-handed, like in the Nimrud ivories; instead, they held an offering or a cartouche containing a royal name. In the case of Penn’s hieracosphinx panel, we cannot identify the object of adoration, which must have been depicted on an adjoining piece. But the sphinxes on other panels make their gesture toward a stylized palmette tree, or floral stalk (in the case of the other hieracosphinx). This tree with curling volutes, sometimes called the “tree of life” or “sacred tree,” is a ubiquitous symbol of fertility and divinity in the Levant and Mesopotamia, and its presence identifies these panels as Egyptianized versions of the classic Near Eastern scene of the adoration of the tree by human and mythical creatures. When this palmette tree
appears in Egypt, it is on Levantineinfluenced decorative objects of the highly international Late Bronze Age (the Egyptian New Kingdom). Indeed, one place it is found is the embroidery of a gorgeously decorated linen tunic from the tomb of Tutankhamun, where the tree is adored by two crouching female sphinxes with floral headdresses and their hands raised before them in precisely the pose of the sphinxes from Nimrud carved 500 years later. Though the cartouches of Tutankhamun embroidered on the same garment show that it was made for the Egyptian king, other motifs, including the tree, female sphinxes, and griffins (eagle-headed winged lions), come from the Levant.
The designer of the Nimrud panels has more thoroughly Egyptianized the scene by flanking the tree with Egyptian-style male human-, ram-, and falconheaded sphinxes wearing the paraphernalia of the Egyptian king. In one case, the tree is turned into the classically Egyptian papyrus, but the sphinxes raise their wings in Near Eastern style. These choices subtly change the ideological meaning of the tree-adoration scene. While the Near Eastern sphinx and griffin are ferocious but tamed guardian creatures that ward off evil, their Egyptian counterparts represent the king himself more directly and, in animal-headed form, identify him with the falcon-headed sun-god Re or sky-god Horus and the creator-god Amun, who was associated with the ram. Was the artist suggesting a more god-like character for the royal owner of this ivory chair or bed than was typical for the Levant? There is an artful play here in the blending of Egyptian and Near Eastern conventions and meanings. This experiment did not take place in isolation, however, but represents one more reply in a centurieslong dialogue between these two regions about the relationship between the royal and divine worlds.
Herrmann, G. 2017. Ancient Ivory: Masterpieces of the Assyrian Empire. London: Thames & Hudson.
BY ERIC HUBBARD
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is a lot older than you might think. For millennia, the diverse peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean region have donned protective amuletic objects and engaged in ritual acts to protect themselves while navigating the trials and tribulations of life.
Monumental temples and sacred statuary that survive attest to religious traditions supported by an ancient elite or that carried an “official” status in religious life, such as the Roman Imperial Sanctuary of Apollo in Kourion, Cyprus. In contrast, the ubiquity of protective amulets, figurines, curse tablets, and pilgrim flasks across domestic, public, funerary, and sacred spaces demonstrate the pervasiveness of a personal, everyday lived religion.
Through powerful images, words, and rituals these objects connected the practitioner to a world teeming with gods, spirits, saints, demons, and other invisible forces that could be called on for help and guidance, regardless of one’s faith or social class. For a nervous investor, wearing an amulet may promote success in business. To a wronged neighbor, a curse might bring
justice. Holy oils from a shrine or water from a sacred spring may cure a relative in pain. Early medicine, religion, and science mixed as well as competed with these varying forms of magical protective, healing and divination practices.
Today and in the past, magical beliefs and practices have constituted a wide array of behaviors and ideas interpreted differently across cultures. Spiritual practices became entangled and new traditions emerged as migrants, merchants, and armies (both local and foreign) crisscrossed the Eastern Mediterranean. Portable amuletic objects and figurines are a byproduct of this crossroads. They reflect the permeability of coexisting religious communities and often defy strict cultural or religious categorization.
Far from the “orthodox” and polemical religious texts that record the rhetoric of an elite minority, magical objects provide direct evidence of the fears, anxieties, and hopes that motivated the wider population to action. Even as there were top-down attempts to suppress certain magical activities, such as the Theodosian codes (5th century CE) of the Late Antique era, archaeology and anthropology have demonstrated that use of magic continued uninterrupted.
Pictured here is a small cross section of the personal protective and divinatory objects on display in the new Eastern Mediterranean Gallery spanning over 4,000 years in the region. Acting as intermediaries between humans and the divine, these objects remain a powerful reminder of the complex network of earthly and heavenly relationships on which people continue to rely for navigating everyday life.
(Opposite Page)
Beth Shean, Israel, 500–700 CE (29-102-176)
Like today, pilgrims seeking a physical connection to the divine collected miraculous oils and soils from sacred locations to bring home following their travels. A pilgrim from Beth Shean traveled many days to visit the shrine of St. Menas in Egypt, a Christian martyr and miracle worker. They carried home a flask with the saint’s image on it—possibly as a keepsake or gift. Vessels like this often contained oil or water sanctified by proximity to the shrine and used in healing or offering rituals.
950–900 BCE, Lapithos, Cyprus (32-27-1182)
Hollow ring-shaped vessels, called ring kernoi, are found in tombs, houses, sanctuaries, and large pits across West Asia and the Mediterranean. Liquids like water, oil, milk, or wine flowed around the ring base and could be poured out of attachments along the top in the form of animals, plants, and miniature cups. They emphasized different aspects of fertility and the ring represented the waters that irrigate the earth. Taken together these kernoi formed models of the cosmos that people used in funerary and other ritual contexts to communicate with and make offerings to the divine and explore the boundary between life and death.
There’s no question that the problems facing ancient people, like sickness, heartache, financial disputes, and so on, are just as prevalent today. Although we’ve largely found different methods to address them through secular medicine or technology, magical thinking and the engagement with a supernatural world has never gone away. Scholars of anthropology, religion, and folklore increasingly acknowledge that the acceptance of some form of the supernatural is a contemporary universal. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, Professor of Religion, Williams College, notes in his book The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences that the assumption that magical practices
have been on the decline since the Age of Enlightenment or Scientific Revolution is but a modern-day myth. Today it may look or mean something different, but the practice of carrying coins or charms for luck, of wearing saintly pendants for protection, and seeking astrological advice and understanding are as common as ever.
Among many faiths too, homeopathic practices and amuletic objects remain to comfort, guide, and cure users. In times of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, this became especially visible. Religious leaders, social media influencers, and politicians alike advertised a diverse spread of amulets, prayers, and exorcisms. Across the world, practitioners of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, traditions born in the Eastern Mediterranean, were among those utilizing the power of sacred words,
Beth Shean, 1500–1250 CE (29-104-138)
Cylinder seals could act as both personal signatures and protective amulets. In Bronze Age Canaan, common divine imagery such as the sacred tree and sacrificial gazelle were influenced by a nearby kingdom called Mitanni.
purification rituals, and various spiritual agents to combat the virus. Merchants of Catholic rosaries, prayer cards, and wearable saint medals updated their wares to emphasize protection against illness or COVID specifically. A group of Orthodox Jews in Israel distributed written amulets protecting against the coronavirus by invoking the Book of Numbers story of Pinchas preventing a plague among the ancient Israelites. Some Muslim communities have retained, since before the medieval era, the use of special bowls covered in Quranic verses which imbue water or other home remedies with healing and purifying qualities. Calls over the past two years by some Muslim leaders to disavow amulets as haram or forbidden in Islam, show a continued market for their use.
As a popular adornment, they offered divine support and protection to the wearers, including the gods themselves. During the Egyptian occupation in Canaan such charms became a common part of foundation deposits, offerings buried in the floors, walls, or under the steps leading to an altar or sanctuary in a temple.
◀ SCARAB AMULET
Beth Shean, 1300–1200 BCE (29-104-71)
Deities of different traditions could be combined during periods of intense cultural exchange. The falcon deity on this scarab amulet may depict the Canaanite god Horon merged with the Egyptian god Horus.
▲ SEKHMET AMULET
Beth Shean, 1300–1200 BCE (29-104-223)
The images of some deities, like Sekhmet, represented a high level of protection. In the form of a fierce lioness, the goddess could effect violent destruction as well as ward off illness and disease. Egyptian faience amulets like this one spread widely through the Mediterranean and remained popular through the Late Antique era (400–700 CE).
Kourion, Cyprus, Sanctuary of Apollo, 500–600 BCE (54-28-202)
The knuckle bones of hooved animals were widely collected and rolled like dice in games, used to help anticipate the future, or make difficult decisions. Each of the six sides had a divinatory significance through which gods and spirits could communicate advice or prophecy. Astragali cast in bronze might be given as offerings in temples, like this one from the Sanctuary of Apollo in Cyprus.
Beth Shean, 300–400 CE, Greek (29-108-254)
This amulet features a riding saint or “Holy Rider” spearing a demon. The Greek text reads, “the one conquering evil through God.” The evil figure is often identified with a class of demons called gelloudes thought to bring harm to pregnant women and infants. The opposite side shows an evil eye being attacked by knives and various dangerous animals.
Beth Shean, 300–400 CE (29-108-248)
With thumb thrust between the index and middle fingers, this amulet captures a hand gesture still familiar to many cultures today, though its meaning varies. As a charm worn in the ancient Mediterranean, it conveyed a gesture meant to ward off evil spirits or the evil eye.
Beth Shean, 300–400 CE, Greek (29-108-602)
Greco-Roman polytheists, Christians, and Jews alike used this common magical device to improve their circumstances. Through rolling and piercing this lead tablet, Panarchia, likely a Christian resident of Beth Shean, called on a myriad of supernatural beings (from Biblical angels to Osiris and the Mesopotamian goddess Ereshkigal) to curse her enemies amidst a money dispute. The power of the inscribed spells also came from the use of magical symbols, called charakteres, and mysterious words known as voces magicae.
Beth Shemesh, Israel, and Gibeon, Palestinian Territories, 1000–600 BCE (62-30-398 Animal, 61-14-1319 Animal/ Rider, Pillar 61-14-1289, 61-14-1318)
Figurines like these became popular in Judah as the Neo-Assyrian Kingdom gained control and spread west. Brightly colored animal and female pillar figurines are found predominantly in domestic contexts and suggest to some scholars a widespread form of healing or protection ritual performed in the home. Many questions and debates surround these female figurines, particularly their possible identification as the goddess Asherah, a consort to some forms of the Israelite god.
Iran, 1700–1800 CE, Arabic (29-221-220)
Within many Muslim communities today and in the past, amuletic devices are carried or worn, imparting divine protection. The power of these objects comes from the Qur’anic verses and stories, astrological signs, and symbols of the prophets elegantly inscribed on their surface. Many contain sacred geometries that could reference the 99 names of God (Allah) or the names of archangels arranged in a matrix.
Elliot, J. 2015. Beware the Evil Eye: The Evil Eye in the Bible and the Ancient World Volumes 1–4. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books.
Faraone, C. 2018. The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Graf, F. 1997. Magic in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Josephson Storm, J. 2017. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Savage-Smith, E. (ed.) 2017 [2004]. Magic and Divination in Early Islam. New York: Routledge.
Palmyra, “the city of palms,” was one of the most important trade centers of the ancient world. An oasis city in the Syrian desert, it lay midway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Euphrates River. Many of the merchants who supplied the Roman empire with Chinese silk, Indian steel, or Parthian carpets stopped here to water their animals on their way to the Mediterranean. Beginning in the 2nd century BCE, Palmyrene families took over much of this Eastern trade, amassing enormous wealth. By the 1st century CE, Palmyra had become part of the Roman empire. But the city retained much of its autonomy. In 270 CE, its famous queen Zenobia declared her independence and conquered much of the Eastern Roman empire before being defeated in battle. Following Zenobia’s death sometime after 274 CE and another failed revolt, Palmyra was razed and mostly abandoned.
The ruined city fascinated travelers crossing the desert. In 1753, Robert Wood published The
Ruins of Palmyra, a romantic account of his journey with three companions alongside exquisite illustrations of the ruins. The book inspired poets, philosophers, architects, and artists in the West. The eagle on the Great Seal of the United States was based on a motif contained in Wood’s book. There are even 19 towns named Palmyra in the United States. The story of Zenobia was also influential. Nathaniel Hawthorne used the famous queen’s name for the feminist heroine of The Blithedale Romance
By the 19th century, a specific type of artwork, the funerary portrait, came to represent Palmyra in museums across Europe and the United States. Most of these portraits are busts of a man or woman, carved partly in the round, often inscribed with the subject’s name and patronymic in Palmyrene Aramaic. Funerary sculptures from Palmyra collected by Charles Howard Colket (later a member of the Penn Museum’s Board of Managers) were some of the first antiquities that the University of Pennsylvania acquired. They were displayed in College Hall in 1889, the first exhibition of reliefs from Palmyra in the United States. Dr. John Peters later procured other Palmyrene sculpture for the Penn Museum in 1889 and 1890, on his way to excavate at Nippur in Southern Iraq. Other objects from Palmyra in the collection were donated by Philadelphia collectors including Francis Campbell Macauley, one of the Museum’s founders.
I begin with this modern history because it has shaped both the ways that scholars have interpreted this material and the fate of Palmyra itself. In 2015, when the Islamic State took over Tadmor (the name of both the administrative district and a city in Syria near the ancient Palmyra/Tadmor), they dynamited temples, tombs, and columns lining Palmyra’s processional way. Daesh—the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria— destroyed these ancient ruins to shock the West, as a type of symbolic revenge. They could do so because for centuries, Europeans and Americans had positioned themselves, and not the modern inhabitants of Tadmor, as its true heirs. Travelers like Wood had removed modern Palmyrenes and their houses from drawings and early photographers followed suit. In the 1930s and 1940s, the French Mandate government made this removal permanent when they destroyed the houses that lay among the ruins, displacing people in order to create a pristine archaeological site. Seeing Palmyra as a Roman city, rather than a Syrian one, not only put the ruins at
risk, but has also obscured many aspects of the site, and the interpretation of its sculptures. The reinstallation of the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery, which displays three portraits from Palmyra, gives me an opportunity to place Palmyra in its local, excavated context.
A caravan approaching Palmyra during its heyday would have traveled down roads that were lined with family tombs. These included multistory tower tombs, which could be 65 feet (20m) high; house or temple tombs with elaborate columned facades; and hypogea, underground tombs hollowed out of the bedrock. Vast cemeteries have been found surrounding the city walls to the north, west, east, southeast, and southwest. Merchants from Damascus, Emesa (modern Homs), or the Euphrates would travel through cities of the dead before entering the city of the living.
The same was true, of course, of other cities in the ancient world. In many ways, the tombs at Palmyra seem to follow empire-wide fashions, particularly in their arrangement outside of the city walls. In Italy, the Via Appia Antica southeast of Rome is also lined with monumental tombs, as is the Porta Nocera at Pompeii. Wall paintings, architectural carvings, and sarcophagi have all been found in excavations at Palmyra, similar to
Tower tomb of Elahbel. American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Department, between 1900 and 1920; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [LC-DIG-matpc-12353].
monumental tombs known from Italy and other parts of the Roman Empire. Funerary inscriptions are abundant at Palmyra and are common across the Roman world and by most accounts form the single largest epigraphic source. A few of the earliest tombs at Palmyra have funerary busts of their founder in external niches, much like some of the tombs of freedmen at Rome and the tomb of the Flavia at Pompeii, visible for everyone to see. Most of these busts at Palmyra, however, were located inside the tombs. The same is true for many funerary portraits that have been found elsewhere in the Roman empire. And like Roman sculpture elsewhere, surviving
traces of pigment on the reliefs show that they were once brightly painted.
But the Palmyrene tombs also have many unique elements. For one thing, the sheer number of funerary portraits is unknown elsewhere. The Palmyra Portrait Project, which was begun in 2012, has recorded more than 3,000 individual portraits; only Rome has produced more. At Palmyra, people buried in any of the known tomb types were represented by means of a carved portrait. In addition to the portraits, most of which are busts, there are occasional scenes of banquets, most of which feature the paterfamilias—with other family members in many cases.
Elsewhere in the empire, wall paintings, mosaics, and sarcophagi were far more common, but although present at Palmyra, they were overshadowed by the thousands of portraits. The busts themselves do not resemble sculpted portraits from elsewhere in the empire in either style or content. They do not show the attention to naturalism that is familiar to us from Italy, nor do they show the same stylization as funerary portraits from elsewhere in the Eastern Roman Empire, such as Beth Shean or Cyprus. The sculptors at Palmyra adopted a naturalistic style but chose not to carve exact likenesses. Instead, the portraits tend to be of types, each slightly different, but rendered with far more attention to detail than those elsewhere in the East. The subjects wear a combination of Greek and Iranian (Parthian) styles, with many clearly Palmyrene features, rather than formal Roman clothing and imperial hairstyles, which are common both in Italy and in the Eastern Roman empire. Moreover, the
sculptors highlighted things that received little attention in other contexts. Women’s headdresses, for example, are finely detailed. Finally, the manner and language of the funerary inscriptions at Palmyra are different. Elsewhere, funerary inscriptions, written either in Latin or Greek, usually contained the subject’s name, their father’s name, and (in the case of a man) his profession or the offices that he held. At Palmyra, however, almost all the inscriptions were in Palmyrene (more than 1,100), a dialect of Aramaic, with only 32 in Greek and 5 in Latin. These Palmyrene inscriptions were short, listing the subject’s name and their father’s name. There are almost no examples that provide a man’s profession or details about his public persona.
In the not-so-distant past, art historians dismissed such idiosyncrasies as the result of the sculptors’ provincialism, as though artists so close to the borders of the empire were simply incapable of mastering the realism that we admire in Classical sculpture. But more recent research has eschewed this approach, recognizing instead that the fine workmanship of the sculptures testifies to the skill of their sculptors.
This means that we should ask why the artists carved the portraits in this style, and why people in Palmyra commissioned these types of representations.
Analysis of the archaeological context of these portraits—both within the tombs as well as in relation to the city itself—suggest some answers. Although the reliefs in the Museum’s collection were excavated by amateurs in the 19th century with no information on context, excavations during the 20th century did provide evidence for how people might have seen these portraits—and why certain details were highlighted, and others were omitted. It’s important to remember that very few examples of funerary portraiture were visible on tomb facades. Instead, portraits usually marked loculi, the niches in tombs where the body of the deceased was laid to rest. In other cases, funerary portraits decorated the inside walls and ceilings of tombs. The secluded position of the portraits tells us something about their intended audience and about the subject’s family and descendants.
Understanding that the sculptures were not made to be shown to the public at large helps to explain why some of these sculptures do not look like those elsewhere. Palmyrene families valued different things in the privacy of their tombs than other Romans might have. The portraits clearly show that these families were not interested in depicting their dead as powerful Romans, given the lack of Roman costume, and the
omission of an individual’s public roles from the inscriptions.
The portraits also give us a few clues about what the Palmyrenes did find important and wanted to communicate to their descendants: lineage, wealth, and trading connections. The many distinctive patterns on women’s headdresses might be related to clan affiliation. Most women were depicted wearing jewelry, often large amounts. The delicate carving of brooches, earrings, necklaces, and rings emphasizes wealth, social connections, and access to trade goods. The portraits also draw attention to dress, and particularly the quality of the cloth and its design. Given the importance of the textile trade in Palmyra, this is probably another way to index wealth or trading connections (particularly with the East).
We can see attention to the same ideas in the male portraits, particularly in the priest and caravan leader portraits. In the priest portraits, men wear a tall cylindrical hat that is unique to Palmyra. Rubina Raja has suggested that priest was a hereditary role, which might be why it is emphasized in these portraits, rather like the women’s headdresses. It is also likely that the temples (and priests) played an important role in Palmyrene trade. Caravan leaders wear long-sleeved tunics and have their cloaks thrown backwards over their shoulders, probably indicating that they are wearing Parthian apparel such as trousers. This may be because such a costume was far more appropriate for riding and travel than the awkward toga, but it also demonstrates that Eastern connections were important, at least for this
familial audience. The many banquet relief scenes—which show a man reclining on a couch, surrounded by his family—also gesture to the importance of kinship, wealth, and trade. They probably illustrate not the funerary feast, but the religious feasts that occurred in the temples of Palmyra and that seem to have been important to the social organization of long-distance exchange. Besides the funerary portraits, one of the most ubiquitous finds at Palmyra were clay tokens (tessera) that served as tickets to these banquets.
Other aspects of the portraits may also be explained with reference to family ideology. Both the style of the carving and the nature of the inscriptions might also point to the importance of lineage. Perhaps Palmyrene sculptures may were not true likenesses, because representing the uniqueness of each individual was not important; what was significant was the subject’s position with regard to their family as a whole. There was no need for the sculptures to be recognizable, after all, when what mattered was their collective nature. Similarly, the inscriptions contain individual
Like the family vaults in New Orleans cemeteries, the tower tombs and underground hypogea of Palmyra were only opened on special occasions—for funerals or commemoration rituals. Light came from the entrance(s) and probably did not penetrate far into the interior. Given this, it is not surprising that discarded oil lamps were some of the most common artifacts found in the Palmyrene tombs. People would have seen the portraits in soft, flickering light. The colors of the portraits in the niches along the wall would have been visible, but the same was not true of the portraits located higher up on the wall. A grieving relative might glimpse the shimmer of gold from a necklace or the rich crimson of a cloak in the glow of the lamp. But the overwhelming presence of the ancestors—the rows of illustrious forebears lining the walls—would have been the most striking aspect of a visit to these tombs. When we remove the Palmyrene reliefs from their empire-wide context and consider them instead as family portraits, we can begin to understand the city better. In 2015 and afterwards, the losses at Palmyra were mourned as losses of universal significance, of a place that mattered to the world. But the losses can also be seen in a different light, one that emphasizes the very local significance of these pieces, which could exist nowhere else.
Baird, J.A. and Z. Kamash. 2019. Remembering Roman Syria: Valuing Tadmor-Palmyra, From ‘Discovery’ to Destruction. London: Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London. 62.1: 1–29.
Danti, M. 2001. Palmyrene Funerary Sculptures at Penn. Philadelphia: Expedition, 43(3): 33–40.
Heyn, M. 2008. Sacerdotal Activities and Parthian Dress in Roman Palmyra. In Reading a Dynamic Canvas: Adornment in the Ancient Mediterranean World, edited by C.S. Colburn and M.K. Heyn. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 171–194.
De Jong, L. 2017. The Archaeology of Death in Roman Syria: Burial, Commemoration, and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kraft, S. 2017. Changing Identities, Changing Positions: Jewellery in Palmyrene Funerary Portraits. In Positions and Professions in Palmyra, edited by T. Long and A. Højen Sørensen. Palmyrene Studies 2. Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab. 36–51.
LeGrain, L. 1927. Tomb Sculptures from Palmyra. Philadelphia: The Museum Journal. 18(4): 325–350.
Mulder, S. 2017. Imagining Localities of Antiquity in Islamic Societies. Bristol: International Journal of Islamic Architecture, 6(2): 228–254.
Raja, R. 2020. Dining with the Gods and the Others: The Banqueting Tickets from Palmyra as Expressions of Religious Individualisation. In Religious Individualisation: Historical Dimensions and Comparative Perspectives I, edited by M. Fuchs, A. Linkenbach, M. Mulsow, B-C. Otto, R.B. Parson, and J. Rüpke. Berlin: De Gruyter. 243–255.
Raja, R. 2022. Pearl of the Desert: A History of Palmyra Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Saito, K. 2005. Palmyrene Funerary Practices from Funerary Goods. In A Journey to Palmyra: Collected Essays to Remember Delbert R. Hillers, edited by E. Cussini. Leiden: Brill. 150–165.
Penn Museum archaeologists entered the Eastern Mediterranean region within an atmosphere of imperialism. Most of the material in the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery came from expeditions spanning the 1920s to the 1980s, periods that saw the contentious drawing and redrawing of political, economic, and community boundaries amidst the fallout of two world wars, multiple regional wars, and a cascade of national independence movements.
Analyzing the archives, and contextualizing their creation, sheds light on the ways archaeology was made possible by and contributed to the legacy of colonialism and empire in the region. This legacy continues to play a strong role in the way many people conceptualize the Eastern Mediterranean’s ancient past and contemplate the future.
After World War I, the League of Nations oversaw the British and French Mandate governments
carve up the remaining Ottoman Empire. The Penn Museum was the first American institution to dig in what became British Mandate Palestine (today’s Israel and the Palestinian Territories) at the site of Beth Shean.
The Beth Shean excavation was instrumental in both the colonial practices of the British Mandate and in the rise of American Biblical archaeology. The excavation’s relationship with imperialism rested on everything from the colonial labor system archaeologists put in place, to the ways they formulated research goals and interpreted the material they found.
Already digging in British colonial Egypt at Mit Rahineh (Memphis), Clarence Fisher led the Museum’s move to Palestine. Fisher chose Tell el-Husn, near the modern village of Beisan (Beth Shean in Arabic), because it was known from Biblical, Egyptian, and Classical sources. Its imposing, intact mound also signaled the potential to produce the exhibition-quality artifacts the Museum wanted and feared it might soon lose access to in Egypt due to the 1919 revolution
against Britain. Eager telegram requests by Fisher to dig at Beisan circulated among British military administrators the same year, several months before the Palestine Civil Government coalesced in 1920. Under the Antiquities Ordinance of 1920, ownership and oversight of Palestine’s cultural heritage passed from the Ottoman Imperial Museum in Constantinople to the British-led civil government. Ottoman laws, previously stringent toward foreign nationals, were amended to ease site access and artifact export for American and European projects.
skilled Egyptian crew on which he relied to help open their own operations. Fisher’s method of excavation became a common model for running a project, enshrined in the research program of the American School of Overseas Research he later co-authored with William Albright.
On any given week, the Beth Shean expedition employed 25 to 250 Palestinian Arab men, women, and children to work under the Egyptian foremen. A meager daily wage supplemented their primarily agro-pastoral lifestyle and often took advantage of their precarious political and economic position since the War’s end. For example, the directors’ diaries record occasional, mostly unsuccessful, labor strikes. The first strike came in April 1923 when Fisher lowered wages to hire more workers. Fisher stood firm anticipating that a recent drought would push the locals to accept anything.
Stretching labor wages was common even for an unusually well-funded project like the Museum’s. Much of the over $200,000 (in today’s value) seasonal budget went to salaries for a director as well as the staff, a team of typically Western-educated specialists that included surveyors, illustrators, and object registrars. Specialist positions were filled by a rotating cast of experts with diverse backgrounds including educated Egyptians, former British, Turkish and Russian military servicemen, and recently emigrated Jewish scholars.
With permit in hand by spring 1921, Fisher was faced with starting a new project in a still war-scarred landscape. He sought quickly to reproduce the colonial labor infrastructure already well established in Egypt and Mesopotamia that relied on hired teams of workers to do the earth moving.
This was accomplished literally by moving dozens of Egyptian foremen and workers from his dig at Mit Rahineh to Beisan, as Fisher and George Reisner had done previously when digging at Samaria before WWI. Through the 1930s Western-led archaeological projects, like at Beth Shemesh, Megiddo, Jerash, and Tell enNasbeh, would seek out the experience of Fisher and the
Non-Western staff members played an especially crucial role as the intermediaries between the foreign staff and the local workforce. Labib Sorial, a Coptic Egyptian, stands out as an example. Dr. Jeffrey Zorn has recently illuminated Sorial’s career as part of a history of the Tell en-Nasbeh excavations. Recruited by Fisher, Sorial became a fixture in Palestinian archaeology working nine different digs between 1921 and 1935. Though uncredited in subsequent publications, the Beth Shean archives shows Sorial performing the work of an assistant director. He supervised foremen, negotiated with and distributed payment to local laborers, organized project logistics, drew architectural plans, and much more. From piecing together their scattered references in project archives, more stories like Sorial’s
are now coming to light to acknowledge the perspective and pivotal contributions of non-Western workers and staff in the colonial-era.
In the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery, visitors can examine copies of photos, diary entries, letters, and more from three excavations which created the collections on display; Beth Shean, Kourion, and Gibeon. The Archive Panel contributes to the "Crossroads" theme of the gallery by painting a fuller picture of the circumstances in which collections were formed, including the diverse backgrounds, skills, labor, and expertise of those who comprised the excavation teams, the motivations of researchers and project funders, and the complicated ways in which all involved intersected with period geopolitics.
When Fisher arrived in Beisan, followed by Sorial and the Egyptian crew, much of their daily routines were determined by the Anopheles mosquito. The malaria-carrying insect was a widespread danger in Palestine especially to foreign visitors, and the marshy area around Beisan had a reputation for being particularly malarious.
Along with the excavation permit, the Palestine government provided instructions on where the project should place its camp, the care of mosquito nets, the proper daily dosage of the malaria drug, quinine, as well as a recommended curfew. Regardless of attempts to avoid infections, letters and diary entries over the course of the excavation contain lists of ill team members and frequent trips to hospitals in Haifa.
After the first year, avoidance measures gave way to action and attention was turned to cutting canals and
draining the marshes around the site to reduce mosquito breeding grounds. While framed as increasing safety for the dig team and neighboring village, anti-malaria campaigns jointly carried out between the expedition and the health department contributed to the broader nation-making aims of the Mandate.
From the Mandate’s perspective, transforming the land and the local epidemiology was necessary to control Palestine, ensure the region’s capacity to sustain new Jewish settlement, and was ultimately to the Arab’s civilizational progress and benefit. A variety of different land, water, and health policies had the effect of disrupting the lifeways of most native Palestinians,
especially nomadic pastoralists. The policies were often supported by widely held, colonial myths, which cast them and their approaches to land use as inherently unchanging and wasteful.
In all, the expedition’s anti-malarial work was small, centered on canalizing the Jalud River that wrapped around the ancient mound. But since canals require continued maintenance, and the project’s rotating foreign staff were always at risk, the disease became a prominent vector along which cultural and racial boundaries on the dig were reinforced. In several letters, Alan Rowe, an Australian archaeologist who succeeded Fisher as director, reports to Mandate authorities how he felt the
local Arabs were making the malaria situation worse through their misuse of the canal and their generally “very careless” use of water. These letters, along with others that describe Rowe punishing workers he thought were not abiding by prevention measures, illustrate that his concern was about maintaining productivity as much as safety. They also show the biases with which he treated non-Western workers in enforcing a new vision of land and health management.
Lest the Anopheles mosquito seem too separate from the archaeology, Clarence Fisher explicitly tied the malarious conditions of the 1920s to the Islamic conquerors of Beisan in 634 CE. In their wake he imagined the destruction of the previous Byzantine city’s dams and that the once prosperous agricultural fields were flooded and left to turn pestilent. He assured readers of the 1923 Museum Bulletin that under the influence of the British Mandate, Beth Shean "may once more climb to its deserved height as the great city... of the Jezreel Valley." Recent investigations have since demonstrated a peaceful transition to Islamic rule. Though diminished after a 749 CE earthquake, the city continued to be an industrial hub for glass and eventually refined sugar in the medieval period. Fisher’s biased story joins many, which underwrote the emphasis behind Biblical archaeology among Western scholars, led to the dismissal of Arab cultural heritage and Islamic heritage more broadly, and assisted the creation of a national narrative that justified European expansion.
When Penn Museum officers promoted their expedition to Palestine they led with the Bible. Philadelphians tuning in to WCAU radio in 1930 might have heard the voice of Cornelia Loring Dam, the Museum’s Head of Education, giving an update and quoting from the First Chronicles story of King Saul’s death and the display of his body on Beth Shean’s city walls. Dam continued “if you know your Bible you will remember that news of the calamity was brought to David who sallied forth to wreak vengeance. He captured the citadel of Beth-Shan and destroyed it—how thoroughly we could read in the excavations, where mud-brick walls had been baked red by the heat of the conflagration.”
The claim to evidence of David's conquest was shortlived, generating as much skepticism and debate among scholars then as interest from the public. Nevertheless, Dam's broadcast exemplifies over a decade of headlines promoting the “holy relics” being discovered at Beth Shean and the rise of a new kind of Biblical archaeology. Research illuminating the lifeworld of the Bible had been carried out for decades before WWI. Mostly sponsored by French, German, and British nationalscientific organizations, excavations and surveys often served the dual purpose of “Biblical exploration” and military reconnaissance intended to aid in staking claim to Ottoman territories once the empire ultimately dissolved. Indeed, the borders of Mandate Palestine were essentially those mapped by the British Palestine Exploration Fund since the 1870s under the cover of illustrating the Old and New Testaments. Thus began a territorializing of the Bible and a reframing of the region as belonging to principally Jewish and Christian heritage.
American scholars were relative latecomers to Biblical archaeology at the turn of the 20th century. Their research was stimulated by intense debates about the authenticity of Biblical history. Even before the dig began, the Museum advertised to the public and donors that archaeology in Palestine was important because of its Biblical connections. The primary goal of finding museum-quality artifacts related to Biblical stories was set from the beginning and heavily biased the interpretations of researchers. As big, privately funded projects like at Beth Shean and later Megiddo announced evidence for David’s destruction of Beth Shean or King Solomon’s stables, they contributed to the solidification and legitimacy of a new paradigm. During this “Golden Age” of archaeology, William F. Albright, a contemporary and mentee of Clarence Fisher, would define a distinctly American research outlook insisting that the Bible was essentially true as a historical document and that archaeology was proving it.
The financial and popular dominance of this outlook would persist through the 1960s. It would have farreaching consequences as the land around Biblical sites and artifacts increasingly became pulled into nationalizing narratives that justified both the British Mandate’s claim to the region and that of the nascent Jewish State they supported under the Balfour Declaration.
By the 1933 season, then directed by Gerald M. Fitzgerald, the financial strain of the Great Depression, rising political unrest, and the diminished recovery of
Biblical Period artifacts combined to discourage the Penn Museum from continuing work. The prospect of returning to Beisan was not officially called off, though, until 1938 at the height of the Great Palestinian Revolt against the British Mandate administration.
Kourion was one of the great ancient citykingdoms of Cyprus. Over twenty years, with a pause for World War II, the Penn expedition uncovered over 5,000 years of human occupation. Their finds ranged from Neolithic settlements (4000s BCE) to stunning mosaic floors of the Late Roman and Byzantine periods (400s CE).
Cyprus had just recently become a Crown Colony when the British-led Department of Antiquities approved the Museum’s request to dig in 1934. The project was made possible by the
exclusive support of George H. McFadden, III. Bert Hodge Hill, who already served the Museum at Lapithos, Cyprus, was contracted to direct the project. Numerous Cypriots ensured the project’s success like Christos Gregoriou, Christophis Polycarpou (see an example of his work in Smith page 46), and museum professionals like Porphyrios Dikaios.
Given the context of imperial competition and the lead up to WWII, Western scholars in the Eastern Mediterranean were seen as regional specialists and often recruited to spy for their governments. Project members like McFadden, John Franklin Daniel, and the project’s architect, Dorothy Cox, moved seamlessly between academic and espionage circles for the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor to the CIA (see Reeves page 86). McFadden employed his personal yacht, the Samothrace, to shuttle operatives around the Mediterranean.
Excavation at el-Jib (the Biblical Gibeon) uncovered an Iron Age city (700–600s BCE) with massive city walls and a complex water system. The project, directed by James Pritchard, was celebrated for the discovery of an extensive winery and decorated jar handles that shed light on political and economic life in ancient Judah (see Herrmann page 38).
Mentored by William Albright, James Pritchard became a leader amongst the second, more critical generation of Biblical archaeologists. Gibeon, where “the sun stood still” for Joshua’s siege, provided a chance to investigate the accuracy of the Hebrew Conquest
Top, 1960: Archaeologists often rely on local knowledge for their research. Landowner Azziyeh Umm Azzat led the Gibeon excavation to the valuable discovery of ancient, undisturbed tombs in her field. She is pictured here to the left of the center individual, possibly her grandson, and James Pritchard (right) at the opening of a Middle Bronze Age tomb. Gibeon Expedition Records. Right, 1961: Asia Halaby organizing and sorting Gibeon pottery, volunteering as the project registrar; Gibeon Expedition Records.
of Canaan described in the Old Testament. Although Albright considered the conquest confirmed by preWWII research, the question was hotly debated by scholars in the 1950s and 1960s.
Howard Pew, president of the Sun Oil Company (later SUNOCO), personally financed the Gibeon excavation. A staunch Presbyterian, he was one of many wealthy American philanthropists who funded archaeological activities that might support scripture.
As before, the project relied on the labor and skill of many local residents, in what was then Jordan (now the Palestinian Territories). In his memoir, Pritchard described being especially indebted to Asia Halaby, a Palestinian aid worker who ran a support center for refugee women. She acted as intermediary between Pritchard, the workers, and the Jordanian Government, as well as excavating, cataloging, and providing medical services.
After the successful expedition to Gibeon, Museum Director Froelich Rainey announced, “given the Hebrews and Greek impact on Western civilization” it was only natural that a new Biblical Archaeology section in the museum be created. James Pritchard was appointed as head curator and hired to teach as a professor in the Department of Religious Thought (Museum Bulletin 1962 [5]:1).
In the same year, the collections were expanded to include purchases from Haverford College’s 1928–1933 excavation of Beth Shemesh (Ain Shems, Israel). The excavation was directed by Dr. Elihu Grant, a Biblical Literature professor from Haverford, assisted by the Museum’s Clarence Fisher and Alan Rowe.
Clockwise, from top left, 1961–1963: The Tell es-Sa’idiyeh dig overlooked big changes happening in the Jordan Valley like the East Ghor Canal Project. The EGCP was a Cold War-era irrigation program located on the frontlines of the Arab-Israeli conflict and was often a target of military and political clashes. The US-funded project though was a friendly presence to American archaeologists. Infrastructure created by the project provided housing for the dig team and Pritchard was joined by one of the lead engineers in his survey of the valley. PM Image 451721, Library of Hazra Engineering Company. June 1964: Asia Halaby also served as a unit supervisor at Tell es-Sa’idiyeh. This page from her journal shows her recording the names of local laborers she directed along with sketches and notes about the excavation of Tomb 117. PM Image 451723. 1966–7: Laborers excavate around mudbrick and stone houses from the 8th and 9th century BCE city atop Tell es-Sa’idiyeh; PM Image 229209.20.
Pritchard turned his attention to the central Jordan Valley next, where there had been little excavation conducted. Part of this neglect among Western scholars stemmed back to the British Mandate period. Corbett (2014) has argued that the territory of Transjordan was delineated in opposition to Palestine, defined negatively as belonging to the inferior neighbors of the Biblical Israelites. Nelson Glueck, American rabbi and archaeologist, all but cemented the same outlook in his extensive mid-century survey of Jordan.
Tell es-Sa’idiyeh had been previously documented and identified by Glueck and Albright variously as Zaphon or Zarathen of the Bible. Pritchard himself did not clarify the name but was drawn to illuminating the history behind Biblical verses, which described the valley as once densely occupied. He was intrigued how such a prominent mound in a strategic location became “forgotten.” Over two seasons of work, the
June 1972: Soon after the raising of a large hydrogen balloon by Julian Whittlesey to take aerial photos at Sarepta, speculation stirred around the expedition’s ulterior motives. Though government officials had approved its use, the balloon made the front page of some Lebanese newspapers for several days, reporting enemy ships off the coast of Sarafand and surveillance by Americans. Right, a political cartoon from Al-Anwar even showed Defense Minister, Majid Toufic Arslan, charging the balloon with a sword. PM archives 238508.17a; Al-Anwar June 8, 1972, pg. 12 credit: Internet Archives.
expedition recovered the remains of an urban settlement and extensive cemetery spanning the Late Bronze to Iron Ages (1250–700 BCE). Burials from the cemetery containing jewelry of precious metals and stones, elaborate bronze drinking sets, and imported pottery highlighted the cosmopolitan culture among the ancient local elite and ties to long distance trade.
Finds from the end of each season were stored in the Jordanian Department of Antiquities office in East Jerusalem. This became a problem in 1967 when the outcome of the Six Day War brought East Jerusalem under Israeli control. After some negotiations Pritchard secured permission from Israel to return the material, but only by way of Philadelphia. Jordan’s half of the excavated finds eventually made their way back to the National Museum in Amman.
Given the Six-Day War, Pritchard turned to Lebanon as a quieter alternative. Lebanon was formerly part of the French Mandate but had gained independence after WWII. This time Pritchard sought to shed light on the Phoenicians, the famous ancient Mediterranean seafarers.
After surveying many sites, he was given permission by the Director General of the Antiquities Service, Emir Maurice Chehab, to dig at Sarafand (Sarepta). Four seasons of excavation revealed a long period of occupation from the 1600s BCE through the Byzantine era (600s CE). The project reached Phoenician levels after the second season, most notably finding evidence for pottery and dyeing industries and the earliest example of a shrine complex in the Phoenician homeland. Sarepta remains one of the most important Phoenician ports and settlements documented.
The quiet Pritchard expected in Lebanon was short-lived. Events of the Jordanian Civil War had made southern Lebanon a new center for the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) activities. Sarepta’s situation on the coast near the Israeli border placed it in the crosshairs of rising tensions between the PLO and Israel. A 1971 clash happened to destroy the project’s dig house and left Pritchard uneasy about further conflict. The lead up to the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 put an end to the project altogether.
Top, 1972: Adapting to rising tensions along the Lebanese-Israeli border, a worker uses a Treasure Trove metal detector to check for land mines ahead of continuing excavations at Sarepta; PM Image 451725. Left: 1979: The Baq’ah Valley of Jordan, looking northwest, continuously occupied since the Middle Paleolithic (ca. 45,000 BP). The Umm ad-Dananir region is the plowed area left of the two satellite receivers in the center of the valley. The western edge of the Baq’ah Palestinian refugee camp is visible as a grey development to the right of the receivers. Photo by MASCA.
By the 1970s, the Biblical archaeology of William Albright gave way to a more anthropological archaeology. Patrick E. McGovern was at the forefront of this movement in the Eastern Mediterranean when he led the Baq’ah Valley project in Jordan with the Museum’s Applied Science Center for Archaeology (MASCA). Five field seasons comprising geophysical survey and excavation across tells and burial caves uncovered material spanning the Early Bronze and Islamic periods. Applying what were new analytical techniques, from neutron activation analysis and petrography to scanning electron microscopy allowed archaeologists to trace detailed changes in stone, metal, and ceramic craft industries over time. These methods transformed our understanding of how Transjordan peoples experienced and responded to broader historical-environmental processes like the decline of the Late Bronze Age citystate system.
The Baq’ah project took place 9 miles northwest of Amman at a time when urban sprawl from the capital was rapidly reaching north. Using a mix of remote sensing and hypothesis driven analytics, the project was one of the first to anticipate today’s challenges of creating a targeted and efficient archaeological program amidst modern
development. In the field, the project relied heavily on the friendship and labor of the Abu Orabi family of Umm ad-Dananir, on whose land the excavations took place, as well as Palestinian workers from the Baq’ah Camp. Another result of the Six-Day War was that the camp was home to a large population of Palestinian refugees displaced from Gaza and the West Bank.
Abu El-Haj, N. 2001. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Selffashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cline, E.H. 2020. Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon. Princeton: Princeton University Press
Corbett, E. 2014. Competitive Archaeology in Jordan: Narrating Identity from the Ottomans to the Hashemites. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Mickel, A. 2021. Why Those Who Shovel are Silent: A History of Local Archaeological Knowledge and Labor. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Sufian, S. 2006. Colonial Malariology, Medical Borders, and Sharing Scientific Knowledge in Mandatory Palestine. Science in Context 19(3):381–400.
From 1934 to 1954 the Penn Museum conducted excavations at the site of Kourion, in Cyprus, encompassing a range of sites and time periods. As international political tensions rose in the late 1930s, excavators at Kourion were optimistic and determined to continue their work despite World War II. The Kourion Expedition records in the Penn Museum Archives include some of the correspondence between the excavators and friends, family, and colleagues both in Philadelphia and Athens, as well as excavation notebooks. These allow us to reconstruct what the excavators at Kourion experienced in these tense years.
Through the letters in the Archives, we are introduced to people who dedicated years of their lives to the excavations at Kourion. Among them are George McFadden, the researcher who financially supported the project, and Virginia Grace, an esteemed classical archaeologist. We also meet John Franklin Daniel (who often went by “Pete”), an enthusiastic young doctoral candidate, and Bert Hodge Hill, an experienced excavator who oversaw and mentored the other team members.
The Kourion records reflect little concern for building tensions across Europe until the very late 1930s. Many nations were arming, but war did not yet seem imminent. Despite Nazi Germany annexing Austria in March 1938, records from this time show enthusiastic reports of finds and excavation, as well as plans for publications and travel.
Over the summer of 1938, tensions mounted as Hitler threatened to invade Czechoslovakia. In September, the first allusions to political escalations began to appear in the Kourion correspondence.
McFadden sent a telegram to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens on September 25th, planning to get back to digging despite the imminent war and valiantly promising to “risk any situation that might arise.” Two days later, Bert Hodge Hill wrote to his friend and illustrator Lewey T. Lands to discuss possible travel complications to and from Cyprus. Hill responded to McFadden’s telegram on the same day, with the same concerns. With hope—or maybe naïveté—Hill added, “I sincerely hope that by the time you see this letter the threats to the peace of the world may have wholly disappeared.”
After Great Britain, France, and Italy agreed to turn over the Sudetenland to the German state, the Kourion correspondence resumed some sense of normalcy, with many congenial letters from John Franklin Daniel.
The archives reflect this ease in tension through early 1939. McFadden wrote to Hill on January 3rd with cheerful updates and holiday tidings. On March 10th, McFadden wrote again, “everything is going smoothely [sic] except the weather which has been fierce ever since we arrived.”
A letter from McFadden on March 13th anticipated a leisurely summer trip around the Mediterranean. Just two days later, Germany invaded unceded areas of Czechoslovakia, an unequivocal act of aggression.
On April 7th, the conflict came closer, when the Italian army invaded Albania. This move frightened many in Greece and Cyprus. Italian blockades began draining goods like sugar and coffee from shelves and obstructing mail.
Around this time, the correspondence begins to reflect more acute concern over current events. On April 26th of 1939, Daniel wrote to the acting director of the Penn Museum, Dr. Edith Hall Dohan:
“We all feel that we are sitting on the rim of a volcano which may erupt any minute, the political situation of the world being what it is. Cyprus would almost certainly see something of the war which would break out now. Fortunately some big Hellenistic tombs near here should prove bomb-proof.”
Tension continued to simmer. On August 25th, two days after the Russo-German Nonaggression Pact, McFadden wrote to Hill, “I have just heard over the Radio that no German ships are leaving German ports so fear we’ll not be able to sail on the ‘Europa’.”
Just a few days later, Germany invaded Poland. On September 3rd, Britain and France declared war.
On September 18th, McFadden wrote to Hill again recounting his frenzied escape. He had been in Germany
when war was declared, and barely managed to flee (most likely back to the United States). However, McFadden was still optimistic, and wrote to Hill, “as things are at present I should think there would be nothing to impede our work there [in Cyprus].”
Excavations at Kourion continued. Even when McFadden was not present on the island he received updates from Daniel, though at odd intervals due to the disrupted mail system.
McFadden returned to Kourion in September of 1939 and continued working without major interruptions until April 1940, a period colloquially called “Phoney War” because there was little actual armed conflict.
The correspondence in early 1940 shows cautious optimism. McFadden wrote to Hill on January 1st to say gas was no longer rationed and mentioned Daniel, but saying “of course, we’d have to risk his being suddenly called home by the war.” Virginia Grace also joined McFadden at Kourion, praising the climate and beauty of Cyprus. Hard at work, they rested only on Sundays.
The excavation notebooks of Grace and McFadden hold clues to their activities and impressions of the war where the correspondence lacks. For example, from May 25th to June 6th of 1940 Grace recorded a trip around the Eastern Mediterranean stopping at workrooms and archaeological collections in modern Israel and Lebanon to look for material, it seems, for her research at Kourion.
On June 9th of 1940, Grace wrote, “working on Sunday, seems we may have to leave Cyprus Thursday on the last boat.” They excavated until the last moment before leaving. The next day, Mussolini officially allied with Hitler, and the Axis powers declared war on Britain. On June 11th, Italy began attacks on British-occupied Egypt. The war had finally reached their doorstep.
Around June 15th, Grace began to nurse British soldiers evacuated from North Africa. On June 23rd, Grace returned to Athens to secure passage home, but gave up her seat to a family in need. McFadden continued digging through July. Germany continued inching closer to Greece.
Grace was the last American archaeologist to leave Greece. On October 5th, the day after Hitler and Mussolini famously met at Brenner Pass, she caught a train to Turkey, where McFadden picked her up. They returned to Cyprus to resume digging in the early winter of 1940.
According to some sources, Grace and McFadden “fled” from Cyprus to Alexandria, Egypt in mid-April of 1941, but the Kourion archival catalogue includes some excavation photos dated to April 24th. A May 1st letter from Daniel to McFadden, sent from the United States to Kourion, indicates that McFadden and Grace were still digging. Daniel writes that he gave the annual lecture at the Museum telling McFadden that, “the audience interrupted me to give you an ovation.…That must be just about the only excavation in the Near East. So you may feel very sure that your activities are being watched with great and sympathetic interest. We only hope that you will be able to continue.”
Complications continued to arise. Excavation funds in Greece were frozen. Their day-to-day safety was uncertain. On May 19th, Alice M. Goudy, the assistant director of the Museum at the time, wrote to McFadden, “we were very glad to hear from Mr. Logue that you were
"We all feel that we are sitting on the rim of a volcano which may erupt any minute, the political situation of the world being what it is."
— Franklin Daniel III
apparently safe and well a few days ago,” supposing their situation could change at any moment. On this same day, Grace’s excavation entries resume, describing a very hot excavation day. The team began taking Sundays off again.
On June 4th, Grace’s mother wrote a poignant letter to the Museum asking after her daughter. Three days later, Goudy responded reassuring Mrs. Grace that her daughter was with McFadden and expressing her confidence in him to keep them safe. On June 27th, Grace optimistically extended the trench that they were working in. On July 13th, we get the last dated discovery of objects from 1941 in Grace’s notebook. What follows are drawings and artifact catalogues, all of which could have been added after she left Cyprus. After that, there were no new entries until 1942.
When they stopped excavating, Grace went to work as a clerk in the American Consulate in Alexandria and—in anticipation of further conflict and insecurity—buried some records she had in a Giza tomb for safekeeping. Later, Grace ended up in Ankara working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). On December 17th of 1941, Grace
wrote to Daniel from Cyprus that she anticipated leaving soon, so at some point she did return to Cyprus. There is then a gap in the correspondence until April 1942.
At the beginning of March 1942, we find another entry in Grace’s notebook, though her entries end again after March 13th. On April 5th, she sent a letter to Dohan, explaining their system for creating and mailing duplicates of their findings to prevent loss in the unreliable wartime mail system. She also writes, “we are planning to leave Cyprus very shortly for Egypt. We have been trying for some time to get definite transportation arranged…but it seems the only way is to appear on the spot and wait.” After this, there is again a gap in the correspondence until June 4th, 1944.
June 6th, 1944, D-Day, marked a turning point in the war and was followed by a slew of Allied victories. On June 7th, the secretary of the Museum Marian Godfrey wrote to McFadden thanking him for funding the excavations and affirming their intent to resume. From other sources, we know Grace spent 1944 working with the OSS.
Finally, on May 7th, 1945, Germany surrendered. On September 15th, Kourion correspondence resumed, and
McFadden wrote to Hill that he hoped to be released from the Navy soon to return to Kourion. On October 11th, Godfrey, by then acting director of the Museum, wrote to McFadden notifying him of his reappointment as a research fellow. McFadden continued in active duty with the Navy until winter when he was released. Grace also stuck with the project in Kourion for several more years. The project continued with McFadden’s financial support until 1954.
There are other records and correspondence from the Kourion project housed in archives in Athens, so the story here is not a complete picture but a vignette. Through the correspondence and field notebooks preserved from the excavations at Kourion in the Penn Museum Archives, we get just a glimpse into the experience of Penn archaeologists during World War II.
The Kourion records illustrate a group of determined and courageous individuals committed to seeing the project through while contributing to wartime intelligence efforts. These people were more than archaeologists: they were dynamic actors at a crucial moment in modern history and are a fascinating bridge between the ancient Mediterranean, Europe in the mid20th century, and our historical eye today.
The author would like to thank Alex Pezzati of the Penn Museum Archives for all of his help with the research and archival scans for this project. All images used are from the Kourion, Cyprus, Expedition Records in the Penn Museum Archives
Allen, S.H. 2014. Classical Spies American Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kourion, Cyprus Expedition records. Penn Museum Archives, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
Lawall, M.L. 2020. Virginia Grace Honored in New Student Center. Virginia Grace Honored in New Student Center | American School of Classical Studies at Athens. https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/ news/newsDetails/virginia-grace-room
IN 1956 AND 1957, the University of Pennsylvania excavated Al Jib, a site located about six miles northwest of Jerusalem and known in the Bible as Gibeon. The object of my study, in the Penn Museum’s Near East Section (62-30-1530) and now on display in the new Eastern Mediterranean Gallery, hails from Gibeon. It is a common artifact type known as the Judean Pillar Figurine (JPF), but with an uncommon amount of paint preserved.
JPFs were mass produced in the 8th to early 6th centuries BCE in the Biblical heartland of Judah, where the “second commandment” supposedly prohibited the manufacture of images (Exod 20:4). JPF iconography is notoriously ambiguous, making it unclear who or what these statuettes represent: is the female human? If divine, which goddess, and how does she intersect with (or challenge) the monotheistic worship of the god of the Hebrew Bible? Or does the JPF perhaps represent a low divinity, like an angel? The Bible does not mention JPFs, though some interpreters consider them examples of “household gods” (Gen 31:19). Whatever the JPFs signified, they are found as refuse across many archaeological contexts in Judah, but especially around
homes. Contexts of use— for example in tombs and house shrines—are rare but do seem to convey religious significance.
When we look at this figurine, we see, in color, an item that biblical people viewed in their everyday lives. Paint on most JPFs has worn away, but this one, along with a handful of others, shows the JPF to be quite a bold figure. This figurine invites us, like the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery does, to indulge the senses: here, sight. Vibrant bands of red and yellow are painted against a white background on an otherwise simple body, enwrapping the neck, shoulders, arms, and breasts in color. The contrasting bands attract the viewer’s gaze, as do the oversized white eyes and prominent breasts made yet more prominent by arm placement around. This figurine has schematic features but paint brings further articulation to them.
Brigitte Bourgeois suggests that paint acts as a "fourth dimension of sculpture." Understanding paint this way helps us see this figurine more fully.
Traditionally, iconographic studies of the JPF focus on the breasts and interpret JPFs as fertility figures. Across the corpus of JPFs that have been unearthed, design is better preserved than decoration, and indeed design does privilege the breasts via arm placement. However, paint on this figurine groups the breasts with other body parts via the red-and-yellow band motif, giving reason to follow the painter’s brush, in a sense, and reconsider the presumed centrality of the breasts. Paint does not depict the breasts as a stand-alone feature, and so connotes a different value system than the figurine’s design.
I collaborated with Penn Museum Conservator Tessa de Alarcon to analyze the pigmentation on 62-30-1530 via microscopic magnification and focus stacking. The results concerning whitewash were surprising. Whitewash is usually understood as a surface primer for paint and is found on Judean objects in clay thought to have religious significance, like figurines and cult stands, but generally not on other objects that receive paint, like pottery.
Whitewash on this figurine was indeed applied as a base layer, but then applied again at later stages in the finish work, to deepen the white in the eyes and lower body, to indicate space between fingers (a rare feature, only a few other examples of JPF fingers are known) and to depict what I suggest are white neck bands, which have not previously been noticed (cf. Pritchard 1961:15; Kletter 1996: 50). These
decorative elements are visible via chromatic data, i.e., color data, but are hardly perceptible on this figurine’s surface topography, even at 100x magnification. This pilot study of JPF pigmentation reveals that both paint and whitewash are too thin to be measured via focus stacking. Future studies of JPF pigmentation should consider privileging chromatic approaches instead of topographic ones.
In sum, whitewash was artfully applied on this figurine and was not limited to surface priming. Whitewash indicates both negative and positive space (for example, negative between the fingers and positive at the neck bands). This updated understanding of JPF decoration does not crack the code on JPF meaning, but it does broaden the primary data through which these enigmatic figurines can be studied. This work also shows that, with the help of technology, the discovery process can keep unfolding even 65 years out of the ground, providing ever-new ways of seeing.
Lauren McCormick is completing her doctoral dissertation in religion at Syracuse University, after completing M.A. degrees in religion at New York University and Duke University, learning Hebrew, Akkadian, Biblical Aramaic, Ugaritic, and Greek, and participating in the archaeological excavation of Iron Age Tel Dor in Israel. Her co-edited volume Ambiguity in the Ancient Near East is in press with Brepols.
Darby, E.D. 2014. Interpreting Judean Pillar
Figurines: Gender and Empire in Judean
Apotropaic Ritual. Forschung zum Alten
Testament 2. Reihe 69. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Bourgeois, B. 2014. Thérapéia. Taking Care of Colour in Hellenistic Greece. In Transformations.
Classical Sculpture in Colour ; 190–207. Eds. J. S.
Østergaard and A.M. Nielsen. Copenhagen: Ny
Carlsberg Glyptotek.
Kletter, R. 1996. The Judean Pillar-Figurines and the Archaeology of Asherah , Baris 636. Oxford: Tempus Reparatum.
Pritchard, J.B. 1961. The Water System of Gibeon.
Philadelphia: The University Museum, Museum Monographs.
The minor in archaeological science offered by the Museum’s Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) consists of six course units including an advanced class with an archaeological science research component as a capstone. Since it was established in 2016, over 20 students have graduated with a minor in archaeological science. Two of the six class of 2022 graduates Cole Gaboriault and Susan Zare share the research they conducted for their capstone projects.
As my research project for the archaeometallurgy seminar, I sought to understand if a particular ore (metal-bearing rock) sampled from Hvalfjörður, Iceland was a potential source of iron for the Vikings. The ore in question was believed to be bog iron, a renewable iron ore produced by iron-oxidizing bacteria mainly in bogs and swamps. Iron Age cultures all over Europe used it extensively, and the Vikings, who settled Iceland in the late 9th century CE, were no exception. In the past, to extract metal from ores, metal smiths heated ore in the presence of charcoal so that certain chemical reactions could take place to convert minerals into metal. This process is called smelting. Thanks to its high iron content, bog iron is easier to smelt than most ores, which contributed to its widespread exploitation. I analyzed, processed, and smelted the ore sample with the help of CAAM archaeometallurgist Dr. Vanessa Workman.
First, I used several techniques to determine the structure and composition of the ore: the microstructure was observed under a reflected-light microscope; the bulk composition was measured using X-ray fluorescence; and fine structures and their compositions
were measured using scanning electron microscopy equipped with energy dispersive spectroscopy. Then I processed, or beneficiated, the ore to increase its iron content and prepare it for smelting. I crushed it by hand into roughly pea-sized chunks, sorted out low-iron impurities, ground the remaining chunks into a fine powder, and sieved the powder to ensure a consistent particle size. As a last processing step, I roasted the powdered ore by heating it to 600°C (1112°F) in a small kiln, which removed excess water and caused some preliminary chemical reactions. Finally, I smelted the ore inside an electric furnace. The Vikings smelted their iron in tall, earthen furnaces called bloomeries; to mimic these conditions, I
layered powdered charcoal and ore inside a graphite cup called a crucible and heated it to 1250°C (2282°F).
Upon analysis, we discovered that the ore sample had a much lower iron content than pure bog iron and contained a high percentage of non-iron-bearing impurities, or gangue, such as silica. Despite this, the smelt succeeded in producing a small quantity of metallic iron, thanks to the tightly controlled environment inside the modern electric furnace. While the Vikings may have exploited bog iron from nearby deposits, it is unlikely this particular source was smelted using Iron Age technology.
Cole Gaboriault, C22, majored in physics, linguistics, and classical studies, and minored in archaeological science and mathematics. The author stands in front of an electric furnace with the results of the crucible smelt; photo by Vanessa Workman.
remains. Last summer, under the mentorship of Dr. Chantel White, I identified carbonized seeds and nuts recovered from this structure using low-power microscopy in the CAAM Archaeobotany Lab. These identifications allowed me to explore subsistence strategies, diet, and local human-landscape relations at the site.
The author would like to thank Steven Szewczyk, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and the Laboratory for the Research on the Structure of Matter, for facilitating use of the electric furnace.
I conducted my senior research on the archaeobotanical material from Sant’Aniceto, a Final Bronze Age site in Calabria, Italy (1200–900 cal BCE). The Late Bronze Age was broadly an era of social, political, and environmental change. Settlements experienced major transitions and several, like Sant’Aniceto, were abandoned altogether. This hilltop site was excavated from 2007 to 2009, uncovering an abandoned subterranean structure filled with midden debris that included ceramics, animal bones, and plant
The most common finds include barley, einkorn, broad bean, and olive, and they are well attested in the region and period. Other notable finds include millet, grape, fig, common pea, acorn, and myrtle. I was able to compare this assemblage to those of other sites in southern Italy to learn more about regional systems of knowledge, exchange networks, and cultural change. In my senior thesis, I discussed the evidence of early olive cultivation, grain and legume agriculture, wild plant exploitation, and food processing. Throughout this project, I’ve been able to apply the research methods and theoretical frameworks that I learned in CAAM courses like Living World in Archaeological Science (ANTH 267/567) and Plants and Society (ANTH 440) to add to the understanding of what daily food routines may have looked like for the inhabitants of Sant’Aniceto.
Susan Zare, C22, majored in anthropology, and minored in archaeological science and classical studies. The author using a lowpowered microscope in the Archaeobotany Lab; photo by Marie-Claude Boileau.
CultureFest! is a popular program for families, intended to introduce visitors to traditions, practices, and art from the regions of the world represented in the Museum’s collection. This program is held several times a year, in October, January, and March. On January 21, CultureFest! celebrated the Lunar New Year, featuring performances and artistic demonstrations from two important community partners, the American Chinese Museum and Northeast Academy of Philadelphia. Jennifer Brehm, Merle Smith Director of Learning and Community Engagement, sat down with Li Edwards, Executive Director of the American Chinese Museum, a brand-new museum in Philadelphia dedicated to the history of the Chinese American experience. They talked about their CultureFest! partnership, and what the public can learn about Chinese culture to increase mutual understanding within the community.
JB: Can you tell me about the American Chinese Museum and how the organization got started?
LE: This museum has been planned for years, and just opened in 2022. It was created by Jason Lam, the President and Chairman of the Museum. He wanted to establish this museum for several reasons; first, because there are many Chinese people that moved to Philadelphia in recent years, and there is a need for a cultural center for Chinese American people. Second, because there have been many hate crimes against Asian people recently, both across this country and in Philadelphia. He and the board members wanted this museum to connect people of different ethnic groups to create mutual understanding and respect, and to promote friendship between Chinese American people and other ethnic groups. Philadelphia is an important
city in American history, and the Chinese American experience is part of America. We think Philadelphia should also have a museum dedicated to Chinese American history, art, and culture.
JB: What is your role in the organization?
LE: I help board members and the founder to raise funds for the museum and to apply funding from organizations like foundations and government agencies. I also design programs and projects, plan marketing strategies to promote this museum, and attract support from the public.
JB: What is the mission of the American Chinese Museum and what do you hope the public can learn from you?
LE: Our mission is to promote America’s diverse cultural heritage by collecting, preserving, and sharing American Chinese history, culture, and art; to serve as a center for research and learning; and to inspire and connect audiences with American Chinese experiences, with the goal of promoting mutual understanding, mutual respect and mutual learning between people of all backgrounds. We want the public to learn more about Chinese American history. As you know, the Chinese in America helped connect the nation through their work
on the country’s first transcontinental railroad. We hope to make new connections at the museum.
We also want the public to learn more Chinese American traditions, because we think they are a part of America’s diverse cultural heritage. We think we can use the power of culture and art to better communicate with the public.
JB: I like the idea of using the power of culture and art to offset the negative behavior that comes with misunderstanding amongst cultures. Why do you think it is important to learn about Chinese cultural traditions?
LE: Chinese culture has a long history and tradition and has made great contributions to world culture. Learning about Chinese culture can help broaden your view of the world, because it has had great influence in the East, and many Asian cultures came from or were influenced by Chinese culture. It serves as a window into the Eastern world.
JB: Can you describe one activity that you did during Penn Museum’s CultureFest?
LE: In order to introduce Chinese Lunar New Year to the public, we explained the Chinese spring festival, which is based on the Chinese lunar calendar and cycles of the moon, unlike the western solar calendar. Visitors learned about the tradition of decorating our houses for the festival, including papercutting, a folk art in China. Visitors learned how to cut red paper and how to make red lanterns. We also brought dancers, singers, and musicians to perform Chinese traditional dance and music.
We worked with our partner, the Northeast Academy of Philadelphia. They brought their resources and we
worked together with them to bring these traditions to the public at the Penn Museum.
JB: Do you have a favorite artifact from the Penn Museum, and why is it of interest to you?
LE: I like the artifact called the Ram in the Thicket. It is from the Tombs of Ur, and very beautiful; there are only two in the world, and one is in Penn Museum. I was born in the Year of the Ram. There are 12 animal signs in the Chinese Zodiac, including mouse, tiger, and ram; these signs repeat every 12 years. When our year comes, we wear something with our animal sign. I will wear something with the Ram on it when it is my year.
JB: What excites you about being a community partner with the Penn Museum?
LE: You are a very influential organization both locally and globally, with many experts conducting archaeological research, and your collection contains many lovely artifacts found by your own teams. We have a great respect for how you transform the understanding of the human experience.
JB: I appreciate our partnership; we can learn so much from you. I like how our missions are aligned in promoting mutual understanding between cultures.
Jennifer Brehm is Merle-Smith Director of Learning and Community Engagement; Li Edwards is the Executive Director of the American Chinese Museum in Philadelphia and a member of the Penn Museum’s new Community Advisory Group (see page 100). For more information about the American Chinese Museum, visit their website at https://usaacm.org/
During fall 2022, the Penn Museum family was deeply saddened by the passing of Board of Advisors emeritus member A. Bruce Mainwaring, and former Advisors Criswell Cohagan Gonzalez and Adolf and Geraldine Paier. All were ardent and longtime Penn Museum champions, whose individual and collective impact will be felt for decades to come.
We also mourned the loss of eminent Egyptologist David O’Connor, former faculty-curator at Penn and the Museum who was instrumental in founding Penn’s Egyptology program and worked extensively at archaeological sites across Egypt, including at the site of Abydos where his excavations resulted in a new understanding of royal burials of the Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods. The fall 2023 issue of Expedition (Vol. 65:2), a special issue on Abydos, will be dedicated to David O’Connor and include articles on work that builds on his legacy by several of the archaeologists he trained and mentored as students. Additionally, a celebration of his life will be held at the Penn Museum in June 2023.
We send our heartfelt condolences to the families of Bruce, Cris, Dolf, Gerri, and David and offer a brief tribute to our former Penn Museum Advisors here.
A delightful presence at events and meetings with his gracious manner, humble nature, and delightful sense of humor, Bruce Mainwaring served for an extraordinary 40 years on the Museum’s Board of Advisors, including five as chair. He also served as chair of the planned giving component of the Museum’s 21st Century Campaign, and Chair of the Expansion Committee responsible for creating the Museum’s East Wing—a state-of-the-art collections storage facility opened in 2002, which he and his wife Margaret A. (Peggy) Mainwaring generously made possible by their lead support and his fundraising, and which bears their name. Bruce and Peggy were also the lead donors to the Museum’s 2010 West Wing Renovation Project—literally supporting the Museum from end to end—which included the installation of air conditioning throughout the wing, the renovation of the historic Widener Lecture Room, and the creation of a suite of conservation and teaching labs which now house the Museum’s Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM). Bruce and Peggy also endowed the first CAAM teaching specialist: the Mainwaring Teaching Specialist for Archaeozoology,
held by Kate Moore, and a number of other positions and programs across the Museum.
After serving in the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II, Bruce joined and later became president of his father’s Uniform Tubes Corporation before going on to create two new firms, UTI Corporation and Micro-Coax, Inc., which, like their parent company, manufacture metal tubing and related wares. UTI’s products have been used in a variety of industries including medicine, telecommunications, and aerospace, as evidenced when UTI tubing traveled to the moon on an Apollo spacecraft.
An opera lover and avid fly fisherman, Bruce was engaged in an extensive number of philanthropic and civic activities outside of Penn as well. His service reached from the presidency of his local Rotary Club to membership on the Board of Governors of the American Research Center in Egypt, to service on almost every committee at Beaumont at Bryn Mawr, where he resided with Peggy in later years.
Bruce was not only a colleague, but a dear friend to so many at Penn who will long recall the kindness of spirit and heartfelt attention he brought to each and every conversation.
The Penn Museum was fortunate that when Criswell (Cris) Cohagan Gonzalez moved from her native Texas to Philadelphia, her passion for the pursuit of knowledge led her to build on her previous studies at the University of Texas at Austin, the Judson School in Arizona, and the Sorbonne in Paris to take courses at the University of Pennsylvania. Her graduate courses at Penn led her to the Museum, where she became an early champion of the field research taking place in Ban Chiang, Thailand, and Laos where she traveled with Dr. Joyce White in 1994, as well as Egypt, where she traveled
NU68, GNU85, GR94
Adolf (Dolf) and Geraldine (Gerri) Paier both strongly believed in giving back to their community and supporting good causes and the Penn Museum was blessed to benefit from their volunteer service on many fronts, as well as their financial support. Both graduates of Penn—Dolf graduated from Wharton School and Gerri completed her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees all from the School of Nursing—they supported their reunion and scholarship funds, the Penn Fund, and Penn Nursing, but their passion was in the Museum’s Native American collections, which resonated with their love of Native American art, crafts, and culture.
In a 2014 profile Gerri characterized the Museum as: “one of a few… in the U.S. that actively support these cultural groups with programs that encourage contemporary artists, storytellers, and others to help keep these cultures alive.” Her first Penn Museum volunteer role was assisting Associate Curator and Senior Keeper Lucy Fowler Williams and Keeper
with Dr. David Silverman. A friend and supporter also of the Museum’s K–12 education programs, Cris served for over 20 years on our Board of Advisors and was an honorary member of the Women’s Committee from 2004 to 2015.
Cris was an avid gardener, creating and caring for an exquisite garden at her longtime home in Ambler, and a devoted collector of antiques—an interest she shared with her mother and many lifelong friends. She loved to travel, especially to Mexico, China, Hong Kong, Argentina, Paris, and Amsterdam, and learn about other cultures—a passion that fed her decades-long devotion to the Penn Museum.
Bill Wierzbowski of the American Section with the rehousing of objects to the Mainwaring Wing when it opened in 2002. Gerri and Dolf would go on to become lead supporters of the long-term exhibition Native American Voices, opened in 2014, and the Mexico and Central America Gallery, opened in 2019, where the Living Maya section showcasing rotating displays of richly woven and embroidered clothing ensembles spoke to Gerri’s own passion for textiles.
In a long and distinguished career in the business world, Dolf’s roles included President and CEO of Safeguard Scientifics after working his way up through the company in various roles. Gerri’s lifelong passion for nursing included a specialty in geriatric care and a clinical faculty appointment in the Nurse Practitioner program at the University of Arizona at Tucson.
Dolf and Gerri each served on the Museum’s Board of Advisors, Dolf from 1998 to 2007, and Gerri from 2007 to 2019. Dolf was also a founding member of the Director’s Council, from 2010, whose contributions to the group’s discussions around strategic issues facing the Museum were characterized by both incisive observation and wry humor.
ON DECEMBER 12TH, the Museum was pleased to welcome members of the newly formed Penn Museum Community Advisory Group for its inaugural meeting. This important group, which consists of cultural arts professionals from local organizations including Mural Arts Philadelphia and the African American Museum of Philadelphia, community activists, organizers, and faith leaders, will play a crucial role in guiding the Museum’s transformation into a truly community-oriented institution. As Williams Director Chris Woods put it during his remarks at the kickoff, “for the Penn Museum to be relevant and responsive to the world, it needs to engage with issues that matter to a contemporary audience. That means bringing in community stakeholders as equal partners in our stewardship and presentation of the legacy of the past. The input of the people in this room will be critical in deciding what issues the Museum prioritizes in its exhibits and its programming.”
The Museum’s Chief Diversity Officer Tia JacksonTruitt explained that members will meet quarterly to collaborate with the Museum in areas including staff training, exhibition and gallery development, and repatriation, and that this group will be an important voice in shaping the Museum’s future.
FOUNDING MEMBERS:
Brooke Glickman, Director of Training and Program Development, Better Tomorrows
Chad Eric Smith, Director of Communications and Brand Management, Mural Arts Philadelphia
Dejay Duckett, Director of Curatorial Services, African American Museum of Philadelphia
Gweny Love, Founder and Artist, Mantua Worldwide Community Arts
Holly Meng, Deputy Curator/COO, American Chinese Museum
Ivette Compean, Director, Mexican Cultural Center
James Wright, Director of Community, Economics and Real Estate, People's Emergency Center
Lauren Footman, Chair, Ezekiel Community Development Corp; Director of DEI, Delaware County
Li Edwards, Executive Director, American Chinese Museum
Lori Ward, Director of External Communications and Partnerships, Better Tomorrows
Monica Montgomery, Executive Director, Historic Germantown; Founder, Museum HUE
Renee McBride, President, Cedar Park Neighborhood Association
Rev. Dr. Malcolm Byrd, Founder, Forum Philly; Pastor, Hopes Beacon Baptist Church
Romana Lee-Akiyama, Director, Mayor's Office of Public Engagement
Stuart Jasper, Managing Director, Penn Live Arts
Tina Pierce Fragoso, Associate Dean, Equity and Access, Penn Office of Undergraduate Admissions; Member Nanticoke Leni Lenape Tribe
Tyrique Glasgow, Founder, Young Chances Foundation
GENNY BOCCARDO-DUBEY as our new Chief Operating Officer, bringing over twenty years of museum experience to this crucial role. Prior to joining us, Genny was Mural Arts Philadelphia’s Chief Advancement Officer and, most recently, acting Chief Operating Officer, overseeing the day-today operations, communications, and strategy and management of revenue sources. From 2015 to 2020 she was Deputy Director at the Laguna Art Museum, where she helped develop art education opportunities and expand access to art for diverse communities—as well as overseeing a capital campaign that led to the transformation of gallery spaces and improvement of the art collection’s storage.
Genny has worked in development and management roles at the Tate in London, the Orange County Museum of Art in California, and at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio. She founded and ran a successful contemporary art gallery in Cleveland, Ohio for eight years. She holds a B.A. in international relations from the University of San Diego, an M.B.A. in international business and marketing from the University of San Francisco, and an M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies from Case Western Reserve University, a program closely associated with the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 2017 Genny completed the Getty Leadership Institute program (recently
renamed the Museum Leadership Institute). Genny lives in Center City Philadelphia with her husband and their two sons, and enjoys hiking along the Wissahickon. She is a Board member of the Print Center and an active member of ArtTable, the Association of Fundraising Professionals, and the American Association of Museums.
THE PENN MUSEUM GRATEFULLY RECOGNIZES
a new, multi-year gift from Nina Robinson Vitow, CW70, WG76, to support the new galleries of Ancient Egypt and Nubia and to advance research in the field at Gordion, Turkey; Abydos, Egypt; and in Mexico and Central America.
The Museum also offers profound thanks to Al Ciardi; Dr. Marie Conn; Ginger W. Dietrich, C87, and
H. Richard Dietrich III; and Drs. Pamela and Peter Freyd for creating endowed funds to provide ongoing support for Unpacking the Past , our flagship program serving middle school students in the Philadelphia School District studying ancient cultures. The impact of these generous gifts is doubled with matching funds set up by former Penn President Amy Gutmann in fall 2021.
WE ARE PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE that Jess Bicknell is now the Museum’s Director of Exhibitions. Jess joined the Museum in January 2015; previously she served as Director of Interpretation and Exhibitions at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and before that worked at the Wildlife Conservation Society. She is also a former board member of the National Association for Museum Exhibition. Her first role at the Museum was as Interpretive Planning Manager, playing a key part in developing many important exhibits, such as The Golden Age of King Midas and Ancient Egypt: From Discovery to Display. In 2018 she became Head of Exhibits, overseeing design and interpretation and coordinating closely with preparation on all exhibition and gallery projects, most notably the new Africa and Mexico and Central America Galleries, which opened in 2019. Most recently, Jess has been a crucial part of the development of the new Eastern Mediterranean Gallery, working collaboratively with curators and grad student curatorial assistants, our own talented in-house tam of
designers and preparators, as well as outside consultants and colleagues across Collections, Building Operations, Marketing and Communications, and Development. While leading this gallery project, Jess also played a central role in the development of The Stories We Wear, U-2 Spy Planes & Aerial Archaeology, Invisible Beauty: The Art of Archaeological Science, several student exhibitions, and projects we still look forward to opening: Ancient Food and Flavor, a new North American gallery, and our new galleries of Ancient Egypt and Nubia.
THE MUSEUM IS PLEASED TO WELCOME ARNAB MISHRA, W96, to its Board of Advisors. Arnab is Chief Product Officer for Xactly, where he leads a team responsible for the strategy, execution and go-to-market success of Xactly's product suite. Prior to joining Xactly, he served as Vice President for BroadSoft (now part of Cisco) where he led a global business unit. Arnab joined Broadsoft as a result of its acquisition of Transera, a company he joined at its founding and where he served as President and Chief Operating Officer. He previously held leadership roles with another
software startup that was acquired by Alcatel.
Arnab started his career in finance, working initially as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch and then as a private equity investor at The Beacon Group (now part of JP Morgan Chase & Co.). At Penn, he has served as an Executive Committee member for the James Brister Society since 2016 and is in his third year on the Advisory Council of Platt Performing Arts House. Arnab holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.S. in Economics from The Wharton School. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and children.
FROM JANUARY 12 THROUGH 14, the Penn Museum in partnership with internationally renowed artist, composer, and educator Hannibal Lokumbe offered a multi-tiered experience around Lokumbe’s original composition Stolen Legacy, a libretto and musical commentary on the removal of art from the African continent commissioned to be part of the installation of the Africa Galleries in 2019. Stolen Legacy is sung in Yoruba and based on individual artifacts that long to return to the cultures which produced them; its commission was supported in part by New Music USA. Stolen Legacy was designed to be experienced in three ways at the Penn Museum. Over several days in midJanuary, Lokumbe visited public school classrooms across Philadelphia and Camden with Merle-Smith Director of Learning and Community Engagement Jennifer Brehm to discuss his composition as both commentary and artistic process. Students were then invited back to the Museum for two performances in a packed Harrison Auditorium on January 12. The following afternoon, Penn students and the public joined a conversation with Lokumbe and Dr. Tukufu Zuberi, curator of the Africa Galleries and Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations in Penn’s Sociology Department. At the public performance of Stolen Legacy on Saturday, January 14 in the Harrison Auditorium attendees dancing in their seats didn’t want to leave—lingering in the Africa Galleries long after the work was over.
ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 15, members of Philadelphia’s Wings Lacrosse team visited the Penn Museum to join with visitors in learning more about the origins of lacrosse and its connections to the Indigenous team sport of stickball. Team members posed for photos with American Section Associate Curator and Sabloff Senior Keeper Lucy Fowler Williams and Keeper Bill Wierzbowski and signed autographs for visitors in front of a display including lacrosse and ball game sticks. They also had a chance to see additional objects in the storerooms. A video of the team members’ Penn Museum visit was shown on the jumbotron at the Wings vs. Toronto Rock game at the Wells Fargo Center on January 21, where Merle-Smith Director of Learning and Community Engagement Jennifer Brehm and Associate Director, Public Programs, Tena Thomason greeted lacrosse fans in the Wells Fargo Center lobby before the game.
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Ready for a world adventure this summer? Designed for children entering grades 1–8 in fall 2023, Penn Museum Anthropology Camp features hands-on workshops, educational talks with experts, and immersive gallery exploration. The weekly curriculum covers diverse themes such as mythology and storytelling, ancient engineering, and what makes a museum. Members receive a $30 discount for each camp week.
