Gamma

...[H]unter-gatherer egalitarianism is rather a sham.  ... [E]ven the most egalitarian of them had a dominance hierarchy as clear-cut as tht in any ape society. The difference is that for humans, the alpha elite were invisible supernatural beings, far too powerful to be overthrown, while the betas were ancestors who did the bidding of the alphas.  No "egalitarian" hunter-gatherer was ever more than a gamma in the social hierarchy,.

--Steven Mithen, "Foresomes and so on," reviewing and interpreting Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality (2012), London Review of Books 11 April 2013, 17-18, 17.  Cf. link, link, link.

It's the Nats

We all remember Douglas Adams' theory of elections: ""Because if they didn't vote for a lizard,the wrong lizard might get in."  Finnerty and Marcus explain how this stuff works among the Kachin of North Burma:

The ancestors of every lineage became masha nats, “ancestor spirits,” and every household had shrines to them. Ancestor spirits were thought to intercede with the celestial nats on behalf of their descendants. When the Kachin were in rank mode, their chief had two household shrines, one for his human ancestors and one for Madai. Lower-ranked households, on the other hand, had only one shrine, at which they supplicated or scolded their human ancestors before making sacrifices to less-powerful nats. ...

 In Kachin society the lineages that worked the hardest and produced the greatest surplus could sponsor the most prestigious sacrifices and feed the most visitors. Their fellow Kachin, however, did not attribute such success to hard work; they believed that one only obtained good harvests through proper sacrifices to the nats. Wealth was seen not so much as the product of labor (and control over others’ labor) as the result of pleasing the appropriate celestial spirits. The key shift in social logic was therefore from “They must have pleased the nats” to “They must be descended from higher nats than we are.”

So there you have it.  Not the lizards, but the nats.

Flannery, Kent (2012-05-15). The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Kindle Locations 3914-3794). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

Going to Ground

Traveling, with dodgy internet.  I think I'm going to ground for a couple of days, or maybe weeks.  Look for me in two weeks, or maybe three, or maybe less.  Meanwhile, I leave you with fa (supposed) factoid, and some questions.  The factoid, if it is one: I am advised that among the grave goods found with the mummies of Egyption pharaohs, we find contraceptives.  This prompts at least three questions:

• Why do you need contraceptives in the afterlife?  Are they afraid of too many little pharaohs running around?

• What does an ancient Egyptian contraceptive look like?

• Why would a pharaoh need a contraceptive anyway?

Okay, maybe it is an Egyptian Urban Myth,

Competing Bible Narratives

I've been watching some DVDs on the archaeology of Israel and environs, by a teacher with solid professional credentials, both in the field and in the library.  She tells her story in a helpful and instructive manner from which I take great profit. Yet there's an issue of presentation here that strikes me as profoundly irritating.  And it's not just her; it's a rhetorical strategy that you see in a lot of "scholarly" material about the Ancient Near East, and invites some exegesis.  Let me see if I can make myself clear.

First: in wretched oversimplification, there are are two ways of telling the story of "the Bible," aka "The Old Testament."  One is to embrace the text: to accept the document itself as a, perhaps the, primary source on events in its purview, and to accept the document as the arbiter of all doubts, the ironer-out of all lacunae.  Some people profess to accept the Bible in tote, though I doubt that very many actually do so.  Others claim the Bible as a primary document, while subtly dismissing more doubtful or embarrassing portions, (sometimes sub silentio) in a kind of cafeteria doctrinalism.

There is a counter-view that approaches the issue from a wholly different perspective. This counter-view takes the Bible as thee product of a particular place and time--an historical event in its own right, if you like--designed not so much to memorialize but to create the identity of a people.

More precisely: on this view, the heavy work of producing the Bible takes place in or around the Seventh Century BC, particularly in and around the reign of Josiah, seeking to generate a narrative that will justify a single identity for all of what we now call (retrospectively) "Israel and Judah."
Operating from this point of departure, it is natural to evaluate the record of preceding centuries with a critical, if not necessarily skeptical eye.  Seen in this light, we notice a number of remarkable facts.  One, the account of the original Abraham-and-Isaac story is hopelessly anachronistic, impossible to reconcile with the time at which it was supposed to have occurred. Two, the physical evidence for a "flight out of Egypt" is at or near absolute zero.  Three, there is no really satisfactory evidence of a Jewish "invasion" into Israel (the alternate view is that the Jews were in fact a segment of the indigenous Canaanites who hived off with an identify of their own).

Further: there may be some historical evidence of a "King David," but the chances theat he was a great monarch are not so strong as the possibility that he was some kind of tribal chieftain.  As to his son Solomon, said to have ruled from sea to sea--the evidence is equivocal at best, depending largely on whether you accept some archaeological sites as relating to Solomon himself, or perhaps rather to the supposed enemies of the Jews, the evil Omrids (Ahab, Jezebel, and the rest of tht lot).

Just as with those who accept the primacy of the Bible, there isn't a single agreed account among all archaeologists, but a rough outline--along the lines that I just set forth--would win broad acceptance.  And while there are, generally speaking, two contending schools of thought, there is a highly contested no-man's land. Plenty (well--some) of the Biblicists make highly informed and sophisticated arguments that there view can be reconciled with an exact reading of the archaeological evidence.

Back to the DVDs.  Where is our lecturer on this spectrum? This is where it gets interesting. The thing is, if you listen inattentively, you'd take her for a strong Biblicist.  She quotes frequently from the Bible as an evidentiary source.  She festoons the presentation with some of those awful pictures of Biblical scenes you saw so long ago in vacation Bible school.  She unfailing refers to the ur-community on the site of modern Jerusalem as "the City of David."  The title of the series is perhaps a giveaway: it is called "The Holy Land Revealed"--one of those names that seems to punt on the first down.

But listen closely and you get a far different picture: pay attention and you can see that she is fully informed of the competing "archaeological" view, and that she almost buys into at least some of it.  Just exactly how much is hard to tell.  My guess is that at the end of the day, she is some kind of "left Biblicist."  She's far too well informed for vulgar belief.  She even takes pains to try to respond to some of the important talking points in the competing view.

The trouble is, she never lets on that there is a competing  view.  Instead, she gives her (apparent) Biblical narrative; she dances around some difficult issues; and she answers questions that she has never asked.

This strikes me as disingenuous and as far as I am concerned, highly unnecessary.  As I suppose should be obvious by now, I am much more of an "archaeologist" than a "Biblicist."  But I recognize that some of these issues are technical and I am an amateur: the technical heavy lifting is just way above my pay grade.  I'm open to careful analysis and indeed, I thought my lecturer scored some interesting points in favor of the Biblical view without ever acknowledging that she was doing so. How much better--and, I should think, easier--it would have been to lay out a more candid account of the competing positions: this is what I think, this is what the other guys argue and this is why I think they are wrong.

Just why she doesn't do this is anybody's guess.  It doesn't seem that her employer imposes a loyalty test: one of her colleagues is Bart D.  Ehrman, perhaps the best-known secularist scholar of the New Testament, almost a celebrity in the field of informed unbelief.  It might be that it's just easier her way.  She may have decided (and I suspect she would be right) that she catches far less flac this way from the committed God squad.  Indeed I've always thought that the occupation of professor for a serious scholar of ancient Israeli* history must be a pretty thankless job.  I should think the best of them have to fight day and night to be herd over the thrum of grinding axes.

And I stress it isn't just her.  I wouldn't be wasting all these bytes on just one set of DVDs.  From my perspective it is a far too frequent presentational style among expositors of ancient Israeli scholarship, and the listener is the worse for it.
---
*Names themselves are a problem here.  Jewish?  Palestinian?  Standard labels like "Holy Land" or  "Biblical," seem to me hopelessly to rig the bidding.  I choose "Israeli" as a back-formation from modern Israel, with no pretense that I have ironed out any of the difficulties.
---
Bibliographic note:  I suspect the best of the "trust-the-Bible" camp is Eliat Mazar, discoverer of what she believes to be "King David's palace" in the ur-city of Jerusalem.  The standard source for the "archeologist's narrative" would be The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman.  A more contentious view, setting the topic in the context of the larger history of  nationalist ideologies, is Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People.  The lectures by Professor Jodi Magness are available here.

He Beat Me To It

Faithful readers will know I spent a month last fall trekking over archaeological sites in Israel and Jordan. Apparently I was not the first. Here is the estimable Sir John Mandeville, Kt., the granddaddy of all travel writers. “And I, John Mandeville, Knight, left my country and crossed the sea in the year of Our Lord Jesus Christ 1332,” he reports (in the Penguin translation of C.W.R.D. Moseley). It seems I was following in his footsteps:

In the marches of Galilee, among the mountains, was the Ark of God taken. On the other side is the hill of Endor in Hermon. … Five miles from Naym is the city of Iesrael [Jezreel], also called Zaraym. Iesabel [Jezebel] the wicked queen was of that city; she had Naboth slain unrighteously for his vineyard. A little way from this city is the field of Mageddo [the plain of Megiddo], where the King of Samaria slew Josias the King of Judah, who was afterwards carried to Mount Sion and buried there. A mile from Jezreel are the hills of Gilboa, where King Saul, his son Jonathan and a great number of the Children of Israel were killed. For this reason King David cursed those hills. A mile to the east is a city called Citople [Scythopolis], or Bethsaym [Bethshan]. The Philistines hung the head of King Saul on the walls of that city.

--The Travels of Sir John Mandeville 94

Penguin Paperback ed. (C.W.R.D. Moseley, trans. 1983)

Unlike some parts of the Travels, which are pretty clearly pure fantasy, the incidental detail here suggests that “Sir John” may actually have seen the sites he describes here.

More on the Book I Wish I'd Read

More on The Bible Unearthed: you can get a hint of what this book is about without ever opening the cover without ever cracking the cover by taking a look at the Amazon reviews. At the moment, there are 97, with an average rank of four stars. But 45 of them give five stars and another 11 give only one—and probably would give zero if they had the chance. For some portion of the reading public, suggesting that the Bible not inerrant, is not a cool thing to do.

It will be obvious that I am not of the inerrancy party, but I don’t want to appear dismissive here: this kind of thing has great meaning to people and it’s not at all surprising if they seem to feel dissed or affronted when somebody challenges a deeply held belief.

In response, I’m sure I can’t save any souls here, but for whatever it is worth: if FS are right, then the Bible is not what we (once thought it was?). But if they are right, then the creation of the Bible has got to qualify as one of the great cultural achievements of human history: they’ve created a culture, a history, a reason for being—and they put it all down in a book. As FS insist, nobody else has anything like it:

The Greek epics and myths spoke only by metaphor and example: Mesopotamian and Persian religious epics offered cosmic secrets but neither earthly history nor a pracxtical guide to life. The Hebrew Bible offered both, providing a narrative framework in which every Jew could identify both family and national history. In short, the saga of Israel that had first crystallized in the time of Josiah became the world’s first fully articulated national and social compact, encompassing the men, women and children, then rich, the poor, and the destitute of an entire community.

There’s a scene in a Stanley Elkins novel (I quote from memory) where God says—alright, you want to know why I did it? I’ll tell you why I did it! Because it is a good story, that’s why!

“Is that all?” says Jesus, rubbing his stigmata. “All?”

Indeed it is all, and perhaps no cultural product has ever done better.

Thanks again, Joe.

The Book I Wish I'd Read

Here’s the book I wish I had read before I went to look at archaeological sites in Israel/Jordan last fall: The Bible Unearthed, by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (Free Press 2001) (link). It’s an assessment of how the archaeological evidence fits with the Bible, or more precisely the Old Testament, or more precisely the “Deuteronomistic History”—the material in Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings that makes up about 25 percent of the Old Testament.

No point in suspense here: FS think the archaeological evidence does not support the narrative very well. But it does support a historical narrative all its own, and explains how the remarkable Deuteronomistic History came into being—together, cultural artifacts of the first order in their own right.

More precisely, FS find no convincing evidence of (1) an Egyptian captivity; (2) a flight out of Egypt; (3) military conquest of the Canaanites by the Hebrews; (4) a “unified kingdom” of Israel and Judah (or at any rate, not before, say, the Third Century BCE). They seem willing to accept that there was a King David and King Solomon, but they treat them as minor local strongmen in a political backwater. They do accept the notion of a strong kingship in “Israel”—i.e., the “northern half” of the supposed joint kingdom. But their candidate is the family of Ahab—he who is perhaps the most excoriated of all historical figures in the Old Testament text.

What can possibly be going on here? FS don’t doubt that there were a “people” in what we now call Israel from perhaps late in the second millennium, who spoke a form of Hebrew and knew of a God named YHWH—Jehovah. They find reason to accept the presence of the “strong kingdom in the north—see Ahab, supra. But they believe that the south –“Judah”—was poorer, weaker, less populous, until the Eighth Century BCE, when the Babylonians conquered the northerners and carried them off into captivity. Rather suddenly and unexpectedly, Judah becomes central, populous, and indispensable to the survival of a more or less common culture. Then—and only then, FS argue does someone (or some group of people) generate the narrative that forms so central a part of our own experience.

Of course this is not going to be everybody’s dish of tea. If you are going to criticize it, I can think of at least two important lines of approach. One, if you believe in Biblical inerrancy, then this is all bollocks from the get-go. And two, whether or not you believe in Biblical inerrancy, there may be all kind of arguments over issues of, e.g., dating and interpretation. It is hard for me to imagine any two archaeologists agreeing with all this stuff in detail, any more than they agree on, for example, the historic home of the Indo-European language.

Either way, however, this might make a pretty good guidebook for the amateur archaeologist. FS do as good a job as you can expect (within the limits of the format) to lay out the substructure of their argument and, so far as I can tell, a fair-minded job of exposing its limitations. Still, you are left with an excellent framework for considering why it is you might care about particular archaeological sites and what it is you might want to look for and at when you are there.

I’ve got more I want to say about this book, but this post has gone on too long already. I may do another one later.

Credit: Thanks, Joe!