I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Junie B. Jones is hilarious. It’s almost like Barbara Park is doing a version of kindergartner stand-up. The delivery here is just phenomenal.
Ancient cities of the biblical period did not include public areas comparable to the central forum in Roman cities, the piazza in medieval European cities, or the shopping malls of modern cities. Instead, the gate area was the heart of the city, as everyone who entered or left the city had to pass through it.
The city gate was where elders of the town sat and passed judgment on disputes brought before them.
Importance of the city gates
Movement through this inner gate could have been controlled, so that possibly not everyone who was allowed into the piazza could then proceed further into the city.
I’m reminded of theater design in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in which lobbies are meant to physically hold everyone in a public space before they’re let into the actual theater space inside.
Tabun is an Arabic term referring to round overns used for baking, measuring around 0.5-1m (1 1/2-3 1/4 ft) in diameter and generally constructed of earth, though occasionally from a circle of rounded stones.
…four large stone steps (a rare find in itself, as built stone steps are seldom uncovered in excavations) descended into the main room.
To the best of our knowledge, drainage channels have not been reported in ordinary dwellings in biblical period cities–only in the city gates–so this came as a surprise.
“To the best of our knowledge” –I like the warning/caution they give here, though most may gloss over it. Small statements like this are small flags in the text that scholars should note for potential future research. Subtle flags like this pop up in math textbooks frequently, but often only the well-trained know to take advantage of them.
This demonstrates how the understanding of archaeological remains can change as an excavation progresses.
Another archaeology 101 example here. Keep in mind that something that may look one way at a point in the research may change fundamentally as one “digs” further.
A bench stood next to the entrance–a feature found only in cultic rooms.
…which we interpreted as a stable.
again another cautionary flag that might possibly take other interpretations.
One room (G) is unusual: it contained a bench…
G doesn’t seem to actually be labeled on diagram C3, but does appear on Fig. 28 of building C10
Pillared buildings are well known from the period of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel and were used as public storehouses for the produce collected as tax from farmers. The existence of such a building at Khirbet Qeiyafa clearly indicates central authority and administration.
We know that in ancient times urgent messages were communicated over great distances by sending signals using fire or torches. Evidence of this practice in the Kingdom of Judah comes from an inscription on a pottery sherd from Lachish from the time when Nebuchadnezzar was besieging the city: “we are watching for the fire signals of Lachish according to all the signs which my lord has given. The palace at Khirbet Qeiyafa would ahve been an ideal place for sending and receiving such torch-signals.
Nice documentation in the archaeological record for early long distance communication
…we can three phases of development in cities in Judah in the biblical period (Fig. 33).
Khirbet Qeiyafa was probably the first site constructed according to this plan. [urban planning in Israel involving a casemate wall with houses that incorporate the casemates as rooms. Several examples from the following centuries exist using a similar pattern.]
The excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa thus reveal another important aspect of the historical figure of David, and show that not only did he build cities, but also that a new concept of urban planning emerged during his reign.
… the city was built in several major phases. In the first phase, the site was cleared of earlier settlement remains and bedrock was exposed around the future city. In the second phase, stones were quarried and brought up to the line of the city wall. […] In the third pahse, the builders began work on the gates and their chambers. […] Construction of the wall itself commenced in the fourth phase. […] In the fifth and final phase, the private houses whose walls incorporated the casemates were constructed.
This was a good demonstration that the chronological dilemma cannot be resolved on the basis of pottery alone.
In the 2008 season we had discovered carbonized olive pits in the city wall and in rooms of the destroyed buildings in Area B.
The enormous tension that accompanied sending the samples via express mail resulted in the credit card with which we paid for the shipment being mistakenly packed inisde and sent to the laboratory at Oxford, along with the olive pits.
This could be a great plot point in a thriller version of this story!
One might think that with multiple samples, they might send them separately, that way if some are lost, then at least they’ve not lost everything!
A discovery made in our 2011 excavation season […] A jar containing some 20 olive pits was found in the destroyed city. […] which clearly indicate that the city had been destroyed no later than 980 to 970 BCE. […} Today, the dating […] is based on nearly 30 samples, probably the best radiometric dating we have so far for any level in a biblical city.
…determining the dates of the reigns of the kings of Israel and Judah is not a simple task, and the length of those of David and Solomon, exactly 40 years each, appears to be a literary device rather than reflecting historical reality. We therefore propose that the round number of 1000 BCE as the date of David’s accession to the through, though this is merely an approximation. […] But it is clear from the radiocarbon determinations that Khirbet Qeiyafa can be dated to the time of David or Saul, but no to Solomon’s reign, which is later than the results obtained. It will only be possible to decide conclusively if an inscription naming one king or another is found at Khirbet Qeiyafa. To be scientifically cautious, we accept the later date, to the reign of King David.
The “excavation dump” is the term commonly used by archaeologists in referring to the piles of earth and stones that they remove from the ground during excavation.
In 2007 it was possible to claim that nothing was known archaeologically about King David; ten years later the situation is very different, and archaeology can present two sites from his period in the Judean Shephelah.
Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through
Maybe even funnier than when I read it as a kid.
Chapter 1 was pretty solid. This almost seems to me like it would make a good book for an IndieWeb book club.
A national public sphere with a uniform national language did not exist in Turkey at the time. Without mass media and a strong national education system, languages exist as dialects that differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, and even grammar, sometimes from town to town. ❧
What I’m understanding about the text is that it was hard for Turkish to interact with one another since there was no official language and how these girls for enforced to master this one language.—beatrizrocio
December 26, 2018 at 12:33PM
Political scientist Benedict Anderson called this phenomenon of unification “imagined communities.” ❧
December 26, 2018 at 12:35PM
Technologies alter our ability to preserve and circulate ideas and stories, the ways in which we connect and converse, the people with whom we can interact, the things that we can see, and the structures of power that oversee the means of contact. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 12:37PM
As technologies change, and as they alter the societal architectures of visi-bility, access, and community, they also affect the contours of the public sphere, which in turn affects social norms and political structures. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 12:40PM
For example, in a society that is solely oral or not very literate, older people (who have more knowledge since knowledge is acquired over time and is kept in one’s mind) have more power relative to young people who cannot simply acquire new learning by reading. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 12:45PM
In her lifetime, my grandmother journeyed from a world confined to her immediate physical community to one where she now carries out video conversations over the internet with her grandchildren on the other side of the world, cheaply enough that we do not think about their cost at all. She found her first train trip to Istanbul as a teenager—something her peers would have done rarely—to be a bewildering experience, but in her later years she flew around the world. Both the public sphere and our imagined communities operate differently now than they did even a few decades ago, let alone a century. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 12:47PM
movements, among other things, are attempts to intervene in the public sphere through collective, coordinated action. A social movement is both a type of (counter)public itself and a claim made to a public that a wrong should be righted or a change should be made.13 Regardless of whether movements are attempt-ing to change people’s minds, a set of policies, or even a government, they strive to reach and intervene in public life, which is centered on the public sphere of their time. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 12:49PM
Governments and powerful people also expend great efforts to control the public sphere in their own favor because doing so is a key method through which they rule and exercise power. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 12:49PM
homophily ❧
December 26, 2018 at 12:57PM
If you cannot find people, you cannot form a community with them ❧
December 26, 2018 at 01:05PM
The residents’ lack of success in drawing attention and widespread support to their struggle is a scenario that has been repeated the world over for decades in coun-tries led by dictators: rebellions are drowned out through silencing and censorship. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 04:47PM
In his influential book The Net Delusion and in earlier essays, Morozov argued that “slacktivism” was distracting people from productive activism, and that people who were clicking on political topics online were turning away from other forms of activism for the same cause. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 04:58PM
Another line of reasoning has been that internet is a minority of the pop-ulation. This is true; even as late as 2009, the internet was limited to a small minority of households in the Middle East. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 05:05PM
Only a segment of the population needs to be connected digitally to affect the entire environment. In Egypt in 2011, only 25 percent of the population of the country was on-line, with a smaller portion of those on Facebook, but these people still managed to change the wholesale public discussion, including conversa-tions among people who had never been on the site. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 05:07PM
Two key constituencies for social movements are also early adopters: activists and journalists ❧
December 26, 2018 at 05:08PM
Ethan Zuckerman calls this the “cute cat theory” of activism and the public sphere. Platforms that have nonpolitical functions can become more politically powerful because it is harder to censor their large num-bers of users who are eager to connect with one another or to share their latest “cute cat” pictures. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 05:13PM
Social scientists call the person connecting these two otherwise separate clusters a “bridge tie.” Research shows that weak ties are more likely to be bridges between disparate groups. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 05:18PM
As Ali explained it to me, for him, January 25, 2011, was in many ways an ordinary January 25—officially a “police celebration day,” but traditionally a day of protest. Although he was young, he was a veteran activist. He and a small group of fellow activists gathered each year in Tahrir on January 25 to protest police brutality. January 25, 2011, was not their first January 25 pro-test, and many of them expected something of a repeat of their earlier protests—perhaps a bit larger this year. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 05:31PM
His weak-tie networks had been politically activated ❧
December 26, 2018 at 05:37PM
or example, it has been repeatedly found that in most emergencies, disasters, and protests, ordinary people are often helpful and altruistic. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 05:53PM
However, that desire to belong, reflecting what a person perceives to be the views of the majority, is also used by those in power to control large numbers of people, especially if it is paired with heavy punishments for the visible troublemakers who might set a diff erent example to follow. In fact, for many repressive governments, fostering a sense of loneliness among dissidents while making an example of them to scare off everyone else has long been a trusted method of ruling. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 05:56PM
Social scientists refer to the feeling of imagining oneself to be a lonely minority when in fact there are many people who agree with you, maybe even a majority, as “pluralistic ignorance.”39 Pluralistic ignorance is thinking that one is the only person bored at a class lecture and not knowing that the sentiment is shared, or that dissent and discontent are rare feelings in a country when in fact they are common but remain unspoken. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 05:57PM
Thanks to a Facebook page, perhaps for the first time in history, an in-ternet user could click yes on an electronic invitation to a revolution. ❧
December 26, 2018 at 06:00PM
Only a segment of the population needs to be connected digitally ❧
December 26, 2018 at 06:59PM
This was always one of my favorite books in my childhood.
I find myself really appreciating all the additional maps, diagrams, and photos that are provided in this text. Too often with popular science writing, authors leave these sort of niceties out and they truly make a difference.
So far a fascinating account of a multi-season excavation of a late 11th and early 10th centuries BCE city. They do an excellent job of teasing out of the biblical, mythical, and archaeological sources for setting the story of their work. They also lay out several alternate and competing contemporary theories surrounding their work.
For those who haven’t studied archaeology, they also do a great job of discussing the evolution of the topic and its application to their particular example, so you not only get the particular story they’re telling, but also a relatively firm framework for how archaeology is practiced in a modern setting.
This is a great example of science and humanities communication. I can’t wait to finish out the book.
The second tradition relating to the Sorek Valley tells of the Ark of the Covenant…
Traditions connected to the Elah Valley are preserved in the books of Samuel and Chronicles, which relate to Iron Age IIA.
Khirbet Qeiyafa is […] situated on the border between Judah and Philistia, […] The question then arises if and how the excavation at Khirbet Qeiyafa contributes to our understanding of this tradition [of David and Goliath].
Hidden in the biblical story of the battle between David and Goliath is valuable geographical-historical information. […] Goliath the Gittite (from the city of Gath) […] Gath was destroyed at the end of the 9th century BCE by Hazael, the Aramean king of Damascus, and Ekron was destroyed in 603 BCE by the Babylonians. […] It is thus clear that the biblical author had access to historical information originating in the 10th and 9th centuries BCE.
However, the Elah Valley was an area of border conflicts only in the 10th and 9th centuries BCE, and after the destruction of Gath entirely lost its earlier geopolitical significance.
I’m curious about the insignia pictured on David’s right shoulder. Does it mean something specific or is it simply decoration?
No other person is mentioned more frequently throughout the Old and New Testaments [than King David]…
David began his reign around 1000 BCE in Hebron, where he remained for 7 years before conquering Jerusalem and establishing it as his capital. Solomon succeeded him in c. 970 or 960 BCE. […] According to the Old Testament, following Solomon’s death the kingdom split into two separate political units: the Kingdom of Israel in the north , with its capital at Samaria, and the Kingdom of Judah in the south, centered on Jerusalem. The northern kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians after several waves of military campaigns which resulted in the final destruction of Samaria in 722 BCE. The Kingdom of Judah was destroyed by the Babylonians after a series of invasions, which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple in 586 BCE.
This was demonstrated on July 21, 1993, when the fragmentary Tel Dan stela was discovered in northern Israel. On it was carved an inscription, written in Aramaic, which refers to a battle and the subsequent defeat of the king of Israel and the king of the “House of David” at the hands of Hazael of Damascus.
Subsequent studies have shown that the same phrase, “House of David,” also appears on the Mesha inscription from ancient Moab.
…Jerusalem is a particularly difficult city for archaeological research for three main reasons. First, the modern city covers nearly all of [it]… Secondly, the nature of construction on such a hilly site meant that in many periods builders removed all previous structures when creating new ones and built directly upon bedrock, so that remains of buildings of certain periods are entirely absent. and thirdly, during the First Temple period of life in the city extended uninterrupted over a 400-year period until the Babylonian destruction, and buildings therefore remained in continuous use for a considerable time.
…several large architectural structures have been uncovered in Jerusalem [including] the “Stepped Stone Structure” [uncovered] as early as 1923-25 [in] an expedition headed by archaeologists R.A.S. Macalister and John G. Duncan exposed a portion of this impressive structure.
The date of these three monumental buildings in Jerusalem is very problematic, as they are not associated with settlement strata rich in the pottery finds that can enable the archaeologist to determine their time of use, and no organic finds appropriate for radiocarbon dating were discovered.
One proposal [for the chronology of the monarchy in Judah], known as the low chronology, maintains that urbanization, i.e., the transition from a rural society (the periods of the Settlement and Judges: iron Age I) to an urban society (the period of the monarchy: Iron Age II) occurred only at th end of the 10th century BCE, and only in the north, in the Kingdom of Israel. In this scenario, David must be regarded as a local tribal chief at most.
Tells consist of layers of settlement largely superimposed one upon the other […], so that it is often necessary to uncover finds from later periods first, in order to reach the earlier ones below, a time-consuming and costly undertaking.
Since archaeological techniques were then in their infancy, the methodologies used were often lacking in precision, and early excavators did not correctly differentiate between the various strata and attributed finds from different periods to the same one.
Alongside the large, stratified archaeological tell sites are so-called ruins (Arabic, knirbah; Hewbrew, horvah). Such sites were settled for limited periods of time and did not develop into deep, multi-layered tells.
Thus, for example, at Khirbet Qeiyafa we exposed 5,000 sq. m (54,000 sq. ft) or around 25 per cent of the settlement in seven seasons of excavation.
Interpreting the various finds from an excavation, such as pottery, stone vessels, metal tools, figurines, jewelry, and coins requires care: those from a particular layer of occupation reflect mainly the final phase of habitation in that layer–in other words, the final days, a moment before the destruction or abandonment of a settlement. But what if a settlement was established a hundred or two hundred years prior to the destruction? How can we ascertain that? This is a difficult problem and the result is that many excavators erroneously tend to compress periods of tens or hundreds of years into brief periods of a few years.
As a result, surveys will fail to identify the latter’s existence and a distorted picture of a “gap in settlement” will result; in other words, the surveyor will falsely conclude that during a certain period there was no settlement at a given site.
I’m enjoying the archaeological background that they describe in their extended example within the book. This book could almost be described as Archaeology 101: An applied example using an exploration of Khirbet Qeiyafa.
The conclusion based on such surveys that there were no settlements in Judah during the 10th century BCE and that a centralized kingdom did not exist at the time is therefore essentially flawed.
We must also remember that the dynamic hypotheses of identifying various sources, redactors, and editors of the biblical text are “constructions of modern scholarship” and that they continue to evolve and change.
One must accept, then, that modern scholarship has no clear and objective tool for dealing with the dating of the writing of the different biblical traditions. In the current stat of our knowledge, with the evidence available, the process of formation and transmission of the texts remains unresolved, as does the time and manner in which they took on their present form.
Perhaps information theory could be applied here to better tease out these questions?
According to the minimalist method [using Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar to study history] , two main conclusions may be drawn from this: first, that the Roman Empire should be dated to the 16th Century, and second that Julius Caesar is a purely literary character–both of which are patently absurd.
The weakest link in archaeological research […] is frequently the lengthy time that elapses between excavation and publication of the results. Archaeological excavation destroys what it excavates. It is therefore a scholarly and scientific obligation to publish all of the data on the excavation procedure and the findings for other scholars and the public at large.
In our view, archaeology finds should be independently dates; only then may attempts be made to connect them with historical/biblical figures, periods, or events.
This is the first site in Judah from the beginning of the monarchy to be dated using this scientific technique [radiocarbon dating]. The results unequivocally demonstrated that the city was established at the end of the 11th and the beginning of the 10th century BCE.
Scholars who attempt to apply findings from northern sites to the situation in Judah and Jerusalem are committing a methodological error. […] we refrain from using the term “United Monarchy,” which implies the existence of akingdom that also included the north of the country. Instead, we shall use here the term “Kingdom of Judah.”
The data are like pieces of a mosaic that can be combined in different ways to form different images; the pieces themselves do not change, but the images they form can be modified. Here we briefly summarize five of the conflicting paradigms regarding David’s kingdom, and their development.
* The biblical paradigm […]
* The mythological paradigm […]
* The chronological paradigm […]
* The ethnic paradigm […]
* The Kingdom of Judah paradigm […]
However the heavily fortified city of Khirbet Qeiyafa, with its planning and public spaces suggests a centralized urban social organization rather than a dispersed rural population.
We believe Khirbet Qeiyafa is a Judahite site for six main reasons, which we summarize briefly here […]
casemate wall [is] a wall built of two parallel walls with the space between them divided by perpendicular walls into long narrow rooms called casemates.
The term “Hebrew” is familiar from the Bible, where it is used to describe populations particularly during the Patriarchal period.
The term “Jew” entered into use only at the end of the First Temple period and appears primarily in the biblical books dealing with the Second Temple period. […] Therefore, in modern research it is customary to use this term only in describing populations from the Second Temple period onward.
To summarize: the mythological, chronological, and ethnic paradigms are in reality variations of the same minimalist approach.
The original minimalist approach, as expressed in the mythological paradigm, was a consistent worldview that maintained that the history of ancient Israel should only be based on extra-biblical data. Both of the approaches that followed, the low chronology paradigm and the ethnic paradigm, were variations that attempted to solve questions that the previous paradigm could not answer.
What about future possible paradigms?
ossuary [is] a small stone chest for holding the bones of a dead person
Christopher Rollston suggested therefore that there could be some connection between the Arabic name Khirbet Qeiyafa and the name of the family of priests, Caiaphas, known from the New Testament, and that perhaps the family had a rural estate in the area of the Elah Valley, a memory of which is preserved in the Arabic name of our site.
[…] in the Elah valley […] the soil is not terra rossa but rather a type known as rendzina.
Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through
Some initial discussion of sets, classes, and conglomerates to keep us out of trouble with some of the potential foundational issues that can be found in set theory.
completions of partially orderedsets and of metric spaces,ˇCech-Stone compactifications of topological spaces, sym-metrizations of relations, abelianizations of groups, Bohr compactifications of topo-logical groups, minimalizations of reachable acceptors, etc. ❧
The tough part of category theory is lists of things like this right up front which will tend to scare off almost any reader but those who are working on Ph.D.s in mathematics…
November 30, 2018 at 09:29PM
Motivation ❧
I really wish more math textbooks had motivation sections like this one does.
November 30, 2018 at 09:35PM
Therefore we advise the beginner to skip from here, go directly to§3, and return to this section only when the need arises. ❧
They’ve buried the lede here apparently.
November 30, 2018 at 10:15PM
Kuratowski definition of an ordered pair ❧
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the specific name Kuratowski attached to this.
November 30, 2018 at 10:31PM