I’ve been asked many times over the years if I know of a place where one can purchase a 3-D relief map of Israel. The first one I ever saw was hand-crafted and not for sale. Some years later I found a company making large maps. While I knew one guy who actually carried the small (6-foot) edition back as “luggage” from Israel, this is impractical for most.

I just learned that Preserving Bible Times, Inc. is selling 10” x 20” 3-D relief maps. These are now available in both framed ($39) and unframed ($29) versions, with shipping of $9.95 for the first map and $1.95 for additional maps in the same shipment. Take a look at the images below to see the quality and detail.

To order, contact the good folks at Preserving Bible Times at 410-953-0557 by mail at PBT, POB 83357, Gaithersburg, MD, 20883. Questions can be directed by email here. This can be a great resource for home, church, school, clubhouse, beach house, or treehouse. The timing is perfect for Christmas as well.

Framed version

Close-up of Sea of Galilee and Golan Heights

Close-up of Jerusalem area and Dead Sea

Southeast Asian Archaeology mentioned.

A feature on a Ro Ngao woman in Vietnam who has spent her life preserving ancient gongs from the Central Highlands of Vietnam.

Y Geu and her gongs. Tuoi Tre News, 20121009

80-year-old woman spends life preserving ancient gongs
Tuoi Tre News, 09 October 2012

Y Geu, 80, a Ro Ngao ethnic minority resident of K’roong K’lả village in Kon Tum city’s K’roong Commune, has spent almost her entire life, and even her family’s possessions, preserving many sets of gongs, the typical musical instrument used in ethnic festivals in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. These instruments are under imminent threat of being lost.

According to A Chung, the head of the village, Y Geu has most ancient Gongs in the area.

“I’ve visited many places, but can’t find any gongs which look as beautiful or sound as good as Geu’s,” he added.

Full story here.

Southeast Asian Archaeology mentioned.

The following has been added to the Zotero Group for Ancient World Open Bibliographies and the Ancient World Open Bibliographies Wiki.

Classical Archaeology; Biblical Studies

Corinthian Studies Library
https://www.zotero.org/groups/corinthian_studies/items
David Pettegrew, Messiah College and http://corinthianmatters.com/
Last updated October 2012.
This Zotero group library of 1,535 items is divided into two major sections: Archaeology and History, and Early Christian Studies. A detailed description of its organization and contents, with tips for use for those new to Zotero, is available at http://corinthianmatters.com/bibliography/zotero/

Photo 1: Double Window at Umm el-Jimal

By: Bert de Vries (Calvin College) and Muaffaq Hazza (Umm el-Jimal)

In 2012 the Umm el-Jimal (UJ) Project received a grant from the Ambassador Fund for Cultural Preservation (AFCP) to engage in preservation and presentation of House XVII/XVIII, the very large Byzantine/Umayyad House famous for its fourth-floor level double windows (Photo 1). The objective was to preserve the ruin as it was and make it presentable, safe and understandable for visitors. This conservation project is a component of a larger effort to make Umm el-Jimal meaningful in a participatory way in the lives of various communities ranging from international tourists and scholars to the local residents of the UJ Municipality*.  See for example, the various components of the new website, www.ummeljimal.org, which is designed to serve these communities with multi-layered content like Site Histories, a Museum, a Guided Tour, the Education Curriculum Guide, a Research Library, Ethnological Films and much more.

A major goal of this decade-long process has been the planning and creation of a program of long-term reconciliation between the local residents, who had become more or less alienated, ironically, by previous sincere efforts to protect and preserve the site.  For the past protective measures had given some the impression that the site was not for them, but for others, and that it was, in fact, being protected from them (Photo 2, the fence). Now this sense of rupture is being mitigated by a variety of inclusive efforts ranging from heritage education, participation in site management and financial benefits from tourism services.

Photo 2: Fenced out

While much of this is as practical as making sure that money from tourist services flows into local coffers, at its deepest level a local feeling of ‘ownership’ has to include the establishment of a conviction that the ruins are a significant component of the people’s own history and play a significant role in their own traditions. This is, of course, to be done through things like education on archaeology and heritage, and integration of the ruins in to the various celebrations of communal life and culture.

However, in the long months of difficult stone moving and tricky resetting of basalt blocks in the House XVII/XVIII preservation process we discovered a different vital connection between the dead and the living: The skills that had been locally available to erect buildings like House XVIII a thousand years ago have survived the vast historic changes between then and now and are still there in the living community of today!

There is an ironic twist in our mutual discovery of this truth. We began the project in January with a preservation-planning field school involving Calvin students and various professionals, both foreigners and Jordanians, but almost no local people. In the process we received a stream of wonderful advice, with great input into issues of preservation standards and practical implementation techniques, for example – and especially – how to achieve an effective stabilization of the Double Window. By the end of the month we had a plan for the stabilization of a half dozen key elements of the building, which included a partly collapsed corbelled roof, an entirely collapsed room, and the Double Window.

In March we began to implement these plans with a crew of 35 workers hired by the Department of Antiquities from the Umm el-Jimal community. We were prepared to implement our carefully laid plans by instructing these workers on what was to be done, and how to do it. That is not how it went.  In each of the three instances just mentioned, our implementation strategy was trumped by the workers. For example, when we explained that we would like to secure the collapsing roof with an I-beam post, the leader of the work crew, Awda al-Masa’eid, looked things over and said: “That’s not necessary; it will be simpler and cheaper to fix the roof with a minimum of intervention. You do not need to have a support post in this room.” And that’s what was done. The story of this particular piece of work is told with pictures at “The Hole in the Roof” (June 9, 2012). After that, every planned intervention began with a long staff consultation with Awda and his crew. In every instance their plan for execution was simpler, faster, cheaper, more in keeping with preservation standards, and achieved exactly what we intended.**

Photo 3: Awda and crew stabilizing the Double Window

The result of this process is a new recognition of the core building skills (Photo 3) preserved at Umm el-Jimal, talents that reverberate with the ancient skills of the original builders. Thus our four months of working together have produced a mutuality and respect that includes a much greater sense of the ‘ownership’ of the conservation process by these local masons. Our intent is to honor this new mutuality and preserve this skills-tradition by finding ways to give this pool of local masons a permanent role in the long-term maintenance of the ancient buildings of Umm el-Jimal.

 Bert de Vries is a Professor of History and Archaeology at Calvin College and Director of the Archaeology Minor.

*Done by the project staff in partnership with Open Hand Studios, the Department of Antiquities and the local community and funded by various agencies, including so far, the Norwegian Research Council, the AIA, the AFCP, Calvin College, and the Department of Antiquities.

**For the story of the stabilization of the Double window see “Preservation of the Double Window,” the Problem (July 31, 2012) and the Solution (August 9, 2012).

~~~

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New Open Access Article- El legado onomástico puquina: a propósito de “Capac” y “Yupanqui”

http://redalyc.uaemex.mx/redalyc/src/inicio/IndArtRev.jsp?iCveNumRev=23173&iCveEntRev=315&institucion=

For the last week, I’ve been working on a grant application for study work next year at the site of Polis-Chrysochous on Cyprus. It’s timely not only because the grant application is due on November 1st, but also because an exhibit dedicated to the work at Polis titled City of Gold: Tomb and Temple in Ancient Cyprus will open this weekend at Princeton Art Museum (the exhibit catalogue is available for pre-order at Amazon).

As writing grant proposals tend to do, I began to think through the major possible outcomes of our work. For those of you who don’t follow this blog, I’ve been working with a diverse team of archaeologists at Polis-Chrysochous for the past two summers. We have focused out work on the Late Roman to Medieval phases of the site particularly those in the area of E.F2. Most of this work focused on the basilica there which was built toward the end of the 5th or the beginning of the 6th century and continued to function into the Medieval period. Last summer, we began to get more serious about integrating material from the earlier periods into the system we created to process stratigraphy from the later phases. 

So far, we have identified three main research issues that intersect with the analysis of stratigraphy at E.F2.

1. A Neighborhood through Time. The area of E.F2 is defined by the intersection of two roads which is marked in the Roman period by a quadrafons arch. Earlier Hellenistic material seems to respect the orientation of the roads (at least in a general way) and later architecture seems to respect the road and perhaps even echoes the design of the arch. The blocks surrounding this intersection preserve evidence for industrial activity (a kiln), significant hydraulic infrastructure (both to facilitate drainage and to tap subterranean sources of water), habitation, and religious structures (namely, but perhaps not exclusively the Early Christian basilica). The careful analysis of the stratigraphy will allow us to track the transformation of a neighborhood through time and to see the interplay between change and continuity in the urban fabric.

2. Spolia and Reuse. One of the most vibrant and significant conversations in Mediterranean archaeology today centers on the reuse of earlier architectural material in later construction. Recent scholarship has come to emphasize the local context for the reuse of material as an important theater for memory and ritual. In fact, the reuse of material from older buildings on the same site may have served to commemorate the process of transforming the local environment. While studies of spolia have tended to emphasize elaborate and monumental constructions, the neighborhood of E.F2 preserves many other less obvious examples of reuse. The reuse of earlier material in these more modest and less visible ways nevertheless left physical evidence for the process of transforming space.   

3. Residuality. Recent work on the persistence of earlier ceramics in much later contexts has challenged the way that we understand ceramic assemblages in an archaeological context. Attention to the presence of earlier ceramics in deposits clearly dated to many hundred years later provides insights both into formation processes and our tendency to understand the use cycle of ceramics as providing important measures for the date of deposits. The range of contexts present at E.F2 provide a veritable residually laboratory. Contexts range from use contexts to a range of small and large scale fills which preserve ceramics dating to hundreds of years.   

While (Old) Georgian is generally thought of as one of the big six languages of eastern Christianity — considered, that is, apart from Greek and Old Church Slavonic — it seems to have fewer researchers than the other five languages: Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Gǝʿǝz, and Syriac. Those of the Semitic family have a long history of research in Europe from the 16th century on and knowledge of one naturally builds toward knowledge of another. Athanasius Kircher and others before and after him worked on Coptic, the study of which was rejuvenated in the mid-20th century with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices (in quite a more lasting way, we can be sure, than that due to the recent hullabaloo-accompanied discussion of the so-called Gospel of Jesus’ Wife). Armenian, while still a language and a tradition apart, is nevertheless an Indo-European language and so not really so foreign linguistically as it may seem to most American and European scholars. But, compared with these languages, Georgian stands furthest away, both for its linguistic uniqueness and perhaps for the distinct Caucasian stamp it shares with Armenian. Scholars writing in Georgian and in Russian have published extensively on the language and its literature, but aspiring students who can’t read those languages have much less to work with. That which is available in the commonly read European languages is mostly in French and German (some of which was translated from Russian or Georgian), and only recently has anything appeared in English.

Map of Georgia from Marr-Brière

It is well known that Lord Byron had a strong interest in Georgia and its culture. More substantively in the 18th century, Marie-Félicité Brosset (1802-1880) wrote Éléments de la langue géorgienne (1837), a grammatical guide giving attention both to the literary language and the “vulgaire,” including some reading exercises at the end, only one of which might be surely classified as Old Georgian: The Martyrdom of David and Constantine (pp. 268-283); it has the text in Georgian, Brosset’s (now idiosyncratic) transliteration, literal phrase-by-phrase or word-by-word French translation, and a more fluid French translation. More recently came Zorrell’s brief (handwritten!) grammar for reading the Georgian version of the Bible and then N. Marr and M. Brière, La langue géorgienne (Paris, 1931), at the end of which are reading selections in all three scripts (the majority being in mxedruli). The author of the tome considered in this post, Heinz Fähnrich — see on him auf Deutsch here, and in Georgian here; at the latter is a picture of him with renowned Georgian scholar Ak’ak’i Šaniże (1887-1987; see here, very brief, in English and more here in Georgian) — earlier penned a 100-page survey of the language in English (mostly made up of paradigms), and in English we also have the recent, short treatment by Kevin Tuite. Longer than the latter, but still very compendious (and in German), is the little book by R. Zwolanek, with J. Assfalg’s assistance. (See the bibliography below.) This is decidedly not a complete list of grammars for Old Georgian, but it suffices to show the context into which Fähnrich’s new work comes.

This new book is hardly the first grammatical work by Fähnrich on Georgian, even in addition to the translation of Šaniże’s grammar and Fähnrich’s survey in English (see the bibliography below); these works are not closely compared with the new book here. That book appeared in 2011 (or 2012, see below) in Brill’s Handbuch der Orientalistik series. Including bibliography and index, it finishes at 856 pages. The book treats Old and later Georgian separately (15-498 and 511-828), but there is a handy discussion of main differences between the two at pp. 499-510. Most of what I have to say here has to do only with the part on Old Georgian; I studied the second half of the book in much less detail. There is some confusion concerning the book’s publication details: the copyright date in the copy I studied is 2012 (also on the title page), but the ISBN there leads one to an Introduction to Altaic Philology (2010)! The ISBN on the back cover of my copy leads one to the correct book, it seems, but the stated publication date for that one is 2011, and in any case, that is the only appropriate volume that comes up when you look at the author’s books at Brill’s site. Not surprisingly, the cost is exceedingly prohibitive: €217/$298 from Brill, and used copies available through AbeBooks are only moderately cheaper.

Strengths

Now, I point out the book’s strengths. Such judgements are, of course, at least partly subjective, but even so they will serve to give a more precise idea of the book than one might glean from the blurb of a bookseller.

At the outset, it is worth stressing that, while the majority of the book really is a presentation of the linguistic behavior of Georgian (i.e. a grammar), it is not exclusively so. The macrosection called “Lexik,” which covers “Bedeutungsänderungen,” “Normierung von Lautformen,” “Homonyme,” “Synonyme,” “Fachwortschatz und wissenschaftliche Terminologie,” “Wortgut kartwelischer Herkunft” (classified topically), and “Lehnwörter” (classified by origin), is the most interesting. We might justifiably ask whether such a section belongs properly to grammar stricto sensu — I think not, but it is well to recall that the book’s title lacks Grammatik! — but at the same time, its interest is almost undeniable. I wish more lexica included sections like these, and easily navigable. (Cf. R.M.W. Dixon, Basic Linguistic Theory, vol. 1, ch. 8.)

Another not strictly grammatical topic, but one especially important for a non-current literary language, that Fähnrich covers is the corpus, i.e. Old (15-46) and later (514-528) Georgian literature. While serviceable as surveys, these sections would be all the stronger with full references to editions and at least a few textual and literary studies, where they exist.

The fact that the book covers both Old and Modern Georgian in one volume will be appreciated by some linguists, both Kartvelologists and others, and especially worth highlighting here is the aforementioned concluding part of the first main part of the book: “Veränderungen vom Alt- zum Neugeorgischen” (499-510).

Weaknesses

I turn now to some complaints I have about the book. One of the biggest problems with the book is that the sources of text citations are not given. Those from the Bible might be easily identified, but not so with the rest of Georgian literature! Supplied references would be of use not only to those who want to check the further context of a particular word form or syntactic usage, but also to those who are struck by the content itself of an example sentence and who wish to see more. Supplied references also confirm without a doubt the genuine existence this or that form, that it is not a mere contrivance of a grammarian.

A quibble: Why is the section “Stammwechsel bei Verben” (370-371) classed under syntax? This is simply suppletion, and not really a feature of syntax, even though it may the case that “[i]n der altgeorgischen Sprache sind Morphologie und Syntax eng miteinander verflochten” (328). (Whether this is really more characteristic of Georgian than other languages is another question.) While a language’s grammar (understood in the fullest sense) is in fact “an integrated system” (cf. § 1.8 in Dixon, Basic Linguistic Theory, vol. 1) — sections on “morphosyntax” that are sometimes found in grammars bear some witness to this recognition — and so suppletion touches aspects of both morphology and of syntax, in a work ranged according to that traditional tripartite structure of phonology, morphology, and syntax, which Fähnrich’s is, questions of “Stammwechsel bei Verben” are to my mind misplaced if they appear under syntax.

Some long spans of the book consist almost entirely of paradigm after paradigm after paradigm. We expect this in books with titles like 501 [insert language adjective here] Verbs or [Language] Grammatical Tables, but in a bald form such as here it is not an advantageous characteristic of linguistic description. (The same criticism might be raised against Fähnrich’s English survey of Old Georgian.) These paradigms will, to be sure, find some occasional use by certain users in certain circumstances, but more description and explanation, less enumeration, would have better made up what purports to be a fairly comprehensive guide to Georgian as a language.

As for the arrangement of the book, in rather non-Teutonic fashion, sections are not numbered and subnumbered ad nauseam. While we may appreciate not being brought ad nauseam, some demarcation and clear marking of divisions with an easy system of reference would certainly have made the book more navigable.

The typography of individual letters, words, and lines (in German or in Georgian) leaves little to be desired, but the same cannot be said for the mise-en-page. There is almost no space in the margins, which not only makes the reading experience itself less pleasant, but also leaves little room for notes (only 1/2 inch outer margins). Indeed, a quick glance at one of this volume’s pages reminds one unfortunately of a document produced using the default settings of Word! (With which contrast the default for a document in LaTeX!) In addition, straight (rather than curved) quotation marks are used, which lends an overall cheap appearance to the book, something hardly appropriate for a book the personal possession of a hard copy of which will devour a few hundred dollars or euros from one’s bank account!

I praised above the inclusion of the section on lexicon. The part on loanwords includes a few remarks particular to each case that touch on historical or sociolinguistic factors of language contact thought to have been conducive to linguistic influence, and it is classified according to language (or, at least, family) of origin, but Fähnrich does not actually gives the words in those original languages. Perhaps he assumed that scholars familiar with the source languages could come up with the original words easily enough themselves, but such scholars are not the only people who might find the data of interest.

The upshot

The appearance of Fähnrich’s new book is not unwelcome. With the paucity of materials on Georgian available in widely read European languages, we might welcome almost any attention to the language, especially one with the kind of detail given here. But the $300 price tag certainly limits its distribution and therefore its use, scans of the book notwithstanding. From the perspective of Old Georgian, the one from which I am writing here, the book takes its place among the detailed grammars of Šaniże(Schanidse)-Fähnrich and Marr-Brière, but what does it add to what has been available in them for decades? The strengths that I indicated above — and there are probably more — do make the book stand out, but we do not yet have before us a reference grammar of Old Georgian that will stand for decades as the main go-to resource for students and scholars of the language. Such a work must be not only authoritative in analysis and explanation, it must also be comprehensive in linguistic and textual scope, based on clearly defined sources, preferably with examples from those sources clearly indicated, easily navigable, accessible (i.e. widely distributed), and at least relatively affordable (I would say under $150 or so). And it would not be a bad thing for its author, where needful, to break out of the traditional tripartite mold of grammatical presentation mentioned above and well-known to all of us by bowing to linguistic common sense and being well-versed in up-to-date — I acknowledge the constant movement of this adjective and thus the frequent evolution of its meaning! — linguistic theory. Finally, while the great majority of scholars, but not necessarily students, who might be interested in a Georgian reference grammar can work with German, it is, for better or worse, probably the case that this wished-for book will garner broader readership with English than with German. In the meantime, we can spend our efforts studying those easily available Georgian texts — there are some published in Georgia that are unfortunately very hard to find — in CSCO, PO, Le Muséon, and elsewhere, publishing new texts, making translations, and studying the language itself more closely, and as we do we have the aforementioned grammars, including the one here under review, whose author (with Surab Sardshweladse) has also given us a monumental dictionary.

Some amusing or otherwise memorable phrases and sentences, or, the beginnings of The Quotable Old Georgian

There is very often something amusing in the vocabulary, phrases, and sentences taken out of context that one meets in grammars, whether they are intended for pedagogical or reference purposes, and dictionaries.[1] Here listed from the Old Georgian part of Fähnrich’s work are but a few phrases or sentences useful not only for remembering particular grammatical forms, but which will also serve us well at the next cocktail party we attend. Because Fähnrich fails to cite his sources, I cannot easily give them (although the places of some can be guessed), but I do give the page in his book where these occur.

• მაქსიმიანე ეშმაკთმსახურისა მეფისა ზე “zur Zeit des Königs Maximian des Teufelsdieners” (305)
• უდაბნოსა ზედა “in der Wüste” (305)
• ენასა ზედა ეგჳპტურსა “in die ägyptische Sprache” (305)
• მწიგნობართა თანა და ხუცესთა “mit den Schriftgelehrten und Ältesten” (308)
• აჰა, ესერა, სიმრავლც მოაწია ჯინჭველთაი! “Siehe, es ist eine Vielzahl von Ameisen gekomen [sic]!” (323)
• ვაგლახ მონაზონსა ვეცხლისმოყუარესა “Weh dem geldliebenden Mönch!” (323)
• თურე ვარა ხარ? “Bist du denn ein Esel?” (327)
• მატლ ვარ და არა კაც “Ein Wurm bin ich und kein Mensch.” (329)
• და იყო პირსა შინა ჩემსა, ვითარცა თაფლი ტკბილ “Und es war in meinem Mund wie Honig süß.” (329)
• ეტლები რკინისა იყო მათი “Sie hatten Wagen aus Eisen.” (335)
• მამით ნუვის ჰხადით “Nennt niemanden Vater!” (341)
• ავაგენ ატენი სახლნი “Ich habe in Ateni Häuser gebaut.” (365)
• ეპისკოპოსმან აღმკუეცნა თმანი “Der Bischof beschnitt mir die Haare.” (366)
• დასაბამად ქმნნა ღნერთმან ცაჲ და ქუეყანაჲ “Am Anfang schuf Gott Himmel und Erde.” (368)

Note

[1] Cf. Ullendorff’s remarks on the curious presences and absences in Armbruster’s English-Amharic Vocabulary (An Amharic Chrestomathy, 5).

Bibliography
Fähnrich, Heinz. Grammatik der altgeorgischen Sprache. Hamburg, 1994.
——–. Kurze Grammatik der georgischen Sprache. Leipzig, 1987.
——–. “Old Georgian.” In Alice C. Harris, ed., The Indigenous Languages of the Caucasus, Vol. 1, The South Caucasian Languages. Delmar, N.Y., 1991. Pp. 129-217.
Marr, N. and M. Brière. La langue géorgienne. Paris, 1931.
Schanidse, A. Altgeorgisches Elementarbuch, 1. Teil, Grammatik der altgeorgischen Sprache. Trans. H. Fähnrich. Staatsüniversität Tbilissi Schriften des Lehrstuhls für Altgeorgische Sprache 24. Tbilisi, 1982.
Sardshweladse, Surab and Heinz Fähnrich. Altgeorgisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch. With the collaboration of Irine Melikishvili and Sopio Sardshweladse. Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 8, Uralic & Central Asian Studies 12. Leiden and Boston, 2005.
Tuite, Kevin. “Early Georgian.” In Roger D. Woodard, ed., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages. Cambridge, 2004. Pp. 967-986.
Zorell, F. Grammatik zur altgeorgischen Bibelübersetzung mit Textproben und Wörterverzeichnis. Scripta Pontificii Instituti Biblici. Rome, 1930.
Zwolanek, Renée. Altgeorgische Kurzgrammatik. With the collaboration of Julius Assfalg. Orbis biblicus et orientalis, Subsidia didactica 2. Freiburg and Göttingen, 1976.

I teaching NT theology next semester, and it’s that time of year to order textbooks around here.  I’ve been going through various texts that people here have used and that I’ve got on my shelf, but I’ve not found anything that just clicks for me.  The current prof is using Frank Matera’s New Testament Theology, which is what I might default to myself.  The biggest problem that I’m finding is that most New Testament theologies are written for seminary level students and are thus detailed and long.  I want to kindle a fire of interest in the topic not beat them to death with reading.  At the same time, I’m a fan of having outside texts–articles and relevant selections from key works–as assigned “seminar” reading so student learn to analyse and discuss arguments.  So, a huge textbook squeezes out the ability of assigning this other reading.

My questions to the blogging world are these:  1) What NT theology(ies) are your favorites and why?  2) Would you recommend it/them for undergrads or just grad students?

Click here to view the embedded video.

By QualiaSoup HT Hemant Mehta

The sediments used to backfill the monumental enclosures at the end of their use consist of limestone rubble from the quarries nearby, flint artefacts and surprisingly large amounts of animal bones smashed to get to the marrow, clearly the remains of meals. Their amount exceeds everything known from contemporary settlements, and can be taken as a strong indication of large-scale feasting. The species represented most frequently are gazelle, aurochs and Asian wild ass, a range of animals typical for hunters at that date in the region. 

...  

In concordance with Hayden’s thoughts, it seems obvious that repetitive feasts of the amplitude implied at G¨obekli Tepe must have placed stress on the economic production of hunter-gatherer groups.Maybe in response to the demand, new food sources and processing techniques were explored. In this scenario, religious beliefs and practices may have been a key factor in the adoption of intensive cultivation and the transition to agriculture. Archaeological and chemical evidence further suggests that this innovation may have been fuelled by alcoholic beverages, giving a new response to Braidwood’s question ‘Did man once live by beer alone?’ Probably not, but beer—and wine—may have played an important role in one of the most significant turning points in the history of mankind. 

Introduction

There is a vast mortuary area on the West Bank of Thebes (the ancient city of Waset) in the 4th nome of the Upper Egypt. Over 400 private rock tombs have been registered so far in this area excluding small-scale shaft tombs in the Deir al-Madina.

Since the 19th century, these tombs have been extensively studied by researchers of the Western World. There is a sharp contrast between these private tombs and the royal tombs, which must have struck and impressed those who visited a private tomb for the first time. That is, the walls within the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings and Queens are mainly decorated by religious texts such as the Book of Am-Duat, the Book of the Gate, the Book of the Cavern, the Book of the Day and the Book of the Night. On the other hand, the wall paintings within private tombs vividly depicted the daily life of the nobles with striking colours...

The purpose of this database is to introduce all the data available so far concering the details of the private tombs in the Theban Necropolis, such as location, plan, the name and title of the owner, family relationship, wall decoration, funerary cones, etc., and the complete bibliography of the past research, in order to prepare the framework and to enhance the future research of the Theban Necropolis.

I learn today from Paleojudaica that Christopher Rollston, who works for Emmanuel Christian Seminary but published an article attacking biblical values, is now under investigation by the college.  The story is at the Chronicle of Higher Education here:

In an undated letter to Rollston, forwarded to Inside Higher Ed by a person who does not work at Emmanuel, Sweeney writes that the professor’s teaching style and the effect he has on his students “have demonstrably exacerbated our current financial problems. That, along with your recent blog, puts you at odds with the purpose and goals of the school… If you feel that you are unwilling or unable to change any of this, and, frankly, I am not even sure it is possible for you to do so at this stage, I strongly suggest you increase your efforts at finding a position in a university where people are not studying for the ministry.”

That seems entirely proper to me. 

What I find much more shocking, however, is the level of intolerance expressed by many commentators towards the college.   They do not share the values of Emmanuel, so they demand that Emmanuel should abandon its own, in order to continue giving Dr Rollston employment.  They would, of course, be the first to protest if they were the victims of a similar demand.

At the simplest level, this is bigotry.  I myself probably do agree with Emmanuel.  But whether I did or did not, I would certainly endorse their right to expect their staff to uphold the principles of the institution that pays them.  If they do not, I would expect them to be fired.  As I remarked earlier, there is no special principle at work here: it is simply a matter of honesty.

When I read, as I have seen in several places, this bigotry justified by claiming that attacking biblical values is just the “consensus of modern scholarship”, I learn that those making that claim are not scholars, and care nothing for scholarship.    For of course scholarship, as such, can have no view on a purely religious or political claim. 

It is the hallmark of the bigot that he refuses to acknowledge that those with whom he disagrees have a right to disagree.  And I see this all over the hostile commentary on this issue.

It’s disturbing to see such narrow-minded intolerance.  If this is, as some have written, what biblical studies is all about, then it is no scholarship at all.  Such pseudo-scholarship should not be funded by the tax-payer.

Open Access Journal- Revista Haucaypata

https://sites.google.com/site/revistahaucaypata/home/revista-haucaypata-nro-4-2012

Corinthian Scholarship

The Theban Necropolis Geological Mapping Project of the University of Charleston and the Serapis Research Institute announces the creation of the On-line Geographical Information System for the Theban Necropolis (OLGIS-TN), a pilot project sponsored, in part, by the College of Charleston Santee-Cooper Geographic Information Systems Laboratory. It functions as an Internet clearing house to which scholars of the Theban necropolis can retrieve and contribute relevant data related to the cemeteries of ancient Thebes (located on the West Bank of modern Luxor, Egypt).

Until now, no single real-time tool has existed for Egyptologists and scientists to store, retrieve, and manipulate complex data of various types related to the necropolis of private tombs in Western Thebes. However, recent advances in both Internet technology and geographic information systems (GIS) have led to the development of map-driven Web sites for accessing spatial, textual and image databases. The Theban Necropolis Geological Mapping Project freely provides this Web-based GIS-driven archaeological information management tool specifically for the Theban private necropolis. Although the coverage area will ultimately extend from Dra Abu'l Naga on the north to Medinet Habu on the south, at the beginning, the system will concentrate only on the hill of Sheikh Abd el-Qurnah.
This information system acts as both a portal to data and a repository to facilitate the exchange of information among institutions and across disciplines. A map interface based on ultra-high resolution satellite imagery and Survey of Egypt topographical maps connects users with archaeological, cultural, historical, geological, and geographical data.

Main Page

SEARCH THE DATABASE

Virtual Theban Necropolis

Searching Instructions

Project Description

Satellite Survey of Western Thebes

College of Charleston Magazine 11/04: "Zooming in on Egypt"

Web Links

DIGITAL GLOBE®

ESRI®

Contact Us

The TSI outperform the CEU as reference for the Greek population in 10 regions. However, there are four regions where the CEU are actually better reference samples than the TSI, contrary to what one might expect based on geographic proximity of the populations. Among them, the most notable are a region of chromosome 7 (100% coverage using the CEU as reference vs. 91.7% using the TSI as reference) and the chromosomal region around COMT (100% coverage using the CEU as reference vs. 93% coverage using the TSI as reference). The Chromosome 7 region spans the TAS2R38 gene (responsible for the PTC taster/nontaster phenotype), as well as the CLEC5A gene. The latter gene has been found to have a role in immune response and interact with dengue virus. Finally, the SLC44A5 regions (discussed in previous sections as one of the most population-differentiating regions in our study) were also captured more accurately in Greeks when the CEU were used as the reference population as opposed to the TSI.