This month's museum pick...

University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
Connecting with the Biblical Past

by Dea Adria Mallin

Your origin and your birth are from the land of the Canaanite.

                                                                                Ezekial 16:3  

University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

If the theme of this month’s issue is “Meet the People,” then museums are a neat fit, a gathering together of people across time and space and culture in an attempt to understand and perhaps bridge differences and to share in the ongoing discovery of humankind’s collective heritage.

There is a small historic land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea -- once called Canaan and then Israel, Palestine, Bilad es Sham, the Holy Land, Djahy -- where conflict over identity and ownership has time and again brought populations to a precarious edge. 

Recognizing the role that the Bible and Biblical lands have had in shaping the personal and cultural identities of people throughout the world, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology opened its permanent exhibition, “Canaan and Ancient Israel” in 1998. Excavated principally by U of P archaeologists between 1921 and 1981, it is North America’s largest permanent exhibit of excavated artifacts from Biblical lands.

More than 500 rare artifacts (of the museum’s 15,000), including pottery, statuary, jewelry of gold and semi-precious stones, weapons, weights, inscribed seals, and evocative faces on clay sarcophagi, date from 3,000 to 500 B.C. and explain how everyday life evolved among the Israelites, Philistines, and Phoenicians in the southern Levant, which is today Israel, Jordan, and the southern portions of Syria and Lebanon.

The archaeological record speaks volumes about those who lived and developed their identities between powerful Egypt and Mesopotamia, volumes to which we are rarely attentive or even exposed. While most moderns have already forged an identity to the Biblical past, this exhibit poses the question, “What shaped the identities of the Bible’s people?” The Bible’s stories are a living document of conflict and contrast, but their context has faded from view, and the U of P Museum mounted this exhibition to afford context.

Dr. Bruce Routledge, the exhibition’s co-curator, noted that “while the Old Testament is concerned with defining the cultural boundaries that separated ancient Israel from her neighbors and predecessors, archaeology shows us that the biblical world was a cosmopolitan one, with much contact and cultural exchange among the region’s ancient peoples.”

The exhibit is organized around domestic life, politics and social organization, labor and craft, trade and commerce, religious belief and practice, and death and burial customs. All this interplay occurs in a land once filled with dense oak, pine tree forest, pistachio and olive trees, and wild wheat and barley -- though the deforestation we know today was already well under way 5,000 years ago.

The exhibit carries potent visuals, including a full-scale replica of a furnished house from Tel es-Sa`idiyeh, Jordan, circa 725 B.C., in which life-sized figures make bread, weave cloth, care for their animals, and make ends meet in the days of Biblical kings.

Next time you eat your flat pita bread, think about the Canaanites who depended upon wheat and barley for 50% to 70% of their caloric intake, consuming 330 to 440 pounds of grains a year, usually in the form of bread. Breadmaking itself was a major household undertaking, much as it is today, though we use “making bread” and “the daily grind” as metaphors.

As two young boys run past the exhibit on their way to the museum’s Egyptian mummies, they slide to a stop. “Are they alive?” one asks the other. They are referring to a woman preparing to weave and a woman on her knees, grinding the grain on a slab of basalt, a volcanic stone, near an ancient oven glowing with red heat from the dung of her sheep and goats. Archaeologists excavated many of these ovens made from clay coils or reused pottery jars, and the flatbreads were baked against their interior side walls. 

Sleeping and entertaining took place on the second floor of the house, while food-processing, household tasks, short and long-term storage, and stables were on ground level. Work generally meant a year of sowing, hoeing, and harvesting with only a pick, a hoe, a scythe, and a flint or iron sickle. Storage for the ancients was critical and meant making airtight containers to avoid rot and infestation after the harvest.

Weaving was the other form of work, and while each household wove for personal use, the southern Levant was also famous for its luxuriously patterned and colored woven textiles. In the cases documenting the life of the Phoenicians, whom Homer called “those greedy knaves bringing countless trinkets,” there is a pottery sherd stained purple. It may look insignificant, but the Phoenicians were famous for their purple dye, and they produced it ingeniously and intricately by removing, soaking, and heating the glands of mollusks of the genus murex. Costly fabrics using this purple dye were reserved for tribunes and consuls, and eventually, the color became the very one we associate with royalty.

Having observed the life-sized figures going about their daily rituals, one is eager to learn about the materials behind glass. In the religion section, a collection of temple offerings from Tel Beth Shean, arrayed at child-height, makes little kids glue their noses to the case to inspect the baboon, the serpent, the mandrake fruit, and the ram’s head amulets – just a few of thirty infinitesimal pieces lined up in rows. Having once participated in an archaeological expedition myself, I wouldn’t dare to sniff at such tiny finds; even the minuscule is what painstaking sifting through quadrant after quadrant of dirt is all about, and what can make an archaeologist weep with joy.

In another case, again at kids’ eye level, are tiny gold ingots and gold flakes whose glitter evokes in kids and adults alike those subtle stirrings about acquisitions and wealth.

As the visitor turns a final corner, there is a swift intake of the breath before a perfect replica of a skeletal form, lying in the sand, along with his grave goods of food, scarab jewelry, amphora, bowls, and offerings. Bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron, the Hittite, says Genesis 49:29. The subject here is death and burial, a subject which Western civilization has pushed out of sight, as if modern medicine and a youth culture could “disappear” death. 

For the ancients of Beth Shemesh, excavated in 1929, death was not an absence but a presence, and the terracotta sarcophagus lids, circa 1175 B.C., with their beautiful, outsized faces, modeled in the natural style or the exaggerated “grotesque” style, are utterly compelling.

Communal tombs were also uncovered, containing several generations of a family line, and among the findings displayed here -- in ivory, alabaster, and bronze -- are toggle pins, mirrors, and cosmetic spoons. One culminates with the head of a duck and another with the trailing curly locks of a swimming girl. There are even tweezers so much like our drugstore tweezers today that the alikeness of human impulses and solutions erases the 2,800 years between then and now.

And finally, there is the small fragment of an 8^th century B.C. Judean clay figurine from Beth Shean in which a mother wearing a necklace and bearing a tambourine, holds a clinging naked infant in her left arm. Such tender embraces are rarely represented in ancient art, yet here she is, from time immemorial, both Everywoman with her infant and the Madonna and Child.

Whenever we “meet the people” through their artifacts in a museum, we are, after all, being given another chance another way of meeting ourselves....