Recent Excavations in Israel: A View to the West; Reports on Kabri, Nami, Miqne-Ekron, Dor, and Ashkelon.

Knapp, A. Bernard

This very timely volume contains most of the papers originally presented in a colloquium at the 1992 annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. The one-page preface by Gitin is no substitute for an editorial overview, which would have helped greatly to set these papers in the desired context of increased communication and exchange between scholars involved in the archaeology of the Levant and the Aegean. Nor does the concluding, very basic overview of trade by W. Dever really come to grips with any current theoretical thinking on trade, which it purports to do. Moreover, Dever's idiosyncratic and often opinionated views about Levantine archaeology are becoming wearisome: it is inappropriate in the extreme to call Martin Bernal a "charlatan" (p. 118, n. 26), however little one may regard the most recent, error-prone volume of Black Athena (vol. 2: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1991]).

What this volume lacks in theoretical perspective, however, it makes up for marvelously in its presentation of important and recently excavated material. From my own perspective, none is more significant than the paper by W. Niemeier on the "Aegean" (his term) fresco paintings from the late Middle Bronze Age "palace" at Tel Kabri in Israel. Here we see (black-and-white) plates of this structure's painted plaster floors with their floral, avian, maritime, and architectural subjects. Likewise, M. Artzy's paper on Tel Nami, a key coastal site and trading center of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, is very welcome and presents to a wide audience some of the rich material excavated at this site over the past decade: among the artifacts, none is more striking than the bronze items (bowls, lamps, sceptres, incense burners), some of which have stylistic counterparts in the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Cyprus.

Excavations at Tel Miqne (ancient Ekron) continue to reveal impressive amounts of Late Helladic (Mycenaean) IIIC:1b material from early Iron Age levels, as well as the Philistine pottery that followed it. Trude Dothan tells us this and we are further told that the final phase of the local Late Bronze culture produced "abundant examples of imported Cypriote and Mycenaean fragments as well as New kingdom objects" (p. 42), but unfortunately no illustrations are offered. In referring to the Aegeanizing, palatial associations of a hearth found in a monumental structure of the twelfth century B.C., Dothan makes reference to Cypriot palaces: it would be useful to know which buildings on Cyprus she regards as palaces, since it is widely accepted that Cyprus lacks palatial structures of any sort. There can be no doubt, however, that Miqne/Ekron is a site that represents clearly and with a great diversity of material evidence the extent of Aegean and Cypriot contacts with the Levant. We owe our thanks to Dothan for always being so prompt and omnipresent in the publication and presentation of this material. Likewise, editor Gitin presents an equally informative and richly illustrated discussion of the later Iron Age levels at Miqne, in particular those of the seventh century B.C. As Dever points out, Gitin presents the only truly "explanatory" model in this volume by proposing that the economic force behind Ekron's trade in olive oil - as witnessed by the striking remains of industrial installations with olive presses, crushing basins, stone weights, and so on - was the spread of the Neo-Assyrian state and the demand thereby created for goods and services throughout much of the Levant.

Subsequent papers by E. Stern on Iron Age Tel Dor, with its rich assemblage of Cypriot and Greek pottery of the eleventh fifth centuries B.C., and by B. Johnson and L. Stager on the export of wine from Ashkelon during the Byzantine era, continue and expand chronologically the theme of "a view to the west." In the end, one can only agree with Dever (p. 117) that there is a real dearth of viable, current, regional surveys of production and trade in the eastern Mediterranean, a gap that the present volume helps to fill only very partially, and empirically.

All of the rich new material from Tell ed-Dab a and Tel Kabri (some of the latter presented in this volume), viewed in context with the well-known finds from Alalakh, demands a thorough reassessment of east-west relations in the Middle-Late Bronze Ages of the eastern Mediterranean. Even if we regard the frescoes from Tell ed-Dab a, for instance, to be Minoan-inspired, the costumes, bull's head, and many other features make it most unlikely that these images were painted by Minoan artists. And yet this is the definitive trajectory of interpretation that has resulted. (See, for example, Ora Negbi, "The Libyan Landscape from Thera: A Review of Aegean Enterprises Overseas in the Late Minoan IA Period," Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 7 [1994]: 73-122, with critical responses by S. W. Manning et al. and by Susan Sherratt, in the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 7 [1994]: 219-35 and 237-40, respectively; see also the papers by M. Bietak, L. Morgan, G. Philip, J. M. Weinstein, and E. H. Cline, in Egypt, The Aegean and the Levant, ed. W. V. Davies and L. Schofield [London: British Museum Press, 1995].) I would counter that these paintings have nothing to do with Minoan artists, but rather form part of an eastern Mediterranean koine, set in the context of a prestige-goods exchange system wherein several polities - or individuals within those polities - emulated high status goods, costumes, and other powerful individuals. This was a world in which distance and knowledge of the "exotic" cultures of western Asia provided economic status and political power to certain individuals or groups on Cyprus or within the Aegean world. The objects and images, such as those represented on Minoan, Cycladic, Levantine, and Egyptian frescoes, were entangled in long-distance trade and played a key role in the construction and elaboration of social strategies, and of personal, local, and state-level ideologies.

We have only begun to understand and sort out the implications of these newly recovered frescoes and floor-paintings for the understanding of Late Bronze societies in the eastern Mediterranean. Consequently we need to encourage and support the publication of volumes such as the one under review, especially considering its reasonable price and high quality of production. This volume is required reading for anybody interested in eastern Mediterranean interaction and trade during the Bronze-Iron Ages.

A. BERNARD KNAPP UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW