archaeology

By JODI WILGOREN
Published: October 6, 2005

Tom Vail, who has been leading rafting trips down the Colorado River here for 23 years, corralled his charges under a rocky outcrop at Carbon Creek and pointed out the remarkable 90-degree folds in the cliff overhead.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Two rafting trips through the Grand Canyon reached different destinations in the debate over creationism and evolution. One group, above, saw signs of eons of erosion.

Geologists date this sandstone to 550 million years ago and explain the folding as a result of pressure from shifting faults underneath. But to Mr. Vail, the folds suggest the Grand Canyon was carved 4,500 years ago by the great global flood described in Genesis as God’s punishment for humanity’s sin. (more…)

by 1984 by David Lorton ©

Part I

In Ages in Chaos,[1] the first volume of the “Ages in Chaos” series, Immanuel Velikovsky develops in essence two propositions: (a) that the Exodus of the Hebrews is to be dated to the end of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, and (b) that “the beginning of the . . . Eighteenth Dynasty . . . coincided with the beginning of the line of Kings in Judea” (p. 103); the latter proposition necessitates the lowering of the dates of the Eighteenth Dynasty by about 600 years. Within this chronological framework, queen Hatshepsut of Egypt and king Solomon of Israel would have been contemporaneous (p. 104), and this leads Velikovsky, in Chapter III of his book, to make a case for identifying the famous expedition to the land of Punt in the reign of Hatshepsut with the renowned visit of the queen of Sheba to the court of king Solomon. He does this by comparing the information in the Punt reliefs of Deir el Bahari to the biblical account in I Kings and II Chronicles, to which he adds some information in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities and the Ethiopic Kebra Negast. It is the arguments of this chapter that will be the focus of this paper, though I shall take into account some arguments and evidence adduced by Velikovsky and others since the publication of Ages in Chaos.

I should rightly begin by making it clear that I am convinced that the Punt expedition cannot be equated with the queen of Sheba’s visit to Jerusalem. While it might suffice to proceed immediately to a response to Velikovsky’s thesis in this regard, I prefer to take a different tack and respond to the main arguments and pieces of evidence cited by Velikovsky in his chapter. I do this because scholars of the ancient Near East have been remarkably silent regarding Ages in Chaos in the nearly five decades since its appearance,[2] and I think that lay readers would be interested to learn how a student of the ancient Near East reacts as he reads through Velikovsky’s text. In the remarks that follow, I shall of course not burden the reader with a reply to every sentence of Velikovksy’s; nor shall I make a summary of Velikovsky’s arguments, because this paper is written primarily for readers who are familiar with his work. I shall, however, even at the expense of adding to the length of this paper, refer to Velikovsky’s arguments for the most part by citing his relevant passages in full; I do this to escape the frequent complain on the part of Velikovksy’s supporters that his critics misrepresent or misquote him. To facilitate cross references, the individual arguments that follow are numbered. (more…)

by 1982 by David Lorton ©

In 1982, John Baines published an eloquent call for the study of the Story of Sinuhe as a work of literature in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 68. By coincidence, in that same year, Robert Parent published L’Affaire Sinouhé, a substantial monograph on the legal aspects of the story. Parent kindly sent me a copy of his book, and I read it with great pleasure, for it is an excellent, painstaking study.

As I read Parent’s work, it seemed to me that certain passages he signaled for their legal implications also served as keys to understanding the story as a work of literature. Certain of them show his inner conflict as he tried to deal with his cowardice in fleeing Egypt. Sinuhe’s career in Asia saw him overcome this cowardice, and a comparison of the account of his duel with he “strong man of Retjenu” toward the end of the story with the content of his paean of Sesostris I near the beginning of the tale shows that ultimately, he emulated Sesostris’ bravery to the extent possible in this different cultural context. Finally, the story ends on a note that we today might view as ironic, though it was perhaps not seen as such in ancient times: stress is placed on the fact that Sinuhe’s flight was prompted by loyalty, not disloyalty, to Sesostris.

I wrote up my thoughts in a lengthy letter that I send to Robert Parent. It was my intention to revise it for publication, but a colleague told me he was writing an article of his own in response to Parent’s book, so I decided to wait until it appeared in print so that I could take it into account. At least three years passed before that happened, and in the meanwhile, I went on to do other things entirely, and I never returned to my analysis of the Story of Sinuhe. In a sense, this is perhaps just as well. Egyptology is a small field; our journals have small circulations, and they are available only in a few libraries with specialized research collections. Interest in ancient Egypt, however, is widespread, and many people have read the Story of Sinuhe, if not in the original Egyptian, at least in translation. The ability to publish what I wrote on the World Wide Web enables me to offer it at this time to a wider audience than it would have enjoyed had I published it in a journal. (more…)

Technical Terms in Ancient Egyptian

by 1999 by David Lorton ©

Introductory Note

What follows is not really a single essay, but rather extracts from two sources. Part I is taken from a book review of A. G. McDowell, Jurisdiction in the Workmen’s Community of Deir el-Medina, Egyptologische Uitgaven 5 (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1990) published in Discussions in Egyptology 23 (1992): 99–109. I wish to thank Alessandra Nibbi, the editor of the journal, for granting me permission to re-"print" (I don’t know what other term to use) the discussion here. Part II is from a manuscript in progress whose working title is Aspects of Amarna Belief.

My review of McDowell’s book was a positive one. I was surprised, however, by the first two sentences of the first chapter, which are quoted at the outset of Part I below. The first flatly denies the existence of technical terms in legal texts, and the second states why. My initial reaction to these statements was one of surprise, and this surprise was all the greater when I reached the end of the chapter and realized that the presence or absence of these two sentences made no apparent difference to its content; the stance taken seemed gratuitous. I had always thought that Egyptian legal (and other) texts contained technical terms, but in the face of this denial, it seemed to me that it would be in place to think the matter through. There might well be fields of endeavor in which technical terminology and how to recognize it have been discussed, but I was pressed for time (I had to meet a deadline for submission of the review), and since this problem had not been discussed in Egyptology, to the best of my knowledge, I decided to look up the word "technical" in the dictionary. If nothing else, I could learn from it what a competent speaker of the English language ought to mean when using that word (this view of dictionary definitions was kindly supplied to me by a professor of philosophy). Looking at the definition, I felt it was adequate to permit me to address the question of what a technical term is as well as that of how to identify certain terms as technical terms in light of the nature of ancient Egyptian expression and the heuristic difficulties we face in dealing with the Egyptian language. (more…)

Written by DR. Haris Sukendar
Director of Research Centre for Archaeology

Some heritages that can be grouped into the age of Megalithic tradition are "teras berundak" (platform with stairs), "batur punden" "lumping batu" "batu berlubang" (stone with hole), "batu bergores" (stone with scratch) "menhir arca batu" (stone statue), sarcophagus, etc. The word Megalithic comes from mega, which means "big" , and lithos, which means "stone" . In other words, Megalithic can be defined as a tradition whereby a society has built many tools made of big stone. Those tools were used for their daily life activities.

The origin of Megalithic tradition has made some controversial debate with some different opinions. There are still some discussions on the existence of cultural diffusion. Some say that the Megalithic tradition was started in Egypt and spread to eastern areas as their society looked for their needs such as pearls, gold, etc. This opinion has been brought by McMillan Brown. This idea was not as popular as the opinion of Von Heine Geldern, the expert from Germany who said that those traditions came from Asia, especially South China, and continued onto southern and eastern areas. This theory has been written in his paper entitled "Prehistoric Research in the Netherlands Indie" ( 1945). And, it has received a positive response from other experts like Van Heekern, R.P. Soejono, Teguh Asmar, etc. Furthermore, he said that the spreading or the migration of people from Megalithic culture happened in the Neolithic age which was approximately from 2500 BC. This migration of Austronesians also brought Megalithic culture, which included the expertise to make the stone tools. At a later time, this culture produced "beliung" (stone pickaxe), "belincung gelang batu" (stone bracelet), etc.

At a later time, precisely in the Bronze-iron age, the spread of these states brought also Metal tools (bronze) which were created with the idea of making the big stone tools. Some forms of Megalithic culture in this age were the "waruga" sarcophaguses that functioned as a grave on Bali island. They contained a human skeleton inside, hence functioning as a grave. There were also items like "tajak", "kapak" (axes), "gelang" (bracelet), "tombak" (spear), and bronze sticks. It showed this culture had been influenced by Dongson culture. (more…)

By Bill Knell

In 1998 I unleashed a firestorm on the world wide web by meticulously placing an article written about the Grand Canyon in 1909 on my website. It generated more email on the subject then anyone else I had ever chosen to comment on or cover. That’s because the Phoenix Gazette article revealed the existence of a grand secret in the nation’s most famous canyon.

The best way to describe the situation is to allow it to describe itself. Here is the unabridged article just as it appeared in the Phoenix Gazette on April 5, 1909:

The latest news of the progress of the explorations or what is now regarded by scientists as not only the oldest archaeological discovery in the United States, but one of the most valuable in the world, which was mentioned some time ago in the Gazette (see photo at left), was brought to the city yesterday by G.E. Kinkaid, the explorer who found the great underground citadel of the Grand Canyon during a trip from Green River, Wyoming, down the Colorado, in a wooden boat, to Yuma, several months ago. (more…)