Story of Philistines Could Be Reshaped by Ancient Cemetery
Статья для Сергея
After more than 30 years of excavating the remains of a Philistine city, a team of archaeologists says it believes it has found a cemetery belonging to the ancient people on the outskirts of Ashkelon in Israel.
The team has unearthed skeletons and artifacts that it suspects had rested for more than 3,000 years in the cemetery, potentially offering clues to the Philistines’ lifestyle and perhaps providing some answers to the mysteries of where the Philistines came from. Much has remained unknown about their origins.
“When we found this cemetery right next to a Philistine city, we knew we had it,” said Daniel Master, an archaeologist from Wheaton College in Illinois. “We have the first Philistine cemetery that’s ever been discovered.”
Dr. Master is a co-director of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, which has excavated the site since 1985. Ashkelon, which archaeologists think the Philistines entered around 1150 B.C., is one of the five Philistine capitals along with Ashdod, Ekron, Gath and Gaza.
The cities and their people are mentioned in the ancient texts of the Babylonians, Egyptians and Assyrians. In the Hebrew Bible, they were the nemeses of the Israelites and sent Goliath to fight David. Many tales tell of the great battles the Philistines fought and lost until their utter destruction at the hands of King Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian army in 604 B.C.
“The victors write history,” Dr. Master said. “We found these Philistines, and finally we get to hear their story told by them rather than by their enemies.”
By using radiocarbon dating and analyzing the pottery found in the graves, the researchers dated the cemetery to between the 10th century B.C. and ninth century B.C. The period, they said, supports the prevailing theory that the Philistines landed in ancient Israel after crossing the Aegean Sea around the 12th century B.C.
But the team still has to perform DNA, radiocarbon and genetic testing on the bone samples to prove that the remains belong to the western migrants. Archeologists call them members of the Sea People, who were described as attackers in ancient Egyptian texts.
During the excavation, the team uncovered more than 200 men, women and children in the cemetery. Absent were newborns, which led the researchers to think the Philistines might have buried babies who died at birth either in their homes or elsewhere.
For Sherry C. Fox, a bioarchaeologist at Arizona State University and member of the team, what set this cemetery apart from other ancient graveyards was the assortment of burial practices found.
“There’s so much variation in how they are positioned,” she said, “between whether they are cremated or buried; whether they are within a tomb, or a chamber, or a cist or a pit grave; whether they are placed face down or face up.”
Dr. Fox also said that unlike some of their neighbors and predecessors, such as the Canaanites, the Philistines did not practice secondary burial, which is the moving of skeletons to make room for another body in the tomb or grave. The bodies appeared to have been left alone after being laid to rest.
Another distinct aspect of the Philistine graveyard, the researchers say, is the colorful pottery found throughout the sites and chambers. Many of the skeletons were found with small jugs of perfume placed right under the neck or right next to the nostril, as if to give the deceased something to smell for eternity, the researchers said. The jugs may have also been placed in the tombs to fight the reeking smell of decomposition.
Also found in many of the chambers were two large jugs, which the researchers think may have held wine or olive oil, either to be offered or used to prepare the corpse for burial.
“While so much is known about the material culture of the Philistines, including their diet, tools, cult, weapons, pottery, and economic and commercial activities, up until now their burial practices have been a mystery,” Seymour Gitin, the emeritus Dorot director and professor of archaeology at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, said in an email.
“Their analysis, especially of the bones in the Ashkelon cemetery, represents a potential revolution, which should provide critical answers to the origin of the Philistines, a major controversy for decades,” Dr. Gitin, who was not involved in the excavation, said.
Статья для Хельги
Are Hobbits Real?
A reader asks: Scientists seem to be calling members of a 3-foot-tall species whose fossils were recently found in Indonesia “hobbits” conversationally. When did this term come into existence? Before or after Tolkien? And how might the “real” hobbits have been similar to or different from the ones Tolkien created?
Carl Zimmer, who writes the Matter column for The Times’s Science section, considers the question.
The term came into scientific parlance very much after Tolkien.
In 2003, the archaeologist Michael Morwood and his colleagues discovered a skull and other bones of an ancient human relative — otherwise known as a hominin — in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. The Flores hominins were very small, standing about 3 feet tall, and had very small brains. And yet Dr. Morwood and his colleagues also found stone tools alongside the fossils, suggesting that they still had substantial mental firepower.
Making the discovery even more exciting was their estimate of the age of the fossils — as recent as 18,000 years ago. In 2010, Dr. Morwood and his colleagues re-examined the sediment layers in the cave and redated the fossils to somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago. That makes the fossils older, but not that much older, relatively speaking. Our own species had already emerged about 200,000 years ago.
The scientists decided the Flores fossils were so different from anything else ever found that the hominin deserved a new name. They dubbed it Homo floresiensis.
By 2004, Dr. Morwood and his colleagues were ready to publish a scientific paper with all the details of their research. They also wanted to publicize the results, but they knew very well that Homo floresiensis is a mouthful. Dr. Morwood proposed to his colleagues that they nickname the hominins of Flores hobbits, in honor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 novel about the little people of Middle Earth.
\The hobbits of Flores and the hobbits of Middle Earth had only a few things in common. Tolkien wrote that his hobbits were related to men, while Homo floresiensis probably shared a common ancestor with us that lived about 1.8 million years ago. And they were both short. Beyond that, the two hobbits part ways.
Our own species invented farming about 12,000 years ago. The hobbits of Flores show no signs of agriculture. The fossil record indicates that their ancestors arrived with stone tools on Flores about a million years ago. By 700,000 years ago, a recent study found, their ancestors had shrunk to hobbit size. Judging from charcoal and cracked bones researchers have found, it looks as if Homo floresiensis used stone tools to hunt dwarf elephants, and then cooked their meat over fires in caves.
The hobbits of Flores probably weren’t capable of language, and probably couldn’t draw pictures. For almost a million years, they lived an unchanging life, making no improvements on the stone tools on which their lives depended. That evolutionary strategy allowed them to thrive on Flores — at least until we showed up. The youngest bones of Homo floresiensis date back to about the time when our own species arrived in Southeast Asia and Australia. It’s possible that we drove them extinct, perhaps by outbattling them for food and shelter.
18COMMENTS
“Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today,” Tolkien wrote. It is fun to imagine a few Homo floresiensis still surviving today in the remote jungles of an Indonesian island. Sadly, that’s probably just as fantastic as anything in Tolkien’s novels.
Статья для Андрея