Academic literature on the topic 'Weapons, Ancient – Israel – Lachish'

Wheel-thrown pottery was widely produced in ancient Palestine during the Middle Bronze Age. However, evidence from two sites in Jordan has led to recent suggestions that this technique went out of use throughout the region during the Late Bronze Age. Investigation by xeroradiography of the pottery-forming techniques used in a Late Bronze Age potter's workshop at Lachish, Israel, suggests that the situation may be more complex and that further research is needed before generalized conclusions can be drawn.

AbstractThis study examines the confrontation between the priest Amaziah and the prophet Amos in Amos vii 10-17 against the background of selected ancient Near Eastern texts that deal with royal attitudes toward prophecy. Texts from Mari, Nineveh, and Lachish all provide evidence for the role of royal officials, including priests, in reporting prophecy to the king in the ancient world. In light of this evidence, Amaziah's actions in this narrative appear to be motivated by state interests more than specifically cultic interests, as suggested in the text by his appeal to the royal sponsorship of the Bethel shrine (v. 13). Read in this way, the narrative points to the complexity of the relationship among priests, prophets, and kings in ancient Israel.

The research in the Egyptian - Libyan relation dates back to ancient history. The change of leaders and the political system had affected these relations ,so they had changed from being so close to unly passing through tension and even conflict There is long borders between the two countries more than a thousand kilo-which made some kind of social relations ship between the people of the two countries . the relation between the two states had grew stronger ,after their in dependence especially when Libya tried to follow the steps of Egypt during Nasir era, but their relations deteriorated after Egypt's peace treaty with Israel , but it had flourished buck in the nineties. In spite of the improvement in the relation. between the two part after 2003.on the economic level , it had passed through tensions because of the mutual acquisitions of the two authorities,the Egyptian and the Libyan because of Libyan decision to abandon weapons of mass distraction, and the Libyan close relations with the muslim brother hood in Egypt,the main opposition forcei-Egypt at that time.

During times of disorder the mainstream media tends towards propaganda by homogenising its representation of the ‘other’. This reduces rich histories, diverse cultures and a myriad of languages and religious beliefs down to sweeping statements, broad generalizations and inaccurate assumptions. This paper seeks to explore the representation in the media of the rich array of minority groups that make up the people of Iraq, the epicentre of today’s greatest disorder. In the interest of establishing a liberal, democratic and culturally diverse Iraq, this paper argues that the media must re-order its representation of the many peoples that make up Iraq. Historically, Iraq or Mesopotamia has been ruled by a vast array of kingdoms and empires. From the ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians and Seleucids through to the spread of Islam under the rule of the Caliphates and later the Ottomans, this part of the world has seen more than its share of war, bloodshed and domination. However, history also tells us that despite the disorder, this area has mostly celebrated diversity since the ancient cities of Ur and Nineveh. Later, Ottoman sultans generally believed that a strong, civilized state was a cosmopolitan one (Mostyn and Hourani 192). After the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, however, much of the Middle East plummeted into an unparalleled level of disorder. A territorial crisis ensued and the fighting between a surfeit of ethnic and religious groups went unchecked. Britain and France moved into much of what are now Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Israel with an emphasis on curtailing chaos by imposing order. Nation-states were hastily designed (Jordan was famously drawn by Winston Churchill in the back of a taxi), ancient peoples were divided and new identities were born. In 1920 the many different peoples of the three previously autonomous regions, or vilayets, of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul became Iraqis (Cordesman and Hashim 60, 71). In essence, Iraq is a created or ‘imagined community’ (Anderson) that was not even imagined by the people of the region. This is, of course, common throughout the Middle East and forms the basic premise of Said’s work on Orientalism (Said) – that the Middle East does not exist other than as a powerful European ideological construct designed to help the West better categorize the ‘otherness’ of all things Eastern. Today, Iraqi society is considered “the most spiritually diverse in the Middle East” (Braude 65) and while much Western scholarly and media attention has been given to the plight of the Kurds (Robinson 20) and the rebellion of the Shi’ites (who form the majority within formerly Sunni controlled Iraq) (Keeble 12), little attention has been paid to other Iraqis. In fact, Iraq is home to “numerous racial and religious minorities…(including) Turkomans, Persians, Assyrians, Armenians, Chaldeans, Jews, Yazidihs, Sabeans, and others” (Batatu, as cited in Cordesman and Hashim 71). To put things in perspective, Hourani identified approximately 40 distinct minority groups that dwell within the Arab World (Hourani 1-2). Each of these groups has their own language, their own culture, their own religion, food, history, dress and customs. However, it seems that since the 11th September 2001 – and the political and militaristic disorder that has ensued – the Western mainstream Media have portrayed events involving the Middle East and its people by fusing Orientalism and propaganda in order to further homogenize these ‘others’. The current reporting of the war in Iraq (including the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction, the invasion of Iraq, the toppling and later capture of Saddam Hussein and the ongoing war against insurgents / terrorists / car and suicide bombers / kidnappings and beheadings) has rarely made reference to the plight of Iraq’s minorities. This trend therefore serves to reduce and homogenize these groups into an all-encompassing Middle Eastern ‘other’. Their rich array of religions, cultures, languages etc become one. We know them only through disorder and opposition: non-white, non-western, non-Christian, non-civilized. The lack of minority representation in the mainstream media and its role in constructing minority identity has been discussed, to varying degrees, by a number of academics with a variety of approaches and results. This has included research into the people of the Acquitaine region of France (Scrivan and Roberts), the Flemish in Belgium (Van den Bulck), African Americans in the US (Goshorn and Gandy) and the Oka Indians in Canada (Grenier) to name a few. What appears to be common amongst this research is the notion that the lack of representation and the homogenization of the ‘other’ negatively influence these minority groups. By investigating the representation of the Sami people of northern Finland in the Finnish press, Pietikainen and Hujanen interpret the relationship between Sami identity and the way that it is played out in Finnish news discourse. Essentially, they argue, “news representations…contribute to the construction of identities of the people and region in question” (ibid 252). While the above research does suggest that the lack of representation of minority groups in the mainstream media have serious implications for the identities of these peoples, it does not seem to address the extent to which this is effected by times of conflict, war or disorder. Nor does it address the compound result of a lack of representation in both the media of one’s homeland and the global media. More scholarly attention is therefore needed in order to understand the relationship between a lack of representation of minority groups in the media (both domestic and international), how this constructs minority identity and to what degree this shifts during times of disorder. Here, the minority groups of Iraq serve as a near perfect case study. Beyond this, there is also a need for a re-ordering of what is considered newsworthy during times of disorder. Here Arnot (as cited in Coole 847), in discussing the media representation of asylum seekers claims that journalists often fail in reporting the complexity of such situations and need to seek the truth and report on what is real. Unfortunately, journalists often omit important pieces of information “that will shock, sadden and compel readers to sympathise with victims of such atrocities in the world…” (Coole 847). In this way, an accurate representation of the many different peoples of Iraq in the mainstream media would not only serve to positively construct minority identity but may also lead to a better understanding of the conflict, and the peoples trapped within it. While the best possible scenario would obviously be the reconstruction of Iraq’s infrastructure, followed by a peaceful withdrawal from Iraq and the development of a multifarious yet harmonious Middle East, this paper has addressed the issues surrounding the mainstream media’s lack of representation of Iraq’s minorities during this time of disorder. Here the media have homogenized the many peoples of Iraq and effectively unified them under the ‘imagined’ banner of Middle Eastern ‘other’. This opens up new areas of concern regarding the relationship between the media and disorder and the consequences this has for the identity of Iraq’s minority groups. Furthermore, this paper calls for a re-ordering of what is considered newsworthy during times of disorder in an attempt to encourage a more accurate representation, construction and understanding of the many different peoples involved. By telling a more complex story, the media can play a positive role in the development of a l iberal, democratic and culturally diverse Iraq. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Revised ed. London: Verso, 1991. Braude, Joseph. The New Iraq: A Thought-Provoking Analysis of the Rebuilding of a Nation. Sydney: HarperCollins, 2003. Coole, Carolynne. “A Warm Welcome? Scottish and UK Media Reporting of an Asylum-Seeker Murder.” Media, Culture & Society 24 (2002): 839-52. Cordesman, Anthony H., and Ahmed S. Hashim. Iraq: Sanctions and Beyond. Colorado: Westview Press, 1997. Goshorn, Kent, and Oscar H. Jr. Gandy. “Race, Risk and Responsibility: Editorial Constraint in the Framing of Inequality.” Journal of Communication 45.2 (1995): 133-51. Grenier, Marc. “Native Indians in the English-Canadian Press: The Case of the ‘Oka Crisis’.” Media, Culture & Society 16 (1994): 313-36. Hourani, A. H. Minorities in the Arab World. London: Oxford University Press, 1947. Keeble, Richard. Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare. Bedfordshire: University of Luton Press, 1997. Mostyn, Trevor, and Albert Hourani. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Middle East and North Africa. Eds. Trevor Mostyn and Albert Hourani. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pietikainen, Sari, and Jaana Hujanen. “At the Crossroads of Ethnicity, Place and Identity: Representations of Northern People and Regions in Finnish News Discourse.” Media, Culture & Society 25 (2003): 251-68. Robinson, Piers. The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention. London: Routledge, 2002. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1978. Scrivan, Michael, and Emily Roberts. “Local Specificity and Regional Unity under Siege: Territorial Identity and the Television News of Aquitaine.” Media, Culture & Society 23 (2001): 587-605. Van den Bulck, Hilde. “Public Service Television and International Identity as a Project of Modernity: The Example of Flemish Television.” Media, Culture & Society 23 (2001): 53-69. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Isakhan, Ben. "Re-ordering Iraq: Minorities and the Media in Times of Disorder." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/11-isakhan.php>. APA Style Isakhan, B. (Jan. 2005) "Re-ordering Iraq: Minorities and the Media in Times of Disorder," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/11-isakhan.php>.

The 21 inscribed ceramic sherds (or ostraca) known as the "Lachish Letters", which were discovered during the British Mandate Period excavations of Tell ed-Duweir (Lachish), underwent eighty years of scholarship that improved our understanding of at least some of these inscriptions. The archive is terse and fragmentary, and the least well-preserved and faded ostraca from this collection have been seriously overlooked, ironically when the "Lachish Letters" have more or less been regarded as a homogenous group of documents written during the final decades of the Judahite kingdom. Some of the ostraca were discovered in different stratigraphic contexts and pertaining to different settings, if not timeframes. The principal aim of this study is to produce an updated edition of these ostraca by objectively and systematically reassessing and understanding these artefacts, the inscriptions they bear, and their respective stratigraphic layers and archaeological contexts. This is carried out by integrating past studies and modern-day developments on the ostraca (and the site itself) from different perspectives: archaeology, palaeography, philology, the Hebrew Bible, and Classical Hebrew studies. This interdisciplinary approach enables a revision of outstanding controversial issues and a dismissal of outdated proposals on the readings, interpretation, and import of these ostraca in their contemporary world. Despite the illegibility of some inscriptions, this study pays attention to all 21 ostraca via physical examination under the lens, to confirm or deny any dubious readings as far as the naked eye can tell us. A crucial criterion is the integration of photographic data and written documentation gathered from unpublished and archived material of the Mandate Period that were accessible to the author at the time of writing. The study concludes that this surviving group of ostraca is far from homogeneous, and there still exist lacunae in their historico-archaeological contexts and interpretations. Our understanding of the source and function of the ostraca (especially the few legible messages and lists of names) remains riddled with controversies, which derive from the fragmentary nature of the corpus and the limitations in the documentation and preservation of these artefacts.

Due to the nature of war, persons are killed with various types of weapons. Throughout the history of humanity, weapons were used in this regard and these weapons left injuries on the victims that are distinguishable. The type of force conveyed by the ancient weapons effected injuries that enable modern-day bioarchaeologists to extrapolate which weapons caused which injuries. The Assyrians depicted their wars and battles on reliefs. An analysis of these depictions, with an extrapolation of the lesions expected in skeletal remains, could contribute to better understanding of the strategies of war in ancient times. This dissertation will discuss how the evaluation of human remains in comparison to Assyrian reliefs may contribute to the chronological knowledge of war and warfare in the Iron Age Ancient Near East – especially at Lachish. A discourse of the approaches available to researchers regarding access to data in the forensic bioarchaeological field will be presented.
Biblical and Ancient Studies
M.A. (Biblical Archaeology)

The archive as a site of ‘knowledge retrieval’* has long been the exemplary domain of astute historical inquiry. Following the recent ‘historic turn’* to address the politics of knowledge in the broader human and historical sciences, rather than its function as a site of ‘knowledge retrieval’*, I will reflect on the function of the archive as a site of ‘knowledge production’* in the writing of the histories of ancient Israel. Aligned within the conversations among historians and archivists and the new archival turn, the research will endeavour to offer a contribution to the debate on the topic of historical methodology of ancient Israel in the disciplines of Biblical Archaeology and History of ancient Israel. I will argue that an examination into the function of the archive as historical a priori in a study of the discourses on the Lachish reliefs in the disciplines discloses the practical and theoretical tenets that converge to construct knowledge on the Lachish reliefs and hence also knowledge on ancient Israel. The research will contend that a bounded formation of knowledge on the Lachish reliefs has evolved in the disciplines since the nineteenth century that is along the British imperial archival grain. * Terminology from Stoler, A L 2002. Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form, in Hamilton C, Harris, V, Taylor, J, Pickover, M, Reid, G & Saleh, R (eds) 2002. Refiguring the Archive. Cape Town: David Philip, 83-102.
Biblical and Ancient Studies
MA (Biblical Archaeology)
1 online resource (xii, 194 leaves) ; illustrations (some color), maps