Attending RAI 51
Observations on the 51e Rencontre Assyriologique
Internationale in Chicago, July 17-23, 2005
August 5, 2005 Francis Deblauwe IW&A Documents, 4
Updated August 20 and 24, and September 16, 2005
[These
observations,
musings and thoughts are written down in "blog" style, i.e., the oldest
entry is at the bottom and the most recent one is at the top]
- Update 3, Tuesday September 16
Mathieu Ossendrijver of the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg in
Germany also sent me a photo taken at the Rencontre. Dank je wel,
Mathieu!

I remember this photo well. It was taken in front of Ida Noyes
Hall after the Iraq Workshop on the final day. These were some of
the Dutch-speaking participants to the Rencontre, from left to right:
myself, Jan Tavernier, An De Vos (the piano player! see the Friday July 22, 1:00 am posting), Ineke De
Lange and Geert de Breucker.
- Update 2, Wednesday August 24
Benedetta Bellucci of the Università di Pavia in Italy was so
kind to send me some photos taken at the Rencontre. I post them
here with her captions:

"Wednesday, July 20. Seth Richardson's party.
From left: Ahmad Serrieh, Emmanuelle Salgues, Seth Richardson,
Alessandra Mezzasalma.
Behind: Lorenzo Verderame, Maria Gabriella Micale, Davide Nadali, Marta
Rivaroli, Agnes Garcia Ventura.
Benedetta Bellucci, Erica Couto, Claus Ambos"

"Thursday, July 21. The cruise.
From left: Marco Ramazzotti, Agnes Garcia Ventura, Benedetta Bellucci,
Alessandra Mezzasalma, Alessandro di Ludovico, Erica Couto, Lorenzo
Verderame, Carlo Lippolis"

"The cruise.
From left: Maria Gabriella Micale, Davide Nadali, Marta Rivaroli, Irene
Winter"

"From left: Carlo Lippolis, Alessandra Mezzasalma, Simona Bracci,
Benedetta Bellucci, Marco Ramazzotti, Alessandro di Ludovico"

"From left: Alessandra Mezzasalma, Marta Rivaroli, Anna Maria Gloria
Capomacchia"

"Still the cruise.
From left: Maria Yakubovich, Alessandra Mezzasalma, Marta Rivaroli,
Carlo Lippolis"
- Update, Saturday August 20
Andrew Lawler contributed 2 more brief articles to the August 5 issue
of Science
(Vol 309, Issue 5736, 869), this time focusing on papers presented at
the Chicago RAI. As they too are pay only I will review them in
detail. In the 1st, "Rencontre
Assyriologique Internationale Meeting: Alas, Babylon: Tracing the Last
King's Desert Exile," he discusses the 2 papers reporting on the
joint Saudi-German excavations at Tayma (see my Tuesday July 19, 4:15 pm
posting). "Mid-6th century B.C.E. was a dark time for the empire
of Babylonia. Persians and Medes were threatening in the east, and the
king mysteriously abandoned his famed capital of Babylon for a remote
oasis in the western Arabian desert. Contemporary texts portray King
Nabonidus as mentally unstable and complain that he forsook the prime
Babylonian deity, virile Marduk, for the mystical cult of the moon god
Sin, often portrayed as an old man with a long beard. Those texts,
written by Nabonidus's clerical enemies, have been the only evidence of
his claimed exile. ... Academics familiar with the Middle East say that
the Tayma dig itself, in sparsely settled northwestern Saudi Arabia, is
a triumph of science over politics, given the difficulty of winning
permits from the Saudi government for excavations by foreign teams.
Three years ago, Saudi researchers working near Tayma found rock
inscriptions that mention an army of Nabonidus that battled local
Bedouin. Then in December, a joint Saudi-German team found a piece of
badly weathered stele, a stone slab inscribed with writing, which
closely resembles other slabs associated with Nabonidus's reign. The
slab originally would have stood for passersby to read, but the team's
fragment--60 ... cm wide, 50 cm high, and 11 cm thick--was later reused
in building a wall. Only about a dozen lines of the stele are legible,
but they indicate that Nabonidus made offerings to Babylonian
deities--including Marduk--in the form of carnelian, lapis lazuli, and
censers of gold, according to a translation by Assyriologist Hanspeter
Schaudig of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. ... The find is
part of a larger effort to understand the complex trade routes that
linked the ancient Middle East. Tayma lies at a critical juncture of
the frankincense trade flowing north from Yemen and other routes to the
Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia, and for millennia it offered travelers a
respite from the desert. At the time of Nabonidus, the oasis included a
city with a vast wall some 14 kilometers in circumference and a well 18
meters across, one of the largest on the notoriously dry Arabian
Peninsula. The team, led by Ricardo Eichmann of Berlin's German
Archaeological Institute and Said al-Said, a professor at King Fahd
University, has found 13 successive layers of occupation from the
mid-3rd millennium to the early centuries of the modern era, showing a
surprising continuity in urban desert life. Although Babylonian texts
mention that Nabonidus built a palace at the site, Eichmann says none
has yet been found, but the team will keep looking when it returns to
Saudi Arabia in November. Textual evidence found elsewhere indicates
that Nabonidus was ill when he left Babylon and recovered during his
decade in the desert. But German excavation director Arnulf Hausleiter
speculates that his real motives could have been economic: By asserting
control over an important trade city, Nabonidus may have been
attempting to bolster Babylon's flagging treasury. If so, the gambit
failed. The texts say that the king returned to Babylon in 542 B.C.E.
after a decade in exile, only to be overthrown by the Persian King
Cyrus the Great 3 years later."
Lawler's 2nd article was given—by
his editor, no doubt—the catchy but deceptive title "Rencontre
Assyriologique Internationale Meeting: Ur's Xena: A Warrior Princess
for Sumeria?" "One of the most spectacular archaeological
discoveries in history was Leonard Woolley's excavation of the royal
tombs of Ur in the late 1920s. The 16 graves included a 'death pit'
with sacrificed retainers and animals. Woolley believed the tombs were
those of kings and their consorts, including the famous Queen Puabi,
buried with a magnificent crown and other jewelry. But one grave, tomb
1054, left Woolley perplexed. In the shaft 4 meters above the stone
burial chamber was a cylinder seal inscribed with the word 'lugal,'
Sumerian for 'king' or 'ruler,' along with a name read as Meskalamdug
and traditionally translated as 'hero of the land.' In the stone
chamber itself were a host of weapons, including a dagger at the side
of the principal occupant. But there was one hitch: Woolley determined
that the remains were of a woman. Scholars had long held that ancient
Mesopotamian rulers, unlike their Egyptian neighbors, were always men.
'That seal cannot be hers,' Woolley concluded in a 1934 publication.
... Now Kathleen McCaffrey, a graduate student at the University of
California, Berkeley, says [see my Tuesday
July 19, 4:15 pm posting] that the most logical answer is the
simplest: The seal and weapons did indeed belong to the buried
skeleton, which may have been that of a female Sumerian ruler. That
claim has sparked fierce debate, however, especially because Woolley
disposed of the bones shortly after discovering them. Woolley himself
suggested that the seal and weapons were gifts from the woman's
husband. Another theory is that the true owner of the seal, a male, was
buried in a mud-brick shaft above the stone tomb. But McCaffrey notes
that the materials in that shaft are low quality and lack weapons, and
that no other royal tomb is constructed of mud brick. In fact, the
remains in the mud-brick shaft, identified by Woolley as male, were
wrapped in women's clothing with feminine jewelry. Unfortunately, those
bones also were discarded. The principal occupant of 1054 herself
reveals some curious gender anomalies, notes McCaffrey. Her skeleton
was found wearing a hair ribbon, two golden wreaths, and a gold dress
pin, all typical for high-status Sumerian women of the day. But she was
not adorned with the usual earrings or elaborate choker, and there were
no floral combs or cosmetic containers. And a gold headpiece and a
dagger and whetstone at her waist were typical for Sumerian men; a gold
headdress near the skeleton has a brim, a style that Woolley believed
was worn mostly by men. Also in the stone chamber were a bronze ax,
dagger, and hatchet--very atypical for a woman's tomb. Other
researchers attribute those weapons to the male attendants in the room,
but McCaffrey notes that the attendants lack rings, weapons on their
bodies, or any other sign of elite materials, suggesting that they were
servants. McCaffrey maintains that the root of the problem is
translation: Sumerian grammar does not include gender distinctions, but
'lugal' has always been translated as 'king' rather than simply
'ruler.' In the case of tomb 1054, she concludes that the woman was in
fact a lugal. But other scholars hotly disagree. University of Chicago
archaeologist McGuire Gibson argues that the seal's location above the
stone chamber makes it difficult to tie it to the elite occupant below.
... Philologists, meanwhile, note that although 'lugal' is technically
a gender-free term [doesn't "lú-gal" literally mean "big man"?],
there is the counterpart term 'eresh,' which traditionally is
translated as female consort to a male ruler. ... Researchers are now
examining Queen Puabi's remains for clues to her genetic
identity."
Furthermore, a paper I didn't attend but should have... is now
fortunately available online, both the text
and the slides—thank
you!—, "New
digital tools for Mesopotamian cultural heritage preservation at CDLI"
by Cale Johnson. "... the photo on the right—a room full of
confiscated tablets [in Iraq]—that will typically include tablets from
every imaginable time period and in every imaginable state of
decomposition. The important thing to keep in mind is that none of
these tablets can be tracked through the markets if stolen; none have
been properly documented, so if they do disintegrate we’ll never know
what they might have said; none can be read by any of us and they are
all slowly turning into dust. And if you’ll permit me to stand on my
soapbox for a moment, the preservation of cultural heritage is not
about Indiana Jones, rescuing the artifact from the unscrupulous simply
to put it in a box and lock it away in a museum. It is all about
documentation, curation and dissemination: the real work of the
preservation of cultural heritage is about sitting in museums,
documenting and transliterating tablets and building corpora." "...
transliterations of the tablets in ASCII Text Format—otherwise known as
ATF— ... Then we convert it ... into ... XML ..." "... lemmatization
and other kinds of second-order markup quickly grow far too complex for
the relatively simple syntax of ... ATF ..." "... the conversion into
XML lays the groundwork for other kinds of markup that link particular
texts to corpora, dictionaries such as the PSD and ultimately
prosopographical study and the localization of materials in terms of
both time and place."; the numbers of tablets per group (with number
transliterated) are, all rounded by me to the closest hundred: Ur III
65,700 (44,600), Ebla 7,100 (1,400), proto-cuneiform 6,100 (5,400), Old
Akkadian 5,800 (2,400), Early Dynastic IIIb 3,800 (2,700), Lagash II
3,500 (2,500), proto-Elamite 1,600 (1,600), Early Dynastic IIIa 1,500
(200), Archaic Ur 400 (400); he explained the improved searching
capabilities; slide
12 is esp. interesting: "... a couple years ago, ... Bob Englund
noticed several proto-cuneiform tablets that were being auctioned by
Bonham’s in London. ... Englund and staff at CDLI do regularly monitor
not only the traditional markets, but also new media of circulation
such as eBay. Given the images of the tablets published in the auction
book, Englund did a search, located the tablets in our database and
also noticed that the same tablets had been offered for sale in Amman
in September of 2000. It is thus likely that these were a few of the
growing number of Late Uruk, Early Dynastic and Old Akkadian tablets,
presumably from Umma and its vicinity, that have been flooding the
markets since the 1990-91 Kuwait War. The important thing in this case
is that only because of such basic tools as catalogs, archival images
and transliterational corpora now in place was it even possible to know
which tablets these were, and where they had been until recently." "Our
next major initiative ... will be the development of corpora of
syllabically written Semitic languages covering the first millennium of
the attested history of the Semitic languages from Ebla to the end of
the Old Babylonian period. Two areas of second-order markup in which we
hope to make substantial progress in the coming years are the
development of a mechanism for collaborative work on the prosopography
of the Ur III empire and the integration of the morphosyntactic parsing
that is being applied to Sumerian materials at the PSD in cooperation
with the Penn Treebank into, again, a collaborative system for the
description of Sumerian morphosyntax and the various grammatical
theories that have been applied to Sumerian over the hundred years
since Poebel. Currently we are investigating the use of
Wiki-technologies ..." "In my view, the best scenario is to continue to
require that both graduate students and their mentors spend time in the
trenches building and extending these corpora, but the real
intellectual content of Assyriology should not solely reside in the
publication of primary sources. If the field of Assyriology is to have
any relevance in this new century, we must as a profession come to
value synthetic treatments of particular historical or linguistic
topics over the mere publication of raw materials, materials that will
hopefully come to exist in publicly available corpora maintained and
extended by projects such as CDLI." Finally, as of August 18,
there were 78
signatures under the Chicago
Statement. If you haven't signed yet, please do, and if you
have, find a colleague who hasn't and make sure he/she does... ;-)
- Friday August 5, 11:55 am
I should have known that the moment I decided to try to close this
report, something would pop up that I'd have to write about: Andrew
Lawler just published an article
in today's issue of Science
(Vol 309, Issue 5736, 869), entitled "Rencontre
Assyriologique
Internationale Meeting: Looted Tablets Pose Scholar's Dilemma"
(unfortunately subscription-only). See my 2003- Iraq War
&
Archaeology site for a review.
By the way, the Müller-Karpe
petition already had 70 signed names as of yesterday! I urge
all colleagues to add their name.
- Thursday August 4, 11:25 am
I'm provisionally closing this "blog" today. I may still add to
it if I receive photos to post, something is published online about
this conference or more RAI papers are posted online. See my 2003- Iraq War &
Archaeology site for ongoing coverage of Assyriology and
Mesopotamian archaeology. Thanks for reading!
- Tuesday August 2, 1:15 am
As already mentioned in my July 23, 10:45 am posting, Michael
Müller-Karpe also presented a paper, "Legal or Illegal -
Can We Afford a Market for (Un-)Excavated Objects?," at the Iraq
Heritage Workshop on Saturday July 23. It is is now available online.
- Saturday July 30, 11:05 am
A statement was prepared by Michael Müller-Karpe for the
RAI. It condemns the looting of archaeological sites in Iraq and
specifically urges scholars worldwide "... to refrain from providing
expertise to the antiquities market and to private collectors, unless
the artifacts in question can be proven to be neither excavated
illegally nor exported without permission." It was presented at
the Workshop “The Threat to Iraq’s Cultural Heritage – Current Status
and Future Prospects" (July 23, 2005) and was subsequently signed by 46
of its attendees. It has now been posted at
the Workshop's web site. Scholars in the field of Assyriology and
Mesopotamian archaeology/art history are encouraged to add their names
to the list of signatures (see the web page on how to contact Clemens
Reichel to do this). They can also discuss this statement on the
moderated Iraqcrisis discussion
list. And yes, as you can see in the list of signed names, the
Universität Wien now has a satellite program in the US, viz. in
Kansas City, Missouri! Just kidding. As most people
probably know by now, the Iraq War & Archaeology
web site and assorted academic web stuff of my hand have been kindly
"adopted" by the Institut
für Orientalistik of the University
of Vienna in Austria, and, as an added bonus, they threw in a nice
title to put on my business card. However, I still don't have a
permanent or full-time job, hence the PayPal buttons I've added just in
case anyone has some spare change they'd like to donate.
Michael Müller-Karpe was interviewed
in Die Süddeutsche Zeitung
of July 28, 2005, at the occasion of the prosecution in Italy of Marion
True, the J. Paul Getty Museum's curator for antiquities, for
conspiring to import illegally excavated antiquities into the US.
He
mentioned that Dr. Donny George
Youkhanna, Director General of museums in Iraq, has clearly stated that
they will refuse access to the National Museum in Baghdad to anyone who
encourages the illegal trade in antiquities through purchasing,
providing expertise or publishing. Iraqcrisis's Chuck Jones helpfully
pointed
out the official statement, see 2003- IW&A
Documents, 2. Müller-Karpe proceeded to talk about how Grand
Ayatollah el-Sistani has declared
looting un-Islamic but radical cleric Muqtada el-Sadr has issued a
counter-fatwa to the effect that looting of antiquities is allowed as
long as its proceeds benefit the fight against the infidels; if you buy
looted artifacts from Iraq, you are also supporting terrorist
attacks. The way this is reported I find a bit of a stretch: the
Shi'ite firebrand el-Sadr is not
likely behind most of the terrorist bombings and attacks nowadays that
are mostly committed by Sunnis; which of course doesn't mean that
insurgents aren't using antiquities looting and smuggling as a source
of income. By the way, digital photos
of the Rencontre are still welcome: shots of the sessions, reception,
cruise, ... You can send me the actual files or the
hyperlinks. Surely, somebody can share some pics that aren't too
embarrassing ;-) ?
Regarding the discussion about what to do with artifacts looted from
Iraq, esp. cuneiform tablets, that appear on the market in the West,
let me tell a "what if?" story I used as an example a couple of times
while in Chicago. As looters in Iraq are plundering rather
systematically, on an unprecedented scale, at a fast rate of tell
destruction and without much meaningful opposition, it would be quite
possible that they hit upon the city of Agade. This capital of
the later-3rd-mill.-BC Akkadian empire has long eluded us scholars and
presumably would contain many remains that would elucidate this pivotal
episode in Mesopotamian history and culture. Now say some tablets
from this site reach an Assyriologist who's willing to ignore the
telltale signs of recent looting. He examines the texts and comes
to the conclusion that they must have come from an archive in
Agade! He is ecstatic, tells the dealer. The latter at once
tracks down what tell the tablets came from and puts in an order for
more. Word gets around in the antiquities trade and among the
smugglers and looters. After all, a find like this is impossible
to keep a secret. A treasure hunting frenzy ensues. A
couple of weeks later, there is nothing left of the tell of Agade worth
excavating. At about that time, some Iraqi FPS archaeological
guards finally arrive to check out what's going on but it's too
late. Lots of artifacts (sculptures, tablets, seals, etc.) pop up
on the antiquities market, all claimed to have been dug up at the now
(in)famous Tell X. None of them have any archaeological context,
stories about some having been found together may be true or may be
just a ruse to drive up the price, even whether artifacts for sale are
truly from Tell X is hardly certain. This confused, hopeless mess
is all that's left of Agade. Some scholars wish the darn Tell X
would never have been identified as Agade in the first place, instead
left to be discovered at a later time when Iraq would have been at
peace.
I'm
home and catching up on e-mail and other stuff. Overall, I'm
happy I got to go to this RAI. I find it very benificial to
interact with archaeologists, art historians, historians as well as
philologists who study the cuneiform world at large. It's good to
get together and not lock ourselves up in our little specialties.
Of course, more archaeological papers would've been nice. I'd
like to attend the International Congress on the Archaeology of the
Ancient Near East (ICAANE) sometime and compare. The next
one is in April 2006 in Madrid. If only I could get some
funding to pay for my travel expenses... I see the organizing
committee has already proposed a "The State of Iraqi Archaeological
Heritage (1990-2006). Looting, Restoration Projects, Current Situation"
workshop! I do think that I need to get out of Kansas City more
often, leave Missouri behind me once in a while. I'm still
churning on a lot of the ideas and discussions... I'll be back
with more soon. Oh yeah, did you notice the Chicago Tribune
article I referred to in my previous posting
seemed to forget about Sumerian too?
Before I forget again, there appeared an
article about the RAI on the front page of the Chicago Tribune of
July 23: "Babylon's dirty secrets: No tablet left unturned. Experts in
a 4,000-year-old language find Mesopotamians faced rising home prices,
booming harems and doctors who laid it on thick" by W. Mullen. "Only
200 or so people in the world are fluent in the Akkadian language.
Scattered across four continents, they get together only once a year.
So by the time the scholars arrived in Chicago this week for their
annual meeting, they had stored up a lot of things to discuss--from the
harems of Assyrian kings to rising housing prices in ancient Babylon."
"'In our field, Chicago is a very important center,' said Dominique
Charpin, an Assyriologist at the Sorbonne in Paris. 'For us, it is our
Mecca.' Charpin, 51, and his wife, Nele Ziegler, 37, have been
going over nearly 20,000 clay tablets generated during the reign of
Zimri-Lim between 1800 B.C. and 1760 B.C. in the city of Mari, ..."
"'It's not so different from the English language, where we see
specialists devoted to reading and interpreting Shakespearean texts,
and others who are experts in reading and interpreting Dow Jones stock
tables,' said Martha Roth, editor of the nearly completed dictionary
and organizer of this year's Assyriology congress. Heather Baker,
42, a British lecturer at the University of Vienna, has been looking at
legal documents recording sales of houses and empty plots in Babylon
between 700 B.C. and 500 B.C." "Barbara Boeck, 37, a university
researcher in Madrid, has inherited the work of her mentor and teacher
in Germany, the late Franz Koecher, who translated pharmacological
texts left by ancient physicians. To the consternation of scholars,
many of those recipes called for the excrement of animals--the
droppings of dogs, pigs and other barnyard species--as key ingredients.
... 'He discovered the physicians listed use of animal excrement simply
as codes for actual secret plant ingredients that they didn't want
their patients to know, so that the patients couldn't make their own
medicine,' Boeck said. 'He discovered the equivalence lists, about 100
coded plant names.'" Too bad this journalist didn't speak to any
archaeologists... He seems to have left with the impression that
cuneiform texts was the thing the RAI was solely about. [see also
above, next posting at the end]
It's also
odd that there wasn't a mention of the events in Iraq. Looting of
sites, anyone? Which brings us to the impromptu
but vehemently requested addition to the program of the Saturday
workshop discussed in my 2 previous postings: a discussion on how to
deal with unprovenanced, i.e., most-likely looted artifacts, esp.
cuneiform tablets. Unfortunately, I had to leave early in order
to catch my plane back home. It was partially instigated by the
petition that Michael Müller-Karpe had circulated. I believe
the petition with the list of signatories will soon be posted on the
web. I'll link to it as soon as it is available. [see also below under my Thursday July 21, 2:20 am posting]
Saturday,
after a coffee break, Paola Negri Scafa and Salvatore Viaggio
gave a
paper about "The Contribution of the Italian D-R Project to the
Preservation of Iraq's Cultural Heritage." They have an incipient
3-D image and text database project of the cuneiform tablets of the
National Museum in Baghdad. [August 4 addition: but using solely
already published tablets, I think; also, as was
remarked from the audience, why re-invent the wheel already invented by
the CDLI project at
UCLA/Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte that has
already processed more than 125,000 texts?] Then David Myers and
Stephen H.
Savage talked about "Documenting Cultural Heritage Sites in Iraq with
an Integrated ArcGIS/MSAccess/SQL Server Database." Myers started
with explaining how the Getty
Conservation Institute and the World
Monuments Fund joined in 2004 for their Iraq
Cultural Heritage Conservation Initiative.
They already have run a training session in November-December 2004 in
Amman with 16 SBAH participants, a session in April 2005 at the British
Museum in London with 3 SBAH staff, and in June 2005 a session for 6
SBAH staff; still to come: August-September 2005 for 18 SBAH staff,
November 2005, April 2006, May 2006, June 2006, October-November 2006;
to continue for several years. Savage continued with more detail
on the Iraq Cultural Heritage GIS database which will be bilingual
Arabic/English (see example to the right). It's a significantly
enhanced version of the
JADIS one of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan. They plan on
making it web based eventually. Roberto Parapetti and Carlo
Lippolis were then scheduled with "The Contribution of the Centro
Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino to the Reconstruction of
Iraq's Cultural Heritage." They have been studying about 1400
artifacts seized by the Jordanian authorities, though not all are from
Iraq. Some still have the "IM" number on them. He showed an
interesting overview of the type of objects confiscated. The
workshop concluded with "The New FBI Art Crime Team and Iraq" by Bonnie
Magness-Gardiner. The new rapid-deployment Art
Crime Team was created in response to the crisis in Iraq.
Legally, no Iraqi artifacts have been allowed to be imported into the
US after 1990. [illustration added and posting slightly edited
on July 25, 9:45 pm and August 4]
- Saturday July 23, 10:45 am
And then the big day arrived: Saturday, the Workshop "The
Threat to Iraq's Cultural Heritage - Current Status and Future
Prospects." After an introduction by organizer Clemens Reichel,
MacGuire Gibson took to the podium in Ida Noyes Hall: "Introduction:
The Archaeology of Iraq Two Years After the War - An Overview."
He started with an excellent recap of the events in 2003 at the
National Museum in Baghdad with good illustrations.
Basetki
statue has lost another toe while it was stolen. Ur harp was
taken apart by looters to try get the gold out of it. Also showed
the looting of archaeological sites. Every little tell around
Nippur has been badly damaged by looting, according to information from
a Spanish army officer. The next paper was "Legal or Illegal -
Can We Afford a Market for (Un-)Excavated Objects?" by Michael
Müller-Karpe. He explained the proposed German legislation
that would finally enact the UNESCO convention of 1970; it has so many
loopholes that it would not be good at all, it would also not abide by
the UNESCO convention of 1995. A major defect is that protection
is limited to a finite number of important artifacts explicitly listed
by a country, ignoring for instance all archaeological objects looted
from sites. [see also the August 2,
1:15 am posting] MacGuire Gibson then read Joanne
Farchakh-Bajjali's
(who was unable to come) richly-illustrated paper "Cultural Heritage
Condemned to Destruction--the Looting of Archaeological Sites in
Southern Mesopotamia." It was actually retitled "Heritage on
Death Row" by Farchakh. Looters dig trenches and then dig tunnels
to stay out of the sun. Parthian site of Farwa also extensively
looted. Smugglers were initially overpaying to recruit farmers to
loot. Arshad Yasin, Saddam Hussein's brother-in-law who had been
involved in smuggling operations in the past, is active again since
2003 in looting and smuggling of artifacts. Farchakh is working
on a film about all this. [I include a photo of the looted
site of Zabalam from the Four
Corners Media web site]
Irene Winter, in her "Sennacherib's Claims to Knowledge," made a
convincing case that terms such as naklu
(Akkadian) have up till now been wrongly translated too narrowly as
"artistic." Instead, they referred to skill, mastering of the
craft, better translated as "artful." Next, Frances Reynold's
"Knowing Your Enemy: Reclassifying Knowledge Through Wordplay" examined
how Babylonian scholars in the late periods reinterpreted different
terms to provide analogies for
foreign enemies. I give 2 examples of her very nicely organized
tables illustrating this:
Text Terms
|
Omens: Direction
|
Text Historical
|
Text Contemporary
|
Land of Akkad /Babylon
|
South
|
Babylonia /Babylon
|
Babylonia /Babylon
|
Land of Elam
|
East
|
Elam
|
Persia
|
Land of Subartu |
North
|
Assyria
|
0
|
Traditional mythological battles:
|
Enūma
Eliš
|
Ninurta Mythology
|
Land of Akkad
|
Marduk
|
Ninurta
|
Land of Elam
|
Ti'amat
|
Anzû (?)
|
Land of Subartu |
Oingu
|
Asakku
|
"The use of spin in foreign relations, it appears, is not an entirely
modern phenomenon." Indeed. I also attended a paper by
Abraham Winitzer: "Alternative Interpretation in O[ld] B[abylonian]
Divination: Organizational and Creative Considerations."
Jesús Gil Fuensantas presented "On the Ubaid Stratigraphy of the
Turkish Euphrates" as evidenced by his excavations near the already
submerged Tilbes Höyük. There is evidence of possible
cross-influences between Halaf and Ubaid potters during the Terminal
Halaf and Late Ubaid times, maybe showing a gradual transition to Ubaid
culture in this region. "Tokens from a Juridical Point of View"
by Bonnie Nilhamn posited that one can study juridical activity by
using archaeological material: tokens, markers, calculi, jetons.
Denyse Schmandt-Besserat has extensively studied them but mostly in
economic context. The excavations at Tell Sabi Abyad (N Syria)
yielded Late Neolithic and Middle Assyrian tokens, the latter found
together with tablets mentioning a certain Mannu-ki-Adad. Perhaps
tokens placed in wooden box together with cuneiform tablets.
There is a similar case in Nuzi: a bulla (SMN 1854) and a related text
(SMN 2096). By the way, sorry about the lack of illustrations or
hyperlinks for the last several postings. I am having issues with
my wireless connection and even with the kind assistance of OI's IT
expert John Sanders I have not yet been able to really find a
solution. The practical effect is that I have little or no
internet connectivity inside buildings and consequently little
opportunity to look up appropriate illustrations or hyperlinks.
There is one I'd like to mention on this occasion though: Ricardo Eichmann's Tayma project in Saudi Arabia
(see my Tuesday July 19, 4:15 pm
posting) has a web
site. While I am following up on some stuff I mentioned
before anyway, I ought to state that Elizabeth
Carter is unfortunately not attending the Rencontre this year---I had
expected her later arrival in posting Tuesday
July 19, 1:05 am.
Back to the papers: F. Rachel Magdalene
talked about "The Jurisdictional Power of the Courts During the
Neo-Babylonian and Persian Empires." After a nice lunch with
Lucio Milano and Elena Rova, the next paper I went to was by Heather D.
Baker: "Characterising Urban Space and Comparing Neighbourhoods: The
Babylonian Cities in the First Millennium BC." Postgate did a
study of Abu Salabikh and Ur and calculated that public space accounted
for about 10% of all space, she did the same for Merkes area of Babylon
and came up with about 17%. There were 27 city districts (erṣetu) in 1st-mill.-BC Uruk.
Property types: bītu house, kišubbû unbuilt plot, kuruppu (kind of reed structure), bīt qāti workshop/storeroom; other
neighbouring features: mūṣû
(no-through) alley, sūqu
street. Caroline Janssen spoke on "Keeping Track of One's
Records: Ur-Utu and His Letters." Over 2,000 Old Babylonian
tablets were found in Tell ed-Der, all from the archive of the "Chief
Dirge
Singer," and with meticulously recorded archaeological context.
"Chagar Bazar (Syria): New Cuneiform Tablets from the Second Millennium
BC" (by Denis Lacambre) found in the new excavations since 1999 by the
Université de Liège. The site may be ancient
Ashnakkum. The texts are from the time of king Samsī-addu.
It is probable that the leader of Chagar Bazar at the time was
Sȋn-iqȋšam. Michel Tanret enthusiastically delivered another
paper on the Ur-Utu archive from Tell ed-Der: "Reclassifying the
Unclassified." Tablets from an archive had been taken out of the
archive room while the room was rebuilt. They were then returned
to await sorting and transfer to the new tablet room. Some
tablets were already stored there when the inhabitants of the house
were forced to flee on short notice. Someone collected a number
of important tablets though, dropping some on the way out. While
making his selection, he threw the ones he didn't want on a heap in the
new tablet room. Hence none of the remaning tablets are sorted or
organized. Real estate tablets were normally grouped in dossiers:
a transaction tablet was accompanied by all of its predecessors all
through the birth of the field, i.e., when it was separated from a
larger field or constituted by combining fields. Layers of the
archive: 1) documents kept in the archive in Sippar Jaḫrūrum; 2)
documents added in the 1st house in Sippar Amnānum; 3) documents added
to the archive in the 2nd house. Reasons to keep so many tablets:
for the tax man; maybe as family mementos. Next was "Abum-waqar
son of Iddin-Erra: A Synopsis" by Karljürgen Feuerherm.
Thursday evening, there was a joint cruise on Lake Michigan of the
participants of the RAI together with the local Assyrian community of
Chicago. The sunset was quite beautiful over Chicago's
skyscrapers... I had fun getting to know even more colleagues
like Harriet Martin, Anne Kilmer, Eleanor Guralnick, etc.
Now that I think about it, I forgot to mention earlier that I had
a pleasant dinner with Felix Blocher on Tuesday night. When,
later that
Thursday evening, I got back to the student residence where most of us
are staying, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of my
colleagues is also a very good classical piano player: An De Vos.
In the community room, she was coaxed by some colleagues to play on the
Steinway and we were enthralled...
- Thursday July 21, 5:30 pm
I started late on Thursday, had to mull over some of the issues touched
upon yesterday... and catch up on my night rest. The 1st paper I
went to was "Les listes métrologiques, entre
mathémathiques et lexicographie" by Christine Proust who
actually delivered it in English. Eleanor Robson started
with a heartfelt note in memoriam of Jeremy Black who passed away
recently. Her paper was entitled "What Counts as Mathematics? A
Re-Examination of the Cuneiform Record." She started with an
interesting history of the study of Mesopotamian math by Assyriologists
as well as mathemathicians. There were local groups of Old Babylonian
mathematicians. She proposed to go beyond the traditional
categories of "table texts" and "problem texts" and also include
intellectual explorations of mathematical ideas as found in a wide
range of texts going from literature and divination to astronomy and
cultic topography. Jamie Novotny spoke on "Classifying
Assurbanipal's Inscriptions: Prisms C, Kh (= CND), and G": Borger's
prism CKalach or CND re-identified as describing the 1st war against
Ummanaldasu. During lunch, I chatted with Frauke
Weiershäuser about the evolving standards of academic publishing
in our field. Digital formats are gaining ground but the problem of
what counts for academic promotion and the like remains unsolved.
Still, funding of the institutes and researchers doing the publishing
as well as the academic libraries doing the purchasing is only
decreasing. I feel that the established academic series, esp. the
ones published by university departments, should be edited and prepared
for print with the same quality standards as usual but then, just
before the usual step of sending a manuscript to a printer, it should
instead be converted into a high-quality pdf file. This then
should be placed on the web to be downloaded for free by anyone
interested so as to encourage research in our small field.
Academic libraries could download it, print it out and bind it into a
book to place in the stacks. If there are fine photographs or plans,
they should have it printed out by their university copying/printing
service on a high-quality printer. This approach would save the
money for a limited and expensive print run which is almost always
totally subsidized anyway. Any academic library could also
acquire a lot more of the literature without having to make the painful
choices that are all too common today. And because it would go
through the same process as before, it would still count fully for
academic achievement.
In the afternoon, the Landscape Archaeology Workshop
started with a paper by Bernadette McCall: "Landscape and Settlement in
the Mamasani Valleys, Fars province, Iran": soundings at Nudabad and
Tol-e Spid; survey of 51 sites (34 mounds), collected close to 4,000
sherds; it turns out that there were substantial settlements present
after all, contrary to the common opinion, and culturally/politically
tied with Khuzestan and highland Fars. Next, in "Recent Survey in
the Region of Tell Brak, E. Syria: Preliminary Results," Eric Rupley
told that they have surveyed for 3 seasons now in a circle around Tell
Brak (including for instance Tell Beydar), assisted by satellite
photography. Their search was optimized using multispectral
identification of settlement-associated sediments coupled with CORONA
legacy imagery. Hollow ways (3rd mill. BC) spotted, radiating out
from Tell Brak. Jason Ur talked about "The Classification of
Urban Settlement Systems in Northern Mesopotamia in the Fifth to First
Millennia BC." After the break, I chose "Classification of
Knowledge, an Archaeological Approach: The Case of Nuzi" by Simona
Bracci. Dominique Charpin talked about "Archives and
Classification: An Example at Mari." He discussed how in the
unpublished text M.15119+ containing a compilation of unpaid debts owed
to the late queen mother Addu-duri and the high priestess Inibshina the
scribe arranged the debts: 1) dated, sealed tablet; 2) dated, unsealed
tablet; 3) undated, unsealed tablet; 4) dated, no tablet, smaller
amount; 5) dated, no tablet, larger amount; 6) undated, no
tablet. Only 21 of the 31 were dated. "Where Was the Statue
of Idrimi Really Found?" by Amir S. Fink proposed an earlier
archaeological dating for this sculpture excavated by Woolley in Tell
Atchana (Alalakh) in 1939. Woolley published contradictory plans
about levels I and II of the temple, and his notes also betray a lot of
uncertainty.
- Thursday July 21, 2:20 am
Tuesday there were a few schedule changes that had been announced
sometime on Monday on a blackboard in the OI entrance hall but that
were not
widely known. This was unfortunate as
it makes
life
difficult for those of us who like to pick and choose from both sides
of the Mesopotamian scholarly aisle (see also my remarks in my Tuesday July 19, 1:05 am
posting). Maybe a page with announcement of the changes could
have been handed out in advance? We had Tuesday afternoon off from the
conference stuff so I checked out the Egyptian exhibit at the Field
Museum. At night, fun and games with colleagues (Douglas Frayne,
Gordon Whittaker, Kathleen Abraham, Jan Tavernier, ...) over a few
games of pool at the rec room of our student residence. Over
Wednesday breakfast, Michael
Müller-Karpe briefed me on his October 2004 trip to Baghdad.
Maybe we'll hear more on Saturday. I started the scheduled
business of the day by
listening to Claudia Beuger's re-examination of "The Pottery of the
Archaic Ištar Temples in Assur" excavated about a century ago.
Marian Feldman analyzed Levantine
frescoes from Alalakh, Qatna, Tell Kabri, etc. and compared them with
the ones from the Aegean: "Knowing the Foreign: Power, Exotica, and
Frescoes in the Middle Bronze Age." A problem is that
Levantine frescoes are generally much more fragmentarily preserved and
their reconstructions draw greatly on the Aegean ones which makes it
hard to prove the direction of the influence. Nevertheless,
Levantine
frescoes seem more like exotica, isolated within their cultural
context. Barbara A. Porter ("A Middle Bronze Stele from Hama and
Old Syrian Cylinder Seals") discussed the dating of a stele excavated
in 1936 by the Danes on the tell
at
Hama (Syria) and contributed more evidence to support Frances Pinnock
that it was not from the Iron Age. The next paper I attended was
"Classification of Methods of Pictorial Narrative in Assurbanipal's
Reliefs" by Chikako Watanabe, focusing on the battle of Til-Tuba and
lion hunt scenes (Nineveh), and esp. the change in method between the
battle scene and the lion hunt in Rooms S and S1
on the one hand and the lion hunt in Room C on the other hunt. In
"Babylon as a Name for Nineveh and Other
Cities," Stephanie Dalley showed that there is evidence in lexical
texts that cities other than Babylon were known as Babylon starting at
least in the late 8th-7th cent. BC. Elna Solvang's "Classifying
Women:
The Harem ... and What It Doesn't Tell Us About Women"
eloquently analyzed the inappropriateness of projecting the term
and concept of the later Islamic "harem" to the Mesopotamian past of,
for example, the texts from Mari. Gabriella Frantz-Szabó
gave a paper entitled "Reflections on the Past and Future of the
'Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen
Archäologie.'" This encyclopaedia of our field of study was
started by Bruno Meissner and a 1st volume published in 1928. The
latest fascicle appeared last year ("Panzer-Pflanzenkunde").
Entry titles are in German but the actual entries can also be in French
or German to allow for choosing an appropriate expert scholar for each
entry.
The general meeting of the International Association for
Assyriology (IAA) took place today in the late afternoon. Witty
as usual, Wilfred van Soldt presided. He explained that the IAA
had 25 members 3 years ago, 95 a year later and now 115. He
stepped down as president and Jack Sasson succeeded him by a unanimous
vote---he was the only candidate. The schedule for the future
RAIs is: 2006 Münster ("War and Peace in the Ancient Near East"),
2007 Moscow & St. Petersburg, 2008 Würzburg, 2009 Changchun
(not yet confirmed), 2010 Paris. A discussion
was then started
about the last point on the agenda: "Policy on unprovenanced
inscriptions." Let's just say there was no perfect
agreement. MacGuire Gibson: it all started when 5,000 artifacts
were stolen from
museums in Iraq after the 1991 War,
of which only 45 were recovered. He met a Ms. Osthoff two weeks
ago in Amman: she said
looting has now reached the Diyala region. Irene Winter: the AIA has
already instituted
programs to educate military personnel on Mesopotamian antiquities at
their
deployment centres in Georgia, etc. There are two purist
positions on the issue: one that says no to any dealings
with looted artifacts of any type as that only encourages more looting,
and one that says that
looted cuneiform tablets contain precious textual information and
should
therefore be studied anyway. A committee will be formed to
formulate a policy by the
next RAI. I personally am
disappointed: this is the year 2005, more than 2 years after the start
of the
Iraq War and we as a scholarly organization still haven't figured out a
sensible policy in this matter we can all more or less agree
with? Sad! [this paragraph was reworked on July 21, 11:30
pm][see also above under the Monday July 25, 2:15 am posting]
Yesterday I was happy to finally meet Andrew
Lawler who has been one of the journalists who has been the best in
reporting about the ongoing damage caused by the 2003- Iraq War to
Iraq's archaeological heritage. Thank you, Andrew, for coming to
the RAI! Tuesday
morning we were off in brightly-colored schoolbuses to the Field Museum
of Natural History (see photo on the right) for more paper
sessions. Like yesterday, I had to choose which papers to attend
as
there are always two concurrent sessions. I started with a paper
by Romina Laurito, Alessandra
Mezzasalma and Lorenzo Verderame: "Texts and Labels: A Case Study from
Neo-Sumerian Umma." Lorenzo talked about the sa2-du11
labels: pyramidical shape, pre-sealed on 3 sides (often also on the
base) by one or rarely 2 officials, unique Neo-Sumerian innovation,
unique to Umma, used to seal cords tying tablet containers and the
monthly counting, all are from the antiquities trade and therefore
unfortunately without archaeological context. Kathleen
McCaffrey's paper "A Female King of Ur: Moving Beyong Gender Blindness"
challenged the tendency to automatically assume that a royal burial is
a king's. Tomb PG 1054 at Ur was identified as a king's grave by
Woolley because of a seal, discarding the skeleton in it which happened
to be female. However, PG 1054's artifacts are different than in other
female burials and in some respects more like men's grave goods.
There is textual evidence of a SAL.LUGAL or female king after all and a
few queens on the Sumerian Kings List. Of course, Sumerian
doesn't have a grammatical gender which doesn't facilitate
things. [see also the August 21 update]
Next, Ahmad Serrieh spoke on "The Ninevite V Period at
Tell Arbid (Northeastern Syria)": old sounding by Max Mallowan, current
joint Polish-Syrian expedition. By the way, contrary
to the
arrangements at the OI/Pick Hall, at the Field Museum at least it's the
archaeologists who got the nice roomy auditorium and the philologists
who got the still very nice but admittedly smaller auditorium (see my
"rant" in the previous posting). I
then chose to listen to Felix Blocher's "The 2004 Excavations at Tall
Munbāqa/Ekalte" about the ongoing work at this Bronze Age site on Lake
Assad in the Balikh valley of North Syria. Ongoing German
research is now focusing on a huge building, probably a 4th sanctuary
but in the "Innenstadt," a part of the town not settled till the Late
Bronze Age. The sanctuary is located in a walled compound.
After the break, Ricardo
Eichmann informed us about "Stratigraphic Research at Tayma." He
gave a well-structured and well-illustrated presentation on the joint
German-Saudi expedition's research at this pivotal site. The
palace of the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus who made this city his
residence for 10 years has not been located yet. Tayma was a
caravan city, wealthy from the trade between South Arabia and
Mesopotamia/the Levant. A fragmentary stele of Nabonidus was found,
with a cuneiform inscription. There was a large lake on the spot in
4,500 BC, the first habitation is attested in the mid-3rd millennium
BC. [see also above and the August 21 update]
Hanspeter Schaudig continued with "The Tayma Stele of
Nabonidus" as mentioned by Eichmann. The fragment was reused in
antiquity. It does not actually contain Nabonidus's name but is
most probably his. It is only sculpted/inscribed on one
side. Traces at the top show a Babylonian king paying tribute to
divine symbols. The cuneiform inscription below is only very
fragmentarily
preserved but parallels known other ones. I rounded off the
morning sessions with "Activities and Projects of the Center of
Achaemenid Studies" by Shahrokh Razmjou. This center studies the
collection from the National Museum of Iran. One of the projects
is the 35,000 Persepolis Fortification cuneiform tablet fragments that
were returned by the OI. Another is joining the fragments of Susa
glazed tiles. They are using digital technology for
reconstruction work. They are serving as a model for the
establishment of a Center of Elamite Studies. Much is still to be
discovered in the National Museum, awaiting "secondary excavation"
after decades of storage and benign neglect.
Over Monday lunch, I hashed over ANE scholarly matters in Belgium in
particular with my colleagues Michel Tanret and Katrien De Graef.
Then, the normal sessions began. By the way, I forgot to mention
I had a good chat with Michael Müller-Karpe the other day
too. Anyway, the first paper I attended was
by Niek Veldhuis: "The Archaic Lexical Corpus." Check out some of
his research on the web: Digital
Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts. I then crossed the street from
the OI to Albert Pick Hall
(the 2 venues for
the regular paper sessions; OI in the big photo on the left, Pick Hall
in the photo on the right)
to hear Trudy Kawami, "Some Bovine Sculptures from Uruk":
zoömorphic vessels made of dark stone that usually have
tubular-drilled holes on the surface for inlaid other-colored stone;
most acquired by different museums and collections in the 1920s and
1930s, possibly pointing at shared original find location; they were
possibly ritual temple furniture of the end of 4th millennium BC.
The paper "The Akkadian 'Bello Stile'" by Davide Nadali and Lorenzo
Verderame analyzed
epigraphy, cylinder
seals and steles. On
another subject, rumor has it that Marc Van de Mieroop will be leaving
his tenured Assyriology professorship at Columbia University to succeed
the late Jeremy Black at Oxford University.
Interesting. I
also met Caroline Waerzeggers, my fellow Belgian associated with the
Universität Wien. Of course, she didn't have to depend on
the kindness of strangers as in my case: they actually hired her on as
a
researcher on their [FWF] project for a multi-year contract. I
was
sort of "adopted" and my web site kindly given server space.
Thank you again, Gebhard and Friedrich! I also bumped into Lucio
Milano, another one of my old professors besides Karel Van
Lerberghe. I'm expecting Liz Carter to arrive later. [see however
above] There
was a paper by Jon Taylor called "Lexicographical Study of the Already
Ancient in Antiquity: Late Copies of the Standard Professions List"
which I sat in on. To be honest though, cuneiform lexicography
isn't really my cup of tea. I again crossed the street and
listened to a fascinating paper, "The Ur-Namma Stele Revisited," by
Claudia Suter, which walked us through how she re-reconstructed this
famous stele
after its cleaning, using its many extra parts not used
previously. The class room was really too
small, lots of people, myself included were forced to stand.
Okay, here it goes: this is not well
organized. The Breasted Hall
in the OI is nice, wood panelled and big, has dimmed lighting and
houses the "language" papers while the Pick Hall class room is
cavernous, concrete plain and small, has only on-or-off lighting and is
the locale for the archaeological and art historical papers. If
one is interested in both types of papers, then one has to run across
the street back and forth: not convenient nor easy as sessions tend to
not run exactly synchronously even though they are planned that
way. Surely, the good colleagues at the OI didn't want to give
the impression that the "language" scholars are more valued than the
others? I understand that it's not always easy to arrange meeting
spaces but this conference was assigned far in advance so that doesn't
apply. The space used for the reception and the book publishers
could've been turned
into a second
session space, couldn't it? And the coffee room downstairs
could've housed the book publishers as well perhaps?
Anyway, it is imperative that all sessions are in the same
building, so as to ensure as much interaction and mingling of all kinds
of scholars as possible. That's my two cents worth anyway.
[see also the next posting] Next came
"Depositional Charateristics of
Altar Deposits" by Judy Bjorkman who drew attention to a subject too
often not given enough thought. She is of the opinion that these
artifacts were buried under altars because of their ritual, magical
power, not because they were worn out, used up or so (which is the
standard explanation). That evening it was time for the Provost's
Reception at the Faculty Quadrangle Club (see photo to the
right). Ideal for, you guessed it, more mingling. That's
really what the RAI is all about I think: meeting colleagues anew or
for the 1st time, connecting a face with a name you've seen in print,
on the web or that you've e-mailed with, having chance encounters with
colleagues that lead to discussions that give you surprising insights
or just make you feel that you are not alone in a certain predicament,
catching up on anecdotes and, yes, some gossip. The weather was
still hot and humid so luckily there was plenty to drink and eat. I got
to meet Clemens Reichel in person and got to know Michael Dick, Olof
Pedersén, Billie Jean Collins, Neal "Chocolates" Walls, Gary
Beckman and Jan Tavernier. Before
I forget, I noted yesterday what was said
regarding the ANE and Iraqcrisis discussion lists at the plenary
session. I may have misunderstood partially or something, anyway,
this is the situation as I was told by e-mail by Chuck Jones himself:
ANE and its corollary ANENews have been on hiatus since mid-May but
Iraqcrisis will be continued indefinitely by Chuck himself.
In the same morning session, OI Hittitologist Theo van den Hout
deviated from the program and did not talk about H[itt]itology at the
OI
but rather about the theme of this RAI, "Classifications
of Knowledge in the Ancient Near East: Lexicography, Iconography,
Stratigraphy," as pertaining to the Hittites.
This year is
actually the 100-year anniversary of the "discovery" of the 1st Hittite
cuneiform tablets (actually shown to a scholar by a villager).
MacGuire Gibson related the history of the excavations and surveys of
the OI in Mesopotamia: the Diyala Expedition, Nippur,
etc. He did point out how in the early digs at Nippur the
philological and archaeological teams did not communicate much and
therefore the excavation methodology was lacking. The famous
Adams survey work spearpointed the new approaches to archaeological
research in southern Iraq. I hotlink a photo of the early days of
digging at Nippur, a view over part of the Temple of Gula (goddess of
healing). He of course mentioned the "Lost Treasures from
Iraq" project. He showed many photos of the looting of the
archaeological sites of Iraq. The photos of the Ur III temple
palace in Umma from 2001 (before) and 2003 (after), for example, spoke
eloquently of the huge damage. Nippur looted for 2 months in the
summer of 2003 but now safe. Abu Salabikh safe as far as 6 months
ago. Finally, Robert McC. Adams made some concluding
remarks. Perhaps the destruction of the big, important sites may
force us to pay more systematic attention to the many smaller sites out
there which after all were an important aspect of ancient society
too. Better availability of satellite photography may be of great
use here. By the way, this using-a-Windows-computer experience
has so far not been great: lots of crashes! Yesterday, I had to
remove 70+ spyware programs... If I only I could buy myself a Mac
notebook... Oh well, don't look a gift horse in the mouth and all
that. There was some general Q&A/discussion after the session
itself. If I understood correctly, OI's Magnus Widell
will be
taking over Chuck Jones's duties running the ANE and esp. the Iraqcrisis
discussion lists, starting sometime after the Rencontre. Chuck
has taken up his new job as librarian of the Blegen Library of The
American School of Classical Studies at Athens---good luck,
Chuck!---but is still doing at least Iraqcrisis a little while
longer. [but see now tomorrow's posting]
The big discussion on how to deal with looted artifacts,
how to prevent, curtail looting, etc. started. No easy solutions,
I'm afraid.
Over breakfast at the Pierce Hall student restaurant, I had a great
time getting acquainted with Trudy Kawami and getting updated on the
news from Leiden by Klaas Veenhof. We started
the RAI officially
this morning at 9:30 with a General Session in the Max Palevsky Theatre
in Ida Noyes Hall (see photo). Gil Stein
(director of the Oriental Institute or OI), Don Randel
(president of the university) and Wilfred van Soldt (president of the Int'l
Association for Assyriology) spoke briefly. Robert McC. Adams
introduced the "The OI and the Ancient Near East" (or ANE)
session. He drew attention to the horrible situation in Iraq and
expressed his opinion that the pending civil war (which may even have
started already) can probably only be avoided by a US withdrawal.
He did ackowledge though that many colleagues believe that this would
only acerbate the problem. OI's very own Erica Reiner focused on
the Assyriological research tradition of the OI, i.e., the study of
Akkadian (with its dialects Assyrian and Babylonian). Next came
Sumerology and the Sumerian
Lexicon Project at the OI as highlighted by Miguel Civil. He
gave a nice historical overview interspersed with the occasional funny
anecdote: Chiera, Poebel, Kramer, Landsberger, Jacobsen, etc. I
hotlink an example of a Sumerian school exercise tablet with a part of
the myth about Lugalbanda
and Nin-sún in the illustration. I love how the 1st
introduction to computers at the OI in the '60s was during a seminar on
"non-numerical" (i.e., text-oriented) computing. The 1st aborted
computer program at the OI was written in Fortran... Converting
an IBM typewriter into a printer...
Appeal to any RAI participants reading this and who have been or will
be taking digital photos: if you don't mind sharing them, please send
some to me (fdeblauwe [at] gmail [dot] com). I may post (a
selection of) them! Thanks! You can also send me the URL of
where they are stored online if you prefer that. Please indicate
then if you wish me to "hotlink" them (see for instance the pic under
my 1st posting) or if I should
download and put them on my server. Oh, don't forget to identify
people in the pics if possible. Thanks.
I am in Chicago. Boy, was it hot today! It reached a high
of 95° F (= 35° C). While reading over yesterday's posting, I noticed one
important Iraq-related omission: Chuck Jones isn't attending either as
he has already taken up his new job in Athens. At the welcoming
reception at the Oriental Institute (6 pm) I did meet a whole bunch of
new and old faces though. I was happy to meet up again with Karel
Van Lerberghe en Gabriëlla Voet, Grant Frame, Dominique Charpin,
Jack
Sasson, Theo Krispijn, David Owen, ... and got to know in person
Heather Baker, Hermann Hunger, Stephanie Dalley, Kathryn Slanski,
Elna Solvang, Barbara A. Porter, Barbara N. Porter, Rich Beal and JoAnn
Scurlock, Carol
Justus and Darien McWhirter, Raija Mattila, Eleanor Robson, Wilfred van
Soldt, Cornelia Wunsch, ... The conference organizers
announced that there were 340 people registered for the Rencontre: a
good turnout! As they said, every continent is represented
"except Antarctica"; a new
volume of the Chicago
Assyrian Dictionary---the second last one, I believe---is due to be
available for purchase during the Rencontre. The food was
appropriately Middle Eastern-style and delicious.
I'm rather
tired so let me finish with some thoughts about the Max Palevsky East
Residence Hall that I and a lot of conference visitors are staying in:
it's
very recently built and therefore nice and clean; however, the plan and
layout is fortress-like and inhabitant-unfriendly forcing people to
walk long distances for everything. For instance, I have found
only one, yes one, snack vending machine and one drink vending
machine---one non-functional, the other sold out---in the whole large
4-floor structure which is weirdly U-shaped with a closed-off inner
courtyard. By the way, the one elevator is located at one end
of the U shape. Also, there's only one entrance to the
building, and one needs to use one's card key 3 times to get inside the
actual building, then one more time to get into a small hall accessing
a shared shower and toilet and finally one last time to arrive in one's
room. Hello, Kafka!
- Saturday July 16, 2:50 pm
I think I've transfered everything I'll need to this laptop and I've
installed the necessary software. Let's see if I can post
this. Even before I make it to Chicago, I already know that some
people won't be able to make it to the RAI this year: John Russell, Sam
Paley, Gebhard Selz, Friedrich Schipper. Too bad, I really was
looking forward to meeting them in person, especially since I am not
usually able to attend academic conferences so I have to depend on
people dropping by Kansas City... Needless to say, that's not a
common occurrence.
- Thursday July 14, 12:20 pm
Just a quick note: on the last day of the RAI there will be a half-day
workshop
dear to my heart. I quote:
The Threat to
Iraq's Cultural Heritage -- Current Status and Future Prospects
In
conjunction with the 51st Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, the
Oriental Institute will host a workshop "The Threat to Iraq's Cultural
Heritage--Current Status and Future Prospects" on Saturday, July
23 2005. This meeting will address the current situation of
archaeological sites and museums in Iraq, measures to stop the looting
of sites, and passed or proposed legislation in western countries to
curb the illegal trade of antiquities.
Admission to
this session is free - no separate registration is necessary.
- Thursday July 14, 12:10 am
I am getting ready for the trip to Chicago: borrowing a
laptop---unfortunately a Windows machine not a Mac---, loading my iPod
with podcasts, brushing up on my cuneiform signs, ... But let me take
this occasion to explain a few things for the reader who may not be
familiar with this conference. The RAI is the
international annual conference of scholars of the ancient "cuneiform
world" (Mesopotamia/Iraq, Syria, Anatolia/Turkey) where Sumerian and
later Akkadian, both written in cuneiform, were the lingua franca. The
more recently adopted English subtitle of the conference is
"International Congress of Assyriology and Near Eastern Archaeology."
Fields that are represented include linguistics, literature,
archaeology, history, art history, etc. It is usually held in Europe
but crosses the Atlantic every once in a while.
Back to the
Iraq War & Archaeology main page.