THE EIGHTH DAY

The Hidden History
of the
Jewish Contribution to Civilization

by
Samuel Kurinsky

ABOUT THE BOOK:

© 1994 Samuel Kurinsky, all rights reserved

Ground-breaking and myth-shattering, The Eighth Day is an invaluable source-book for anyone interested in Jewish history.

It is equally valuable for those interested in the way historiography has itself evolved. All subject peoples have suffered the destruction of their historical heritage by their conquerors. The Jewish people have been quintessentially the victims of an historical holocaust throughout their three-thousand-year experience in hostile Diasporas.

The religious and ethical contribution of Judaism to civilization has rightfully been acknowledged; but the seminal role the Jews have played in the technological and artistic evolution of civilization is absent from our histories. The Eighth Day goes a long way toward the reconstruction of this "Hidden History" of the Jews. It likewise opens a new view of the histories of technology and of human society.

The myth that the early Jews were nomads is exposed in the very first chapter by the presentation of biblical archaeological and documentary evidence to the contrary. The thesis is set that the Jews stemmed from the first civilization to invent the alphabet and the axled wheel, a civilization which gave birth to the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Wherever the Jews were dispersed into the Diaspora, they carried that literacy and technological expertise with them.

The Eighth Day sets the stage for an entirely new historical paradigm.

The Eighth Day opens a revelatory page of Judaic history

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Jewish Beginnings: Urbanites and Artisans

• The Nomadic Myth
• The Oldest Testimony
• Abraham and Isaac
• Who Were the "Semites"
• A New Look at Ancient Society

2 The Rise of Semitic Civilization; Reading the Record

• A Problem of Jewish Historiography
• The Archaeology of Jericho
• The Tablets of Ebla: Discovery and Controversy
• How the Use of Anachronistic Labels Impeded the Scientific Approach to Near Eastern History.
• An Ancient Metropolis: Mari
• Akkadia, Sumer, and Ur

3 The Akkadians in Anatolia: A Semitic Trading Empire

• The Discovery and Excavation of Ur
• A Startling Discovery
• Regional Ethnography in Biblical Times
• Akkadia
• Karums and Expansion of Trade
• Mesopotamian Technology in Anatolia
• An Anatolian Expedition

4 Ancient Egyptian Historiography: Setting the Record Straight

• Manetho and the Mysterious "Hyksos"
• The Second Intermediate Period
• The Asiatic Influence on Egyptian Culture
• The Overthrow of Asiatic Rule in Egypt
• The Record of Asiatic Rule

5 Semitic Culture and Technology Arrive in Egypt; Myths and Misconceptions about Early Egyptian History

• El-Fayoum and the Bahr Youseff
• Modern Egyptology Confronts the Semitic Influence
• The Pre-Dynastic Period
• Early Mesopotamian Influences
• The Beginning of the Dynastic Era
• Egyptians and Canaanites
• Early Canaanite Settlements in Upper Egypt
• The Biblical City of Avaris

6 The Transformation of Egypt under Canaanite Rule: The Aamu Revolution

• Innovations in Materials, Manufacture and Agriculture
• Marine Innovations and Trade
• Innovations in Woodcraft
• On the Absence of Monuments under Canaanite Rule
• How an Age of Peace and Prosperity Came to be Neglected
• Setting the Record Straight

7 Ancient Mediterranean Sea Trade; The Revelations of Modern Underwater Archaeology

• The Historical Background
• The Mid-Second Millennium BCE; A Turbulent Period
• The Rise of Mediterranean Sea Trade
• An Expedition along the Turkish Coast
• An unexpected Discovery: Glass Ingots
• The Cargo of a Bronze Age Ship

8 The Emergence of the Israelite Nation: The Dawn of the Iron Age

• Canaan from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age
• Origins of the Israelite Nation; Three Theoretical Models
• Reading the Evidence - or Lack of It
• Conclusion

9 A Question of Identity: Hebrews Habiru, and Israelites

• The Biblical Record
• "Hebrew"
• The Habiru as Artisans
• Early Manufacture of Glass
• Hebrew Identity; Mosaic Law, and Exodus Crafts
• Technology of Eretz Israel under David and Solomon

10 Architecture and Engineering: Achievements of the Israelites

• Domestic Architecture
• Israelite Self-sufficiency and Independence
• Growth and Innovation in the Davidic Period; Architecture
• The Israelite Volute Capital
• Other Architectural Achievements of the Israelites
• Urban Planning

11 Pyrotechnology in Eretz Israel: The Archaeological Evidence

• Pyrotechnology in Other Near Eastern Cultures
• Evidence of Iron Production in Israelite Villages
• The Discoveries at Ekron and Other Judaic Industries
• Discoveries at Timnah and Tel Qasila
• Philistine and Mycenean Versus Israelite Ferric technology
• Ivory Work in Bronze Age Canaan
• Glassmaking in the Emerging Israelite Culture

12 Semitic Origins of Literacy: The Aleph-Bethic Script

• The Earliest Records
• Discoveries at Lachish
• A Hoard of Clay Bullae
• The Aramaic Papyri of Yeb

• Israelite Pyrotechnology
• Pyrotechnology and the Prophets
• The Jewish Experience in Persia
• Jewish Merchants and Artisans and Far Eastern Trade
• Beth Shean and Beth Shearim; Jewish Linen and Jewish Glass
• Jewish Dyers and the Royal Purple

14 The Hidden History of the Diaspora: A Matter of Numbers

• How Populous Were the Jews in the Classical Era?
• Why Has the Jewish Presence Been Minimized?
• A New Look at Early Records
• Looking Backward from Sicily, Spain and Venice
• Other Jewish Communities Under Greek and Roman Rule
• Aquileia

15 The Classical Era: Hellenization or Judaization?

• Early Contacts Between Jewish and Greek Cultures
• The Jewish Influence on Greek Philosophy and Science
• Rejection of Jewish Egalitarianism by Greek and Roman Rulers
• Hellenization versus Judaization
• Philo, Josephus, and Other Jewish Writers of the Period
• The Flourishing of Judaism in the Classical Era
• Documentary and Archaeological Evidence

16 The Jews Under Roman Rule: The Second Diaspora

• The Roman Response
• Jews, Christians, and the Emperor Julian
• In the Aftermath of Julian’s Rule
• Roman Attitudes Toward the Artisan
• "Captive Judah" and the Monuments of Rome
• Trastevere: The Jewish Quarter of Rome
• The Jews in Other Regions of the Empire
• The Jewish Attitude Toward Labor; A Final Word

Notes

Bibliography

Index

The Eighth Day
The Hidden History
of the
Jewish Contribution to Civilization

Ancient archeology, as much or more than any other science, is based on theory and hypothesis more than on fact. Many historiographical constructions are hatched from a single artifact, or from a mere reference from a witness whose credibility cannot be proven. The further we probe into the past, the less material we find with which to reconstruct history, and the more subject to interpretation the reconstruction becomes. Written records are unreliable because they are for the most part written, or rewritten, by those who attain power... Once empowered, they employ their synthetic rendition of recorded history as a cover for the iniquitous actions by which power was achieved, as a vindication of crass ambition, and as a rationale for sustaining their hegemony over people and territory.

Conversely, records that present the subjected peoples in a positive light are deliberately deleted or remolded and replaced to suit the interest of their conquerors... Ancient records should therefore be interpolated accordingly...

...The horrific Holocaust perpetrated upon the Jewish people by the Nazis is but the most recent manifestation of an agelong series of desecrations suffered by the Jews. The human loss, the unprecedented, deliberate eradication of six million people for no other reason than they were born of the wrong parentage. is so appalling that another ghastly aspect of the Holocaust is overlooked. Another egregious consequence that both the Jews and the world suffered as a result of Nazi bestiality was the irretrievable loss of mountains of historical data. Uncountable millions of books and documents were put to the torch upon the razing or confiscation of thousands of Jewish enterprises, of thousands of Jewish cultural institutions, and of some six hundred synagogues. The architectural loss was the least part of the disaster that befell the world no less than the Jews; The loss of the vast corpus of documents covering virtually the entire range of the Jewish European experience is a loss that cannot be reconstituted with the same facility with which buildings can be reconstructed. The Jews were a substantial cultural and industrial factor of Central European civilization, but masses of documents that define that history, that demarcate Jewish identity and record Jewish accomplishments, were consumed in the flames of that secondary holocaust...

...Yet the twentieth-century Nazi Holocaust of four year’s duration is merely the latest and not the most momentous of the recurrent devastations that have plagued the Jews over three thousand years....

....The thrust of the thesis being herein presented is to unshroud the extraordinary accomplishments of the Jews and to put in proper perspective the vast contribution the Jews have made to the technological and artistic evolution of civilization. Literacy, a learned trait, is ascribed as the main reason for the extraordinary accomplishments of the Jews as a culture and as a nation...

....There is no doubt that the same effort should be applied to the case histories of all peoples who have suffered oppression. In the search for their roots, many people have discovered how unjustly history is written, how peoples meriting recognition have been relegated to the dust-heap of history, the greatest indignity of all. Science itself has suffered in the process, for truth, the greatest leveler, is also the most effective ladder to the future.

Therein lies our story.

FOLLOWING ARE

FIRST PAGES OF CHAPTERS OF THE EIGHTH DAY:

The tribe of Abraham is popularly categorized as nomadic... Neither biblical representations, archaeological recoveries, ethnological research, nor documentary evidence supports the image so blithely repeated, widely disseminated, and commonly believed....The Jews stemmed from a civilization that had first domesticated wild grains; a civilization that had first made use of the wheel; a civilization that passed from the age of copper and stone to the age of bronze; a civilization in which the secrets of the sophisticated art of glassmaking were discovered, and whose descendant peoples remained exclusively privy to that knowledge for thousands of years! The ancient Jews wee the heirs of many millennia of technological development, and they soon became the carriers of that ancient culture into the world at large.

The seminal civilizations within which the Jewish nation evolved were ravaged time and time again by Egyptian, Persian, Hellenic, Roman and sundry other barbarians, the pirates and warlords of antiquity who sought loot and slaves and power. Until recently, historians gave little weight to the fact that the citadels from which these conquerors ruled were generally engineered and built by war-won slaves or indentured workers, and that the cultures the barbarians thereafter manifested were absorbed, as often as not, from the peoples they conquered. Historians hardly deigned to discount the self-serving renditions of events left to posterity by the conquerors. Thus a "classical" ancient history was created, which congealed into historiographical lore, composed as much of mythology as it was of demonstrable fact.

The Nomadic Myth

Recent discoveries of civilizations older than, and often underlying, those of the "classical" era have roiled the placid surface of scholarly conformity. Revelation...

[---End of First Page of Chapter 1---]

Chapter 2

The Rise of Semitic Civilization
Reading the Record

Although archaeology has undergone a significant change of orientation in the last fifty years, the hunt for precious and exotic artifacts still prejudices research to an unwarranted extent. Curators of museums remain overly devoted to decorating their institutions with lionizing statuary, idolic figures, and precious artifacts so that sponsors can feel their contributions were well served and visitors can be provided with titillating displays. The inordinate space and attention allotted to artifacts that conquerors accumulated from their victims by looting, enslavement, or indenture attributes an inflated historical importance to the culture of the conqueror at the expense of the conquered. More importantly, the misleading impressions that such displays inevitably generate is that the material was produced by the conquerors and not by the conquered. The booty torn from adversaries or victims, the tribute taxed from conquered peoples, are generally assumed to be the creation of the dominating power and attributed to the culture it represents. Scientific literature tends to follow suit and too often reflects the same historical deformity.

A typical example of such historiographical distortion concerns the art of primary glassmaking. Museums are proud to display "Egyptian glass," yet no ancient Egyptian ever produced glass, and probably not even glassware, products made of that primary material.

Again, no museum would feel satisfied unless it had an adequate display of "Roman glass." Yet it is unlikely that any ancient Roman, unless he was an easterner who became a Roman, ever produced either glass or glassware. "Provenance Egypt" would properly declare that the glassware found in Egypt was not necessarily made there, and "Roman Period" would properly fix the chronology of glassware made in the Near East or by "Easterners" and not erroneously credit the Romans with its production. Such accurate labels are seldom employed, although it would seem incumbent upon museums to practice accurate labeling. The misleading labels inevitably lead to...

[---End of First Page of Chapter 2---]

Chapter 3

The Akkadians in Anatolia
A Semitic Trading Empire

It is written that the tribe of Terach dwelt in the land of Shinar in the city of Ur, the city in which Terach’s son, Abraham, was born. Both Shinar and Ur were relegated to a mythical biblical existence until the twentieth century, a presumption that persisted even after the British Consul at Basra in southern Iraq, J.E. Taylor, blundered upon the fabulous city in 1854. Taylor was merely acceding to the instructions of his foreign office to investigate the mysterious mounds in the area at the behest of the British Museum and was unaware of what he had found, for he had no abiding archeological interest nor scientific qualifications. The area was infested with fierce tribesmen, bands of Bedouin brigands to whom tribute had to be paid for passage through or presence in their territory. A British force was assigned to protect the work force hired to excavate the mounds.

The Discovery and Excavation of Ur

One of the huge mounds thus subjected to excavation was known locally as Tel al Muqayyar, "the mound of pitch." The diggers exposed the ruins of many buildings made of bricks stamped with strange symbols that meant nothing to them or to Taylor. Among these buildings the remains of a ziggurat, a magnificent pyramidal structure, were revealed. Its stepped tiers soared to the heavens and it was constructed of the strange bricks. The stamps on the bricks happened to be the names of the original royal architect of the ancient city, Ur-nammu, and of a later Babylonian conqueror of the region, Nabonidus, who, many centuries after it had been first destroyed by invaders, rebuilt the city and the ziggurat of Ur-nammu. The excavators also scooped out scores of baked tablets covered with rows of curious incised characters. Taylor’s interest was piqued by the writing on the cakes of baked clay and the characters stamped on the bricks, but having¼

[---End of First Page of Chapter 3---]

Chapter 4

Ancient Egyptian Historiography
Setting the Record Straigh

Manetho and the Mysterious "Hyksos"

The term "Hyksos" is derived from the words employed by Manetho (323-245 BCE), an Egyptian who rose to become the High Priest of the cult of Serapis at Heliopolis during the reign of the Greek Ptolemies. Manetho was a contemporary Ptolemy II Philadephus (285-246 BCE). He was born at Sebbynnetus (now Samannud), in the Delta region of Lower Egypt, an area that was still replete with vivid memories and traces of the period when patriarchal chieftains from Canaan ruled that area and all of Egypt and Canaan some 1,400 years earlier. Manetho’s version of Egyptian history has long been the standard by which Egyptian history is written. His system of dynastic succession is still employed by the archaeological community although it has long been proven to be inaccurate, misleading, and prejudicial. Manetho’s treatment of a period of several hundreds of years beginning from his "Twelfth Dynasty" forward is particularly suspect because of his sharply anti-Semitic view of a period in which Semitic peoples peacefully augmented their traditional infiltration into the Nile Delta.

We must pause to address the circumstances surrounding the Manetho rendition of Egyptian history in order to fully comprehend how it was that his account, as well as Greek and Roman renditions of history, came to be universally accepted history. Manetho’s attitude was not uncommon. Tacitus, the Roman historian....

[---End of First Page of Chapter 4---]

Chapter 5

Semitic Culture and TechnologyArrive in Egypt

Myths and Misconceptions
About Early Egyptian History

An American engineer, Francis Cope Whitehouse, was among a group of engineers retained by the British a century ago to resolve the problem of increasing the amount of arable lands in the desert wastelands of Egypt, a country then under British hegemony. Whitehouse astonished his employers by reporting that he had confirmed the existence of a vast lake artificially created by Joseph in the time of the Pharaoh Moeris, and that the most practical method of irrigating the arid Egyptian desert was to reconstruct the system of irrigation which Joseph had instituted 3,500 years ago!

El-Fayoum and the Bar Youseff

Whitehouse was a distinguished technician, foresighted enough to have been an early inventor of devices to capture solar energy. In surveying the desert he found, to his amazement, that the problem of the desert irrigation appeared already to have been addressed more than three millennia earlier in the time of biblical Joseph. Tracing the remains of ancient irrigation canals, Whitehouse became intrigued by the existence of a small lake, the Birkut el-Qarun, in a deep basin of the desert known to the Egyptians as el-Fayoum some hundred kilometers southwest of Memphis. The Birkut el-Qarun, or Lake Karoun, was a freshwater lake in the midst of the vast Sahara desert, and yet it had no visible source. His interest piqued by this peculiar circumstance, Whitehouse began an investigation that led to surprising results and to his sincere conclusion that indeed, the lake was a living legacy of a vast irrigation system instituted by none other than Joseph, vizier to the Pharaoh Moeris of Egypt....

[---End of First Page of Chapter 5---]

Chapter 6

The Transformation of Egypt
under Canaanite Rule

The Aamu Revolution

The Aamu revolutionized Egyptian society during the short period of their rule: they taught a people who never knew the wheel, nor bronze, nor the horse; a people who worshiped idols, who prayed to a host of beasts such as the crocodile, and who adored beings with heads of jackals, and beings with beaked heads of birds.

Innovations in Materials, Manufacture and Agriculture

The introduction of the wheel wrought several changes. The potters of Egypt became more productive; they had been obliged to wind coils of clay to the form of a vessel and smooth the ribbed surfaces to shape, or to pound the resistant clay with firm fists, punching the clay into hollow bowls. Now, working on a wheel that whirled its clay burden swiftly around, the supple fingers of the potters could lightly tease the pliant wet mass to form and gently work their wares with new-won ease into elegant, harmonious shapes.

Wheeled vehicles appeared from the East, and horses and oxen to draw them; wheels were affixed to sledges, which, until the time it is said Joseph’s people came to Egypt, had been dragged laboriously by men. Horses were introduced, and this enormous yet amenable new animal was harnessed to haul the newly created carts. The people of Egypt were astounded by the gentle, ungrudging behavior of these grand beasts, by how manageable and responsive they were. They had never seen such animals, let alone believed that such animals would do man’s bidding. The donkeys upon which Asiatic merchants had been portaging goods into Egypt over many hundreds of years were now joined by the proud, magnificent, swift horses....

[---End of First Page of Chapter 6---]

The cultural and technological heritage of the Jews is drawn from four basic elements of the evolution of civilization: agronomic expertise, artisanship, literacy, and commercial entrepreneurism. The seeds of all four of these elements found sustenance in Mesopotamia, and thrived, and grew to scatter their seeds beyond the borders of that rich alluvial land to propagate abroad. The provenance of the Jewish progenitors was the area that cradled civilization. The emigration of such tribes as that of Abraham into Canaan brought the to the coast of the Mediterranean, where commerce freed itself of the trammels of travel by land.

The Historical Background

Overland caravans and river crafts had been the main conveyances for commerce through the third millennium BCE, but as ships became more seaworthy, shipping by sea proved to be more and more economically advantageous. Piracy at sea proved to be more perilous than predatory raids on land caravans; stormy seas brought no more incidence of disaster than did slippery rain-soaked or snowy mountain trails; wind was free, whereas beasts of burden had to be fed; the complement of sailors on a sizable ship were fewer than the handlers, guards, and scouts necessary for the safe conduct of caravans. As ships grew larger and became capable of lading an equivalent quantity of cargo to that portaged by a fair-sized caravan, sea traffic assumed a significant importance in international trade.

Geopolitical events also tended to divert the course of trade to the coasts. The Hittites had become a powerful national entity under Hattusili I, who appears to....

[---End of First Page of Chapter 7---]

Chapter 8

The Emergence of The Israelite Nation
The Dawn of the Iron Age

The seeding of the Iron Age in the hills and forests of Canaan, a process so dramatically documented in the Bible, is substantiated in its broad outlines by archeological revelations, although the means by which that settlement came about are subject to considerable debate. It matters little, as far as the outcome is concerned, whether one accepts in whole or in pert the biblical version of the manner in which a new cultural entity, the Israelites, emerged in the Canaanite highlands of western Asia. Two events are universally recognized as having taken place coincidently in the Canaan of the twelfth century BCE; the birth of the Israelite nation and the inauguration of the Iron Age.

Canaan from the Bronze age to the Iron Age

Professor William Dever describes the dynamic changes taking place during the Bronze Age, in which Israelite culture gestated and from which the Israelites emerged:

A great transformation took place just after approximately 2000 BCE. The brief transition between Early Bronze IV and Middle Bronze I witnessed . . . a nearly complete change in technology, economic basis, social structure, and political organization between approximately 2000 and 1800 BCE, as urbanism increasingly took hold. . . . The long process of collapse in the Southern Levant was halted. A sudden revival of urban life ushered in the Bronze Middle Age. By about 1800 BCE, 65 percent of the population lived in large fortified cities. The proliferation of these is the most characteristic feature of the period.¹

The introduction and diffusion of tin-bronze metallurgy, an entirely new repertoire of pottery, the industrialization of ceramic technology through wheel-thrown . . .

[---End of First Page of Chapter 8---]

Chapter 9

A Question of Identity
Hebrews, Habiru, and Israelites

The Hebrews wandered through the desert for forty years. So is it written. It is written that the desert experience brought the wandering Hebrews close to their Creator; that the great band of bedraggled stragglers shuffled through the sands of the Sinai desert and survived through the miracles wrought by Him; that they learned His universal laws through the great prophet who led them through the wilderness. It is written that a covenant was entered into between the people and their Creator; that upon acceptance of His divine ordinances, the wanderers were chosen to bear the burden of delivering that Law to a wicked world of iniquity and idolatry; that they were rewarded for assuming that heavy burden by the promise of a land to dwell in from which they would wander no more.

The Biblical Record

The sojourn in the desert is the only period in all of biblical account in which the Hebrews are depicted as desert dwellers, a blink in time out of some four thousand years of recorded tribal, cultural, and national existence. Even so, it is written that the Hebrews did not choose the desert as a way of life but were constrained by the force of circumstance to suffer through the period; that they quickly wearied of wandering and yearned for a sedentary life in a land of their own. It is clear that, unlike those who look to the desert as their home, they did not separate into small family units and disperse, as desert life demands, but remained a multitude that survived in mass to congeal into a nation.

After one year, one month, and one day in the wilderness of the Sinai, "Moses chose able men out of all Israel, and made them the heads over the people, rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens."¹ They were organized into a national entity composed of twelve congregations, autonomous....

[---End of First Page of Chapter 9---]

Chapter 10

Architecture and Engineering
Achievements of the Israelites

Hundreds of Israelite communities mushroomed in the hill country that ridges Eretz Yisrael. They were implanted upon the rugged hilltops at the end of the Bronze Age, the biblical period of Judges. The region had never been extensively populated; it was a rock-strewn, wooded area that had to be laboriously cleared for habitation and farming. Other Israelite communities spread out across the Negev, a desolate, arid region. The housing and productive installations of the Israelites bore the unmistakable hallmarks of a people welled versed in architecture and agriculture, a people whose knowledge and competence in crafts of all kinds reflected long and intimate urban and agronomic heritages. Many of the Israelites were literate, a cultural attribute that was not relegated to a few specialized scribes but was shared by the common people to an extent that the world at large had not yet experienced.

Domestic Architecture

The remarkable aspect of the houses that proliferated throughout Eretz Yisrael was their distinctive, radical, advanced type of architecture. The Israelite private houses were. For the period, ample, well-constructed habitations, and were distinguished by the use of a row of stone pillars for supporting the roof beams. This orthostatic feature was almost entirely absent from precedent private houses of the region and rare even in monumental structures. The houses were generally but not always composed of four rooms flanking a courtyard, a layout that served as a model for the structures of the subsequent "classical" period. The Israelite four-room pillared house is an ancestor and prototype of the "Roman" villa.

By the monarchial period, the privately owned Israelite houses, while never reaching palatial proportions, had become more elaborate; a second story was....

[---End of First Page of Chapter 10---]

Chapter 11

Pyrotechnology in Eretz Yisrael
The Archaeological Evidence

The advance of civilization is appropriately measured by pyrotechnical competence. Its Neolithic beginnings are marked by the use of fire. The designations Chalcolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages are simply reflections of the stage of pyrotechnology at which a particular culture has arrived. The ability to smelt iron from its ore and to produce glass from mineral silicates are the most noteworthy adjuncts of the shift from bronze to the Iron Age, and although they are by no means the only measures of a culture’s sophistication, they serve as an accurate gauge of its advance. The ferric and vitric arts were important parts of the heritage that enriched Israelite culture from its Mesopotamian roots; the Jews became the carriers of those arts into the Western World.

Pyrotechnology in other Near Eastern Cultures

Among the many myths that have fallen by the wayside are those concerning the advent of ferric technology. The Egyptians, the Hittites, and the Philistines have all been proposed as the cultures from which iron-making was introduced to Canaan, but without taking cognizance of the fact that the requisite pyrotechnology was absent from all those cultures. The fact that the Egyptians were incapable of such technology has been long since, albeit grudgingly, accepted.

The only significant iron object recovered from Egyptian tombs is a Mesopotamian dagger found in the tomb of Tutankhamen. The blade has not been analyzed and in any event may have been manufactured from meteoric iron. The few iron artifacts recovered from early Hittite centers have now been conclusively shown to have been imports from Amorite and Hurrian (Urartian) territory to the east. Philistine sites have been extensively excavated, and whereas a few iron objects have been found in their ruins, no evidence of the requisite pyrotechnology has ever appeared during the Iron Age I phase (the twelfth to tenth centuries BCE)...

[---End of First Page of Chapter 11---]

Chapter 12

Semitic Origins of Literacy
The Aleph-Bethic Script

The Hebrew script on the handle of Ahilud’s jug at Raddana, the descriptive information on the handles found in the rubble of Gibeon, the inscriptions in the tunnel of Siloam and other such seals and inscriptions are a few of the manifestations of another stimulus of the great thrust forward into a new stage of civilization that took place at this critical juncture of history: the invention of acrophonic writing and the consequent development and proliferation of the aleph-bethic writing system. The invention heralded a revolutionary advance in communication and in making knowledge available; for the first time in the world’s history, universal literacy became feasible.

The Earliest Records

The earliest example of such writing was found at Serabit al-Khadem in the western Sinai, dating to the Middle Bronze Age about 1650-1600 BCE Semitic-language-speaking slaves were put to work in the remote desert turquoise and copper mines by the Egyptians soon after control by the Canaanite chiefs was shattered and Canaan was subjugated to Theban pharaonic rule. There is no doubt that the redactors of the inscriptions were the Semitic slaves and not their Egyptian overlords, for much of the graffiti scrawled over the rock surfaces near the mines was addressed to Semitic deities, among whom the favored ones appear to have been El and his consort, the "serpent lady" Elath. The content of the messages certify to the cultural pedigree and mark the social status of the inscribers: "Oh my God" reads a pitiful plea by one of these miserable, erudite Semitic slaves, "rescue me from the interior of the mine!"

It was the great Sir William Flinders Petrie who first came across potsherd fragments on which these "Proto-Sinaitic" inscriptions appear. Some twenty-two characters comprised the complete catalogue of Canaanite signs, a group of symbols....

[---End of First Page of Chapter 12---]

Chapter 13

Artisans of the Diaspora
The Jews in Persia

During the period in which the hilltop villages of the Israelites and Judahites were prospering and maturing into cohesive nations, Mesopotamia fell into a prolonged period of technological stagnation. Protracted subjugation to the Egyptians and Hittites ended with a standoff between the great powers, but struggles ensued between the northern Assyrian and the southern Babylonian regimes in which first Assyria and then Babylonia was devastated. On the eastern flank the Elamites constantly plagued whichever of the two centers dominated the area, but most disruptive was the increasing pressure of dissident Aramaean flanking the western borders of Assyria and Babylonia.

The Aramaeans were situated athwart the critical trade routes at the crown of the Fertile Crescent. During the eleventh century bce vigorous Aramaean pressures severely affected the conduct of trade along the commercial lifeline joining East and West, a threat that "seems to have encouraged the Babylonians and Assyrians to forget their differences." Renewed prosperity in the region hinged on the establishment of unhindered access to the West and the Mediterranean, and on an infusion of technological skills. Mesopotamia, the region that had nurtured civilization for many millennia, had fallen far behind in industrial capability. The artisans who could help bridge this critical gap were to be found in Israel and Judah. After the Aramaeans were brought under control, the Eastern powers turned covetous attention toward the nations still blocking domination of the region’s critical commercial routes: the Israelites, Judahites and their commercial allies, the sea-going Canaanites of Tyre and Sidon.

Israelite Pyrotechnology

The smelting of iron and the production of glass took place in the thickly forested areas across the entire northern sector of Eretz Yisrael. The hardwood trees....

[---End of First Page of Chapter 13---]

Chapter 14

The Hidden History of the Diaspora
A Matter of Numbers

The Roman Forum! Aphrodisias! Ephesus! Sardis! Corinth! Thessalonica! Fabulous names, names that evoke vivid visions of grand ruins and dazzling art. Names that contain mysteries to be unraveled, events to be recaptured, peoples to resurrected from obscurity. Apparitions of the Jews can be discerned among the ashes and ashlars strewn about the ruins of these ancient communities, nebulous but insistent, dim but demanding revelation.

The term "classical" was coined to infer "of the highest class," and is customarily applied to the period of Greek and Roman hegemony over the Near East. The civilization the Greek and Roman mercenary armies encountered in that area was indeed of the highest order, one that they captured and absorbed and made their own. The world was ripe for Judaic egalitarian precepts, and their universal appeal led to a rapid and massive multiplication of the number of Jews by those who were attracted to and identified with Judaic ethical, moral, and, to a significant extent, religious principles. The threat that those principles posed to rulers and ruling classes proved to be the undoing of the existence of a Judahite national entity.

How Populous Were the Jews in the Classical Era?

The Greek author of the Sibylline Chronicles puts the total population of the Jews of the Roman empire at 6,944,000, a figure that was derived from a census taken by the Emperor Claudius in 42 CE. The sheer numbers of Jews of that time bespeak the importance of Jewish culture in the life of the Greeks and Romans far beyond that commonly accredited to them. The astonishing size of the figure exposes the abysmal depth of our ignorance of the seminal role such a number of Jews must have played in Western civilization....

[---End of First Page of Chapter 14---]

Chapter 15

The Classical Era
Hellenization or Judaization?

From the twelfth to the seventh century BCE, the "Greeks" were a collection of disparate, contentious, illiterate, barbarian societies. The insular Minoan and the peninsular Mycenaean civilizations that preceded the formation of a "Greek" or "Hellenic" culture in the Aegean region had passed from the scene together their writing and much of their technology. A period of literary darkness spanning more than four centuries intervenes between the passage of the Mycenaeans and the beginning of the process of the coagulation of the disparate tribes into a new cultural entity.

The ancient communities of the region did not continue the use of the primitive "Linear A" scripture of the Cretan island Minoans nor of the somewhat more advanced "Linear B" system that the peninsular Mycenaeans had developed, let alone participate in their evolution. The tribes that descended from Central Asia at the end of the twelfth century to meld with the autochthonous tribes of the region had no literate tradition whatsoever. Virtually all that is known of both the peninsular and the insular peoples strewn about the Aegean in that interim period has been gleaned from relics retrieved from the area and from their iconography.

An oral tradition did exist in the Aegean region, insular and peninsular, consisting of poetic narrative containing traces of the memory of the glorious civilizations that had burst into being in the region and had faded from the scene. The vestiges of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations are discernible in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Homeric sagas that have descended through the centuries by oral repetition and refinement, to be finally committed to writing after the Greeks had absorbed the Semitic aleph-beth. The Iliad does provide a single, anomalous hint of an awareness by the Homeric poets of the art of writing, a single mention of a message on a folded tablet, and we must assume that it was a diptych that was being described with that phrase. The diptych cannot have been either Mycenaean, Minoan, or Greek at the time. "The poet was aware of....

[---End of First Page of Chapter 15---]

Chapter 16

The Jews under Roman Rule
The Second Diaspora

The ancient Jews did proselytize; therein lay the threat to authority, for the philosophy of the Jews was anti-autocratic at heart. Evidence of a missionary out-reach of some importance has come down to us from a variety of sources. This "subversive" activity was persistent, and its libertarian effect was felt in Rome at an early period, a continuation of the rampant Judaization of the Greeks.

The Roman Response

Rome reacted early and harshly to the insidious antiestablishmentarian influence of Jewish precepts. In 139 BCE the praetor of Rome, Cornelius Hispalus, "compelled the Jews to return to their homes because they attempted to corrupt Roman morals through their cult of Jupiter Sabazius." This event took place about a year after Simon, the Hasmonean ruler, delegated Numenius, son of Antiochus, and Antipater, son of Jason, as envoys to the Roman Senate to plead on behalf of the Jews. The confusion exhibited by the praetor regarding distinguishing the Sabbath and the Phrygian god (Jupiter) Sabazia may well have arisen from the circumstance that some of the proselytizing Jews came from Phrygia, where Sabazius was a god identified with Dionysus and Jupiter, and the similarity of the name induced a mistaken identification with the Jewish God. Whatever the reason for the confusion displayed by the praetor, clearly he, as well as the consuls of Rome, already felt at this early date their social structure was being undermined by insidious Jewish ideology.

The Jews, however, were absolutely essential for the health of the Roman economy; the technology of the Near East was vital to Roman industry, and Jewish slaves and free artisans were a prime factor in the provision of the technological disciplines required for the maintenance of the Roman establishment. As Jewish numbers grew, so did their philosophy filter out into the Roman society....

[---End of First Page of Chapter 16---]

[BIBLIOGRAPHY AND INDEX FOLLOW CHAPTER 16]