“… misled by
their stern belief in textbook chronology archaeologists have, time and again,
distorted the situation laid bare by excavations to match their pre-conceived
dates. Yet, the time to allow stratigraphy its say may be closer than ever”.
Gunnar Heinsohn
In what follows, professor Heinsohn gives great import to the Nabataeans,
whose cultural influence, however, appears to have bene negligible.
Thus Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabataeans
Many examples of graffiti and
inscriptions—largely of names and greetings—document the area of Nabataean
culture, which extended as far north as the north end of the Dead Sea,
and testify to widespread literacy; but except for a few letters[10]
no Nabataean literature has survived, nor was any noted in antiquity.[11][12][13] Onomastic
analysis has suggested[14]
that Nabataean culture may have had multiple influences. Classical references
to the Nabataeans begin with Diodorus
Siculus ….
More promising, I think, would be to substitute Nabataeans with the
Hellenistic Greeks of Syria, which thus enables the identification
of the enigmatic Umayyads with their neo-Hellenistic architecture, out of
fashion for 700 years, in and near Jerusalem in the 8th century.
ARABS OF THE 8th CENTURY: CULTURAL IMITATORS OR ORIGINAL CREATORS?
….
The revisionist thesis (Gibson 2011) that Muhammad's Quranic
geography is better suited to the Nabataean area around Petra than the area of
Mecca and Medina, enables the identification of the enigmatic Umayyads with
their neo-Hellenistic architecture, out of fashion for 700 years, in and near
Jerusalem in the 8th century.
By employing (with Tiberias as an example) the
stratigraphy-based approach to the 1st millennium CE, early Christianity,
early Islam as well as Rabbinical Tanakh-Judaism all develop side by side in
the 1st/2nd c. CE, i.e. 8th/9th c. CE stratigraphically. They emerge
in the competition for finding the most appropriate way to lead a righteous
Jewish life. JEWISH EVIDENCE
of 1st millennium
CE TIBERIAS confirms the contemporaneity of its major periods in the
time-span of the 8th-10th c.
CE: Between 1 and the 930s CE there are only some 230 years with
stratigraphy! [from Heinsohn 2018]
….
|
II Are Nabataean and Umayyad art styles really 700 years apart?
So, who was capable to place 15 m deep cement foundations
under Jerusalem's Umayyad palaces in front of the Temple Hill? Whose Arabic
realm was located close enough to the Holy City to [build] … there in such a
massive way? Who were the Arabs well known for alliances with [?]
|
Eventually, the Israeli scholars decided to invoke a geological
miracle to obey Christian chronology and, at the same time, make sense of the
stratigraphy of Tiberias. That mover of a higher order was identified as a
mega-earthquake of 749 CE [AD] afflicting all the lands from Damascus to Egypt.
With surgical precision that [disaster] … had pushed the 1st c. BCE … Roman
material upwards until it stopped precisely at the Umayyad level of the 7th/8th
c. ff. CE. The Arab material, however, was kept in its position in such a
wondrous manner that the Roman material was neither allowed to stop
inappropriately below nor to move inappropriately above the Arab material
believed to have arrived some 700 years later.
Yet, all the stratigraphic evidence does really show (for the
period preceding the catastrophe that drowned the 2nd/3rd. c. CE Roman theatre
of Tiberias) is the contemporaneity of 7th/8th ff. c. CE Arabs and 1st c. BCE
to 2nd c. CE Romans. Thus, Early Medieval Umayyads followed as directly after
Late Hellenisms (=Late Roman Republic = Late Latène of the 1st c. BCE) as Roman Imperial Antiquity (1st-3rd c. CE). However,
misled by their stern belief in textbook chronology archaeologists have, time
and again, distorted the situation laid bare by excavations to match their
pre-conceived dates. Yet, the time to allow stratigraphy its say may be closer
than ever.
A recent example for such fresh openness is provided by Bet
Yerah on the southern tip of Lake Kinnereth. For decades, a large fortified
enclosure on this site … was misidentified as a synagogue from Byzantine Late
Antiquity (4th-6th c.). Yet fresh excavations completed in 2013 point to the
Umayyad qasr (castrum) of al-Sinnabra from the Early Middle Ages
(8th-10th c.). That
fortress cuts through the site’s Hellenistic walls whose period is dated some
700 years earlier. Even the name of the place, Al-Sinnabra or Sinn
en-Nabra (Umayyad Arabic), is still the same as in Hellenistic times (700
years earlier) when it was known as Sennabris (Greek):
“Post-Hellenistic presence on Tel Bet Yeraḥ was quite
limited in extent and did not produce massive deposits. Early excavators
reported Roman remains, but virtually nothing of this period can be identified
in the remaining collections. Byzantine occupation appears to be limited to the
church excavated and published by Delougaz and Haines” (Greenberg/Tal/Da’adli
2017, 1).
700-year period have long been seen by art historians
(e.g., Avi-Jonah 1942). Indeed, there are "close relations between the art
of Ahnas and the Nabataean sculptural school reflected at Khirbat et Tannur. Despite
the time gap between the sites, this affinity cannot be fortuitous"
(Talgam 2004,100). ….
