Monday, July 30, 2018

Closing the big gap between Umayyads and late Hellenistic


Image result for hellenistic and umayyad palace


 

 

 

 

 

“… 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.


 

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). ….

 

Image result for tel bet yerah

Thursday, July 19, 2018

White elephant in the realm: Birth of Mohammed, Reformation


 Image result for year of elephant


 

by

 

Damien F. Mackey

 

 

“About the only thing these two idioms have in common is the word elephant, but that was enough to pull them together to produce white elephant in the room. … the Wikipedia entry notes that elephant in the room is “not to be confused with white elephant“.”

 

Neal’s blog

 

 

What a marvellous thing is text book history, or, ought one say, would-be history!  

Both the prophet Mohammed and the Reformation seem to kick off with a white elephant.

Mohammed (Muhammad), we are told, was born in “the Year of the Elephant”:


 

We all know that the year of the Elephant is the year in which Mohammad was allegedly born. The year Islam credits for this event is the year 570 A.D. Islamic tradition says that another major event took place in the same year which is narrated in Sura 105 “The Elephant”, and what happened to the army that was marching on Mecca to destroy it and the Kaaba.

 

And the gift of a white elephant to pope Leo X may have helped launch the Reformation.


 

…. Amazingly, this whole elephant episode may have helped spark the Protestant Reformation.

Pope Leo X was known for having an overly extravagant papal court, including, among other things, regularly throwing lavish masquerades at the Vatican. Soon-to-be Protestant Reformers were already angry at the Church, but the fact the Pope now had a special pet elephant from India named Hanno was viewed as the perfect over-the-top example of how corrupt the papacy had become.

Just one year after the elephant’s death, Martin Luther published his 95 Theses. One historian writes that Hanno the elephant “formed the basis for one of the first published criticisms leveled against him by German supporters of Martin Luther.” ….

 

I personally do not believe in all this Year of such-and-such an animal stuff, e.g. Elephant. However, as a Tiger football supporter from childhood (a family tradition), I was more than happy to learn in the year 2000, said to be the Year of the Tiger, that I had been born in the previous Year of the Tiger (1950). The Richmond Tigers are the reigning premiers.

 

Image result for richmond premiership

 

Be that as it may, I think that whoever came up with the idea that the prophet Mohammed was born in the year when a certain Abraha (or Abrahas), of the kingdom of Axum (or Aksum), invaded Mecca, must have been seeing pink elephants. For as I have argued in my “Biography of the Prophet Mohammed” series, Mohammed was not a real historical person, his biography is replete with anachronisms, and, moreover, as I pointed out in e.g.: 

 

Biography of the Prophet Mohammed (Muhammad) Seriously Mangles History. Part Two: From Birth to Marriage

 


 

 

 

the supposed invasion of Abraha is simply an Islamic appropriation of the real invasion by the neo-Assyrian king, Sennacherib, against, not Mecca and its Kaaba, but Jerusalem and its Temple – the date being closer to 700 BC than to 570 AD.

It is just one of various examples of ancient Ninevite history being absorbed into the pseudo-history of Mohammed. See e.g. my article:

 

Prophet Jonah, Nineveh, and Mohammed

 


 

Now Abraha was apparently riding a white elephant.

But, as if that weren’t enough, Abraha’s elephant is said to have been named Mahmud, or Mahmoud the Praiseworthy.

But, wait, isn’t that the name-epithet of Mohammed?

The One with the Throne is praised (Mahmud) AND HE IS MUHAMMAD”.


 

Most strange, too, it is that Martin Luther, who kicked off the Reformation - possibly on the back of (so to speak) a white elephant - has been described as “another Nehemiah”.

See e.g. my:

 

Nehemiah and Martin Luther

 


 

in which one will also read that: “The two men [Nehemiah and Luther] are almost carbon copies of each other”.

All of a sudden we are getting too many Nehemiahs for comfort - considering that the biblical one seems to re-emerge (and, once again, under Persian auspices) during the life of the Prophet Mohammed:

 

Two Supposed Nehemiahs: BC time and AD time

 


 

Has someone been seeing too many pink elephants?

 

Or, put another way, has white elephant become something of an elephant in the room?

 

Image result for elephant in the room