Items of Interest: Camels, Philistine Towns, etc

It’s been a while since i’ve been able to update. The usual excuses. A few stories of importance or at least excitement recently.


Giant Camel bones found in Syria, estimated to be 100,000 years old. These guys were as big as giraffes or elephants. It seems the animals were mostly hunted for food rather than used as transportation.

And seperately, at the lovely Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, a talk on November 5th with the following abstract. The Israeli Antiquities Authority has a history of excluding, and even destroying non "Israelite" archaeological finds in Palestine. This find by the IAA bolsters evidence that the majority of civilizational activity in Palestine in the 9th century BC and beyond were in the coastal regions where the indigenous Canaanite population has always lived, and continue to today as modern Palestinians.

"Yavneh, a city some 20 km south of Tel Aviv, was a Philistine city on the border with Judah. It was occupied for numerous periods and was home to Canaanites, Philistines, Jews, Christians, Samaritans, Moslems and other people. This lecture concerns a unique find made in 2002, during a salvage excavation at the "Temple Hill" at Yavneh on behalf of the Israeli Antiquities Authority. The excavation revealed a round pit from roughly the 9th century BC, serving as a favissa (Genizah in Hebrew), that is, a place for safekeeping of cultic objects, which could no longer be used in the cult. The favissa included thousands of bowls and chalices, some of them decorated, many showing traces of soot from burning of perfumes and/or incense. There were also dozens of juglets and other vessels. The most important find is more than a hundred intact or restored cultic stands.

Many finds will soon be exhibited at the Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv. They are a rare find, and Yavneh is the best preserved and richest of all those found in Israel so far. The number of cultic stands is unheard of — it more than doubles the existing amount known from 120 years of excavations in Israel. The Yavneh stands will contribute to the long-going debate about the function and meaning of these objects. Other vessels can teach us much about the burning of incense/perfumes in cultic activities. The finds are also important for art history and for the study of Philistine religion in a period barely known from historical sources."