Text and Tablet

Near Eastern Archaeology, the Old Testament and New Possibilities

Arthur Gibson, Brook W.R. Pearson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138737730
• eBook ISBN: 9781351733434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient History

This title was first published in 2000. Text and Tablet balances a blend of logic, post-analytical philosophy, French philosophy and literary criticism to carefully introduce some of these issues to the reader. Just as writers such as Derrida and Kermode have been interested in relating religion and philosophy to literature, so this book extends the idea of multidisciplinary synthesis to connect ancient and modern issues. Linking philosophy to literature, Old Testament texts and studies, Near East archaeology, and Religious ideas and debates in fresh ways, the author explores ancient texts and sites and developing interpretations of some recent excavations. Addressing issues raised by leading thinkers (Chomsky, Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Renfrew, Barr) on language, life and history, Gibson seeks to challenge many entrenched views based on familiar discoveries and proposes fresh engagement between the interpretation of Old Testament studies and archaeology, using a new, multidisciplinary analysis.

Part I
A Conceptual Framework

1
Philosophical Archaeology and Ancient Texts

Introduction

The archaeologist Ian Hodder (1999: 20) states, ‘It is remarkable that there is almost no literature available on how archaeologists come to their conclusions.’ Within the present book’s priority - that of the Near East and its relations to the Old Testament’s narratives—this reported situation cannot be given the extensive attention that it deserves, though it serves to justify the book’s concern with identifying and assessing relations between empirical data and conclusions which are said to follow from them. These data include site archaeology, ancient narratives, our contemporary mentality, and their relations; the present study is not primarily concerned with the investigation of methodology, however. The philosophical elements presented in this book are not intended as decoration secondary to archaeology and interpretation of ancient texts. They are there as practical functions in the study of the ancient Near East and the Old Testament.

The connections between data and conclusions are of central concern to philosophy. This interest is also partly a function of perceived relations between philosophy and the subject to which it is applied. A presupposition of this book is that a philosophy of a subject will include use of other subjects. This can sometimes highlight the need to introduce a feature from another subject as a component of philosophy itself. Some of the reasons for this are because we are ignorant of what the identity of philosophy is, and of what the identities of philosophies are. There is gross dispute over a range of fundamental questions about this sort of issue between many philosophers. On the one side, some philosophers claim that attention to the ‘philosophy of philosophy’ is futile. Against this there are many opposed theories within philosophy on such topics as logic, language, the history of philosophy, and philosophy of social theory. So an attempt to apply philosophy to other subjects will be fraught with problems.

An analogy is appropriate here: Nancy Cartwright (1999: 180) refines the idea of ‘bridge principles’, albeit, in her context, for physics and economics. She states that, ‘theories in physics do not generally represent what happens in the world;…the fundamental principles of theories in physics do not represent what happens; rather, the theory gives purely abstract relations between abstract concepts… When we want to represent what happens in these situations we need to go beyond the theory and build a representative model.’ Cartwright (1999: 181) notes that this notion reflects the sense of an ‘interpretative model’ which operates by ‘bridge principles’ linking distinct fields of meaning. Obviously, there are a number of differences between philosophy of science and a philosophy of texts from the ancient Near East and Old Testament. Yet, we should be wary of dismissing all parallels between philosophies of sciences and humanities, not least since Cartwright’s book proposes substantial parallels between physics and economics. Cartwright (1999: 201) refers to the notion of theory-nets, as opposed to theories. So one could say my argument would be that, within a spectrum of philosophical theory-nets, there is the potential for devising representational models that lead to the exposure of bridge principles for other subjects, which have interpretative significance for the ancient Near East. This perspective distances itself from commitment to a specific theory, and/or treats it as a phenomenon in need of bridging-principles. An explicitly developed (future) philosophy of the ancient Near East is more provisional than, and possibly at least as complex as, a philosophy of physics which recognises parallels with economics. The foregoing is not a proposal for a formal methodology. There are evident disanalogies, though the use of prediction/forecasting in physics and economics might be profitably compared to retrojection in archaeology and our interpretation projected into the ancient world.

Might this use of philosophy concentrate on method and technical terms, as well as a review of various theories? Rather, this book presents an applied engagement with a variety of actual problems within the studies on the ancient Near East and Old Testament material. This choice itself presupposes that other subjects have something to contribute to philosophy itself. Research on the ancient Near East and the Old Testament has benefited from the introduction of other subjects, such as literary analysis, aesthetics, history theory and scientific testing. So an attempt to produce some possible routes to a philosophy of these facets of the ancient world will have to reflect on such issues. Moreover, when the conjunction of philosophy and other subjects suggest a new interpretative state of affairs, there may be need to modify and propose fresh views in these subjects or with regard to how they impinge on the evidence. In a certain respect, then, we are faced with the need for a future Renaissance scenario.

Is it possible to handle some uses of literary theory by treating them as subsets of archaeological general theory, noting the archaeologist Colin Renfrew’s (1982) concern to advocate research for an archaeology of the mind? Notoriously, Freud (1953) and the historian of ideas Foucault (1966, 1969) employed not only the metaphor of ‘archaeology’, but also some of its conceptual structure by which to construct concepts of mind and its relation to language.¹ May these writers have perceived or responded under the impress of some traces of mental elements in archaeological analysis and its historical retrojection? Some possibilities associated with this type of proposal are initiated in Gibson (1998b).

¹ Although they employ this terminology in different ways, as Forrester 1997 shows.

The Old Testament is a dense, and perceptually unstable, set of narratives. Traditions of institutionalism within and external to it have, to varying degrees, thwarted this apprehension by facilitating an imperious sense of predictable, normative meaning. The new hides within the old, however. Components of unacknowledged possibilities are ossified within the ancient text. One should not overstate the scale of such claims; yet may not modern alien perception identify unfamiliar ancient sense? Sometimes it is worth interrogating influential theories that have been adopted as the norm, and re-posing discarded or unlikely theories to test our assessment of our pasts as well as the ancient past. As distinguished scientists sometimes intimate (see Rees 1999: 145): good, even wrong, ideas are extremely scarce. They are needed to rival and test accepted hypotheses, as Popper (1982) explained, especially where the peculiar problems associated with retrojection are involved, as is the case in such widely separated subjects as mathematical cosmology, and investigation of the ancient world’s narratives in archaeological contexts.

Adjacent to this perspective is the prospect that relating ancient genres to modern criticism could enrich both. Some French literary analysis (typified by Les Temps Modernes, for example, in the studies on George Bataille—TM 54 [1999] 602), suitably adjusted and qualified, might be re-deployed to ancient Near East narrative—and vice versa. Riffaterre (1991), among others, speaks of an intertext between narratives. Beyond this rudimentary idea, intertextuality ranges from (a) reference; to: (b) the weaker allusive relation or parody between the read narrative and texts which it presupposes. A quotation is an evident example of the former, while some other intertextual relations code complex nests of scarcely identifiable sources. Although one should map the limiting functions of intentionality, I suggest that the intertext can be conceived live metaphorically as a mirror of the contributing authorial (un)consciousness, semantically contracting schedules within and between narratives. One does not have to adopt an idea of a collective unconscious infecting texts to appreciate that ancient narratives often mirror the psychological archetypes ranging through the societies in which narratives were composed. Certainly, problems of interpretation obtrude on attempts to retrieve a conception of which property of the unconscious is mediated by a symbolic transaction. Riffaterre (1991) proposes that, in French, highly disputed narratives can yield to decidable semantic assessment that will expose internal senses. Gibson (1997) has an original theory to realise this sort of situation in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Signs to the External World

Such a conception is, I suggest, also applicable to a range of semantically informative physical objects that have been used as signs in the external world. To select a common illustration (to which we will regularly return in this book, in particular because of its common uses), how should we conceive of an ancient animal such as a lion when used in an ancient text, tablet or site? As Gombrich (1977) has shown, some mental states of sculptors and their worlds are, in complex senses, manifested in the ‘lions’ that they produce. In this situation, word and object share some common features, though discontinuities between them are informative mirrors of ancient imagination. Some features of myths and societies are condensed into similarities and contrasts embodied in the lion-type.

Livingstone (1986: 59–60) has, in respect of Mesopotamian influences, drawn attention to early provenance of the lion motif. For example, Gudea’s presenting the ‘mace [or axe], lion-headed weapon studied with ḫalalu stones’, and Eninnu’s fundamental use of it as early as the 3rd millennium BC. It appears that these types of usage were dominated by the seminal Sumerian term me, an expression for ‘archetype’. It is significant that this term is employed, for example, to mark the perceived essence of what it is to be civilisation, among other functions. Accordingly, the lion was fundamental to the semantics of text, site and mentality in Sumerian and Akkadian. This is especially important in view of the Mesopotamian mythological me weapon text, discussed in Chapter 8 below.

Figure 1.1 depicts the Hittite Lion Gate at Hattusas, which, as Akurgal (1962) pointed out, embodies an archetype that, from early times, was influential long after the demise of the empire that constructed Hattusas. It is worth attending to this in the perspective of the pragmatics of producing such art and it site-realisation. Such lion figures, and the like, were often composed as substantial additions to buildings and gate-pillars, which therefore had to be structurally integrated precisely by the ancient architects. Eleanor Robson’s (1999: 185–90) studies on Mesopotamian mathematics at the turn of the 3rd millennium BC demonstrate that such builders articulated geometric

Figure 1.1 The Hittite lion Gate at Ḫattusas

coefficients and, for example, equations for producing trapezoidal bricks. She proposes that such mathematical phenomena do not accord with our division of pure and applied mathematics, were quasi-algorithmic in nature, and related to mental calculation at junctures where we should have detailed written formulae to achieve such abstract calculation to implement building-plans. So, we should not accord to the characteristic Mesopotamian placing and existence of architectural symbols such as the lion some sort of casual and incidental significance. If we add to the building process, the role of the artist/craftsman as a functionary of this type of process, it assists us to recognise the complex and institutionalised position that sculptured architectural symbols occupied in ancient Mesopotamia. (Obviously someone might object that these symbols had a mere decorative purpose; yet the following and other investigations show that this judgement is not capable of explaining the close relation such symbols had to cultic and conceptual matters.) Clearly, the lion archetype was modified by many other cultural impulses, including earlier Sumerian, later Assyrian and Canaanite images. No doubt the use of ‘lion’ in, for example, Genesis 49, as an individualising ideal, and Daniel 7’s use of ‘lion’ as a complex empire motif, are variously differentiated later ironising transformations of such early archetypal patterns. When different types of symbols (such as lion and iron axe) are combined, frequently there is an informative transfer and merging of types.

So it should not surprise us to discover a Hittite reference to a lion made of iron from the sky (cf. Kosak 1982). In turn, this complements the reference in the Sumerian Lugalbanda Epic: ‘He took his axe made of meteoritic iron’ (cf. Hallo 1983). This use of alleged ‘meteoritic iron’ (KU-BI AN-NA) may presuppose an early imagined knowledge of the putative ‘celestial’, as well as terrestrial, sources of iron, certainly by 1600 BC and probably before 2000 BC (cf. Muhly et al, 1985). It seems evident that the celestial source of iron must have had its origins in astral cultic mythology, rather than any extensive empirical metallurgical sources. This cluster of relations, made in cultic astrology and war, is intensified when we consider later Canaanite iron axes. In Chapter 7 below, an Ugaritic iron axe, replete with lion-head, is discussed in connection with the background military and cultic polemics of the axe-raising miracle in Elisha’s ministry in 2 Kings 6.

It will be helpful for handling the investigation of such examples, if the basis of an overall theoretical framework can be established, partially as an outcome of linking archaeology with such subjects as logic, linguistics, literary theory and aesthetics. I hope that proposals in this book will not only be helpful for its primary subjects (Old Testament as well as Near East/Mesopotamian interpretation and archaeology), but also for the development of aspects explored in other subjects here. There is no reason why one should not attempt to develop bases for a theory of meaning employing uses of language in subjects other than, for example, poetry. Barthes (1977, 1985) derived insights for his theorizing from study of the Genesis Jacob narrative. Ingraffia’s (1995) research, on the relation of postmodern theory to biblical theology, has not only shown how the latter can be revived by the former; he also obliquely demonstrates that theological analysis of narrative can contribute new theoretical insights for literary and philosophical theory.

Multi-disciplinary applications benefit not only the target-subject, but also the subject that is applied to it. For example, logic, when brought into archaeology, can derive new insight for archaeology respecting logic’s (and logics’) own developments. T.J. Smiley’s (1982) exposition of the ‘Schematic Fallacy’ is pertinent here. Informally expressed, it is the use of—actually arbitrary—formal schemata as though they were the logical forms of sentences. Smiley points out that some distinguished logicians, who have constructed mathematical or philosophical logic systems, have fallen into this fallacy.

This fallacy can be reformulated as a corollary of Gidden’s (1984: 180) critique of mistaken ‘reification’ in sociology. It is worth linking this parallel to the project of developing a facet for a sociology of archaeology, not only of ancient societies, but also a sociology of archaeology. Archaeologists impose their patterns of rationality on data and their discourses, just as literary expositors do. Further investigation of natural languages, and any other domains of semiotic expression—such as artefacts—is urgently needed to enable one to assess what basis there is for generalisation of logical inference over disparate subjects, as well as how individual subjects might contribute to the construction of criteria for reasoning. Conversely, extant versions of logics, when applied in this perspective, and even at the elementary levels, can excavate fundamental relations in archaeology which might have been silted-up by cultural ideology. The possible future definitive synthesis of almost any subject can be brought about by such multi-disciplinary—and not mere interdisciplinary—links, partly because one subject does not internally possess the criteria for its own complete definition. No slice of the world is logically an island, in the sense that even with random functions, they displace the empirical and/or conceptual space that comprises their contexts, and this produces functional relations, which prevents autonomy. I am not proposing analysis involving formal logic. Much of the scope of the term ‘logical’ here is sustained by making explicit consistent interpretation of the ancient data, and what is taken to follow from them.

Visual Predicates

The above listing of literary theory and aesthetics may seem novel, or perhaps only relevant for the history of art in archaeology. Rather, it will be maintained below that research ideas in such topics can be of explanatory value in archaeology. For example, what logical status do artefacts, such as religious centre statues or the above lions, have in descriptive power? Chapter 2, below, will argue that literary theory and aesthetics (and other subjects) can be formulated so as to occasion the exposure of a close logical relation between the logic of language and the logic of objects that depict identities.

The lion motif introduced above is a case in point: a stone lion is a live metaphor of an actual lion. There is a calculable mapping relation between the actual and the figurative; not only for the measurement of overlap respecting shared properties, but also respecting the contrasts which embody interfaces for measuring representation and discontinuity. I shall propose that this type of range of features can be logically characterised. A fundamental reason for this is that the identity of meaning is itself a type of live metaphor notion.

On the basis of this sort of approach, it eventually follows that the representational properties of artefacts are themselves tautologies, sometimes in counter-intuitive ways, with logical predicates, that is, logico-linguistic predicates. (See Gibson forthcoming e: Section 1.2, for a detailed study of this terminology, and Gibson forthcoming c on counter-intuition.) Such an approach uses a relative identity theory, in which relations of identity have the form ‘x = y’ with respect to a predicate or property F (following Geach 1981). My treatment also implements a realist approach to language, integrated into a fresh theory of meaning, a view which is developed in the present book and Gibson 1997b, 2000a. A realist theory of meaning does not have to be a naive or self-evident correspondence of language with the external world. There are unexpected and counter-intuitive correspondences between language and its references. Consequently, we should develop this type of state of affairs as a counterintuitive notion of realism. We should also allow for the obvious but sometimes-neglected features of logic applied to language. But some applications are quite basic; for example, logic represents false as well as true propositions (and other natural language expressions that can be paraphrased into logic). When 1 Kings 18 presents expressions used by Baal priests, it clearly allows them the claim that Baal acts in such and such a way; yet the narrative denounces such assertions as false. Consequently, a logic that ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Dedication
• PART I: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
• PART II: OLD TESTAMENT AND NEAR EAST INTERPRETATION
• Bibliography