»Top-Down« and »Bottom-up« Monumentality at Kuntillet 'Ajrud: The Evolution of the Benchroom at Kuntillet 'Ajrud as a Communal Monument
Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, 2021
This essay analyzes the aggregate of texts, images, and vessels in the area of the benchroom in B... more This essay analyzes the aggregate of texts, images, and vessels in the area of the benchroom in Building A of the Iron II site of Kuntillet 'Ajrud using the framework of monumentality. I examine the ways in which the monumentality of this space developed through central planning but also through the aggregation of material depositions left in the benchroom by diverse people. The ritual meaning of the benchroom and its importance as a communal monument at this site was interconnected to the message of protection communicated by its »top-down« design as a royal fort and by the royal decorative program of its painted walls. All of these aspects of the site conditioned the evolution of the benchroom into a communal monument where people could petition the gods for protection.
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Papers by Alice Mandell
The present study highlights how the Canaanite Amarna Letters offer unique insight into Canaanite literary culture in the Late Bronze Age. The letters represent the diplomatic acumen of scribes writing letters for local elites that were sent to the Egyptian court in the mid-fourteenth century BCE. Yet they also preserve the earliest evidence of Canaanite literary forms and compositional practices. The letters include memorized formulae and expressions, word pairs, poetic devices, and the use of repetition to frame poetic units, which are common in the practices of later first-millennium scribes working in this same region, including those who wrote the Hebrew Bible. The letters also offer insight into the ways that the scribes combined memorized units into new narrative contexts. Such features added literary texture to the letters, but also contributed to their rhetorical aims. While some poetic passages in the letters may be novel compositions, there is also evidence that literary forms and expressions were integral to Canaanite scribal education by the Amarna period. The Canaanite Letters therefore set an important precedent for literary creation, and for the scribes' bricolage practices in the process of creating new diplomatic letters.
This article belongs to the Special Issue The Bible and Ancient Mesopotamia, edited by Robin Baker.
(Contributors include Céline Debourse and Michael Jursa; Selim Ferruh Adalı; Alinda Damsma; Richard S. Hess; Robin Baker; Avraham Faust, and Amar Annus.)
tried to speak clearly to their scribal peers in Egypt through the medium of their scribal craft. (For the whole article, please contact me).
in the Ancient Levant and in the Hebrew Bible
culture in the study of Early Alphabetic inscriptions. I engage with recent writings in
sociolinguistics, new literacy studies, and multimodality theory to address the ways
in which the design, choice in script, and socio-cultural settings of ancient inscriptions
informed their meaning. I address the use of the early alphabetic script on the
Lachish Ewer and Kefar Veradim Bowl as a means of marking group membership.
Keywords: Early Alphabetic Inscriptions, Multimodality, Lachish Ewer, Kefar Veradim
Bowl
to writing might be applied in a meaningful way to the study of NWS
monumental inscriptions. We offer a summary of recent scholarship in
the studies of sociolinguistics and visual design that form heuristic tools
for analyzing such inscriptions, with a focus upon inscriptions embedded
into architectonic structures.