Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

archaeology

My New Book: Forthcoming in February

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Dear friends,

I’ve spent much of my career exploring the ancient religious imagination—how people understood the divine, lived with the sacred, and interacted with each other across boundaries of belief. And how they acted on those beliefs.

Today, I’m excited to share some personal news that grows out of that work:

I have a new book coming out in February.

It’s called An Enchanted World: The Shared Religious Landscape of Late Antiquity, and it’s now officially listed on the publisher’s website.

This book is about a world we often forget: one where Jews, Christians, and so-called pagans didn’t live in separate, sealed communities but shared rituals, holy places, and even religious expectations. It was a world full of wonder—of angels, demons, healing waters, miracle workers, and sacred dreams.
A world where the divine was not distant but immediate, present, and tangible.

 

In the months ahead, I’ll be sharing more about the book—its ideas, stories, and the texts and people that fill its pages. I’ll also post some excerpts, offer reflections, and invite you to be part of the launch.

For now, I just wanted to say thank you. This book grew in no small part from the conversations I’ve had with many of you—through this blog, on the podcast, and in classrooms and lectures over the years.

I’m looking forward to bringing you into An Enchanted World.

With gratitude,
Michael

The “Isaiah Seal”

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Biblical Archaeology Review just published this new, tiny find from the excavations at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem: a clay seal (or bulla) that seems to contain the name Isaiah with (a little more doubtfully) the word “prophet” written underneath.  The top register of the seal seems to depict an animal, perhaps a doe.  The article, “Isaiah’s Signature Uncovered in Jerusalem:  Evidence of the Prophet Isaiah”  can be accessed here and has been picked up quickly by a number of news sites.  Paleojudaica also has a nice write-up about this.

How significant is the find?

Popular media tends to keep rewriting the same story for finds of this sort: they prove the veracity of the Bible.  In this case, however, nobody seriously doubts the existence of Isaiah, who is also attested outside of his own book in the Bible in some of the more historical writings (2 Kings 18).  Finding the a seal of the biblical prophet Isaiah would indeed be interesting but the fact that it would then attest to his actual existence is perhaps the least interesting thing about it.  (The headline, incidentally, is slightly misleading.  It is the seal that is the “signature,” not the writing on it, which was probably carved on the stamp by someone else.)

To my mind, there are instead three things of genuine interest about this seal:

  1. It attests to the formal, institutionalized nature of “the prophet.”  Seals tended to go on official correspondence and the fact that Isaiah would have one with his title strongly suggests that he holds some kind of official position, like “court prophet.”  This confirms other evidence from the Bible that prophets were not only, as we tend to think of them, random people who were believed to have received divine communication but that they also could hold official jobs in the court or temple.
  2. It suggests that either Isaiah or (probably more likely) his retinue was literate.  Prophecy was usually an oral phenomenon.  Other biblical books contain examples of prophecies being put into writing (e..g, Baruch writes down Jeremiah’s prophecies in Jeremiah 36) or otherwise thematizing writing (Ezekiel 3) but the process by which the prophet’s words became text is enigmatic.  Some time ago, a seal that may have belonged to Jeremiah’s scribe, Baruch, was found (there remain questions about its authenticity).  This seal, if authentic, would show the prophet sending correspondence in his own name, not that of his scribe.  This has potential implications for understanding the interplay of the oral and written in prophetic circles.
  3. Finally, I’m intrigued by the iconography.  Why would the prophet Isaiah use a doe?  Is there anything significant about this choice or, for that matter, any of the iconography that appears on ancient Israelite seals (of which we have many)?

The seal is hardly earth shattering, but it is also not insignificant.  If it really is what it is being claimed to be.

The Temple Mount: Conference Report

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I have spent much of the last month attending conferences.  Fun, but tiring.  But fun.

Let me offer a few thoughts on one of them,  “Marking the Sacred: ​The Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem,” which took place at Providence College on June 5-7, 2017.  The conference involved about thirty scholars who discussed the archaeology and significance of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim perspectives.  Given the intensely political nature of this topic, it was refreshing to be able to engage in a sustained civil, critical, and productive discussion that crossed ideological, political, and religious fault-lines.  Tremendous credit goes to the organizer, Professor Joan Branham, for creating such an environment.

I was unable to attend the last day, but through the first two there were a few leitmotifs that struck me:

1. There was a temple on the Temple Mount.  Now, this might be rather obvious but both modern political discourse and a recent kerfuffle over an inaccurate article in the New York Times a couple of years ago (for my own response to this, see here) led to review of the various kinds of evidence that demonstrate that a Jewish temple existed on this site.  For example, Jodi Magness discussed the literary evidence; Shmuel Gibson the archaeological evidence that can be gleaned from archival sources; and Yuval Branch some of the extant archaeological finds.  It was fascinating to see a discussion of a photograph of a piece of mosaic floor found on the Temple Mount and published long ago (picture above).  While this mosaic floor almost certainly was not from the Jewish temple, there was uncertainty about whether it could be part of an ancient church built on the site or was put in later by the Umayyads.  It was also heartening for me to hear Sari Nusseibeh explicitly condemn the attempts to deny that there was a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount.

2.  It is a bit misleading to speak of a single “Second Temple.”  There was an original “second” temple that according to literary sources was renovated.  That was followed by what must have been another renovation in the Hellenistic period.  The Hasmoneans then either renovated or reconstructed the temple after they took control in the mid-second century BCE; Lawrence Schiffman argued that the plan of that temple is preserved in Mishnah Middot.  And then, of course, Herod extensively reconstructed the temple.  There was more than one “Second Temple.”

3.  The Temple Mount has always been a political football.  After its destruction, Romans and Christians had a stake in keeping it desolate: the desolation was a living testament to the supercession of Judaism.  This is highlighted by the Christian building program in Jerusalem in the fourth century and beyond.  Thus, as discussed especially by Robert Ousterhout, Jon Seligman, and Tracy Thorpe, the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre intentionally was meant to create a contrast with the devastated Temple Mount.  Christian supercessionism was deliberately etched into the urban landscape.  This very downgrading of the Temple Mount created a strange and newly competitive dynamic when Muslims gained control of and began to build on the site.  Michael Press has an informative post on this issue.

4.  Given the impossibility (and undesirability) of actually digging in the Temple Mount, there are emerging new approaches to the evidence that is available.  Ancient lumber, for example, can be analyzed for age and provenance.  Most interesting to me was the approach to ancient garbage, which can provide some insight (as discussed by Helena Roth) into pilgrimage at the site.

A fuller record of the papers can be found at twitter using the handle: #templemountharam.  A volume of the papers is forthcoming.

Digital Preservation

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Over the past few years, institutional digital repositories and more broad-based digital “commons” have proliferated.  Many are found at universities (Brown now has one) and sites such as Zenodo and Humanities Commons.  Such platforms serve two purposes.  First, they provide a (relatively) stable environment that can preserve digital data.  Second, they serve as a digital repository through which scholars can make their work freely accessible to others.  While it is this latter potential that has largely attracted scholarly attention and enthusiasm (Sarah Bond recently argued that depositing one’s work in a “commons” is far preferable to putting it on academia.edu, a for-profit entity), I have been thinking lately more about the issue of preservation and specifically how it relates to the modern creation of scholarly and artistic works.

The underlying problem is a simple one: most scholarly and creative work today is done digitally.  My own file cabinets are almost empty now and are largely uninteresting; my Dropbox folder, on the other hand, is a teeming, semi-organized mess of notes, manuscripts, drafts, correspondence (although most of that is in my email account), grant applications, and the like.  Now, I like to muck around in scholarly archives and to read biographies of scholars that are based on such archives.  And while I can’t imagine that anyone will be interested in my particular files, I wonder about the archives of scholars and artists who led genuinely creative and interesting lives.  What happens to that part of their literary legacy that remains alive only in digital form?

Lest my concern be taken as mere narcissistic rumbling (scholars worried about the unfinished work of other scholars?  Who cares?), let me offer a more pointed example.  I have had occasion recently to have a series of discussions with archaeologists about their process of publication.  Archaeological excavations generate reams of data.  Locations of walls and strata changes need to be carefully noted and objects – especially the often enormous quantity of pottery sherds – each need to be carefully logged and catalogued.  Pictures are taken.  In the past, these records were kept in field notebooks and other written forms.  At the end of an excavation, a final report is produced.  The data upon which that report was produced were, ideally, filed away in a personal or institutional archive.

As with any scientific data, archaeological data are valuable.  Other archaeologists use them to test the reconstructions and hypotheses.  Later archaeologists frequently want to ask new questions of the older data.  Since archaeology is by nature destructive, often all that remains of a site is whatever previous archaeologists chose to note.

Today, nearly all archaeological recording is done electronically.  There is no single way that archaeologists do this recording.  Some use off-the-shelf proprietary databases, others might create their own data managements systems.  In any case, when the final report is completed and the excavation is wrapped up, all of that data goes… well, where exactly?

Unlike scientists, many archaeologists and humanists have not thought very hard about the preservation of digital data.  Scientists routinely deposit their raw data in institutional repositories and are called upon to articulate their digital data management and preservation plan on many grant applications. The paths open to others are less clear.

Digital platforms offer many opportunities for archaeologists and other scholars who wish to more fully document their work.  An archaeological report, for example, can be published online and linked with all of this raw data.  A literary work can be linked to previous drafts.  There are many fascinating attempts in the digital humanities to make the data and process behind completed works more transparent.  Such projects, however, generally involve a significant investment of resources.  It may be ideal but remains unrealistic to expect that every scholarly product will be disseminated with links to the raw data and process from which it emerged.

It is with cases like scholarly archives and archaeological data that institutional digital depositories and digital commons provide a simple and inexpensive solution.  Upon completion of a project (or a career) the entire archive of data can be converted to an accessible format (e.g., XML); bundled together with more or less organization; and then deposited.  Each deposit receives a library (MARC) record, which makes it visible to the entire web (especially if the repository is part of the OCLC).  One could imagine cases where someone might want to embargo these archives for a time (easy enough to do) but ordinarily such data would then be easy to locate and freely accessible.

The most involved part of this process would be conversion of data into a standard, open format such as XML.  Most common proprietary programs (e.g., Microsoft Word), however, already have this capability.  In other cases, the software that would perform this transformation is relatively easy and inexpensive to produce.  The advantage of this conversion is that keeping the data in a simple, open access format allows future users to reconvert the data to whatever format they find most useful rather than forcing them to find the same proprietary program compatible with older data.  The whole conversion process might take a few hours; the final step, for example, of wrapping up an excavation report.  Scholars might bundle the XML folder of their work with their email and, voila, an archive is produced.

At worst, such a digital work would sit unaccessed and unused – hardly a unique situation for scholarly works or archives.  Yet the costs, in time, money, and digital storage, are low (and continue to drop).  It is time to think about digital preservation as a staple of our “best practices.”

Create, Process, Link: Some Final Thoughts on The Big Ancient Mediterranean Conference

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Now back home it will take me a while to process what I’ve learned at The Big Ancient Mediterranean Conference, and even longer to work through my new, vastly expanded, to-do list.  Here I want only to sketch out a few thoughts.  I don’t think that any of them are particularly original but having the intellectual space and dialogue to focus on them helped me to work through and articulate them for myself.

First, I think that it is heuristically useful to think of digital humanities (DH) projects as being of three types: data creation, processing tools, and aggregators or linkers.  The data creators (some of the more impressive representatives at the conference were Nomisma, Open Philology, Corpus Scriptorium, and the emerging and impressive Digital Latin Library) make digital data.  The tools, such as those that do social network analysis (e.g., Gephi), natural language processing (xrenner), or plotting make that data not just accessible but also useful.  And the linkers (Trismegistos, Pleaides) link different sorts of data, most often from different sites, for a variety of purposes.  I find that thinking about DH projects this way is useful even if some projects fall between these cracks and most do more than one of these things.

While I think that the “linkers” are some of the more exciting DH sites, it all starts with the data.  Data creation isn’t sexy.  It also is of limited use if they are created for only one site or purpose.  If one is going to go through the laborious process of creating digital data, one may as well try to make them not just accessible but useful.  That requires structuring data in a way that existing tools can, with minor modifications, process them; including URIs so that linkers can reuse them; creating APIs to give computing access to them; and encoding them in an open rather than proprietary format so that they will be accessible when software standards change.  This also applies, mutatis mutandis, to tools and aggregators.  Tools should be designed to apply to a wide swath of structured data and aggregators function at their best when they can harvest or scrape data from a large number of sites.

For Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine, the road has been long and slow in large measure because the site was created ahead of the standard structures and the very existence of URIs.  Over the two decades of the projects existence, we have had to transform our data several times.  The transformations from SGML to XML and from our schema to EpiDoc were some of the more traumatic ones.  Each required not only the custom development of an automated process but also manual cleaning and refining of the data (some of which we are still doing).  Now we must add URIs to allow geographical and chronological linking.  Each of these transformations was costly and I predict – despite assurances that we now have stable standards – that there will be more to come.  These projects, even the data collections, are never fully complete or stable.  I’m not sure how one prepares for this but it is an inevitable, and for the scholar frustrating, part of any DH project.

This brings me to a second thought.  In the past DH often fell somewhere between the administrative cracks of IT and the library.  In recent years the weight has shifted to the library and it has become increasingly clear to me that that is a good thing.  Each of these projects – whether a data collection, a tool, or an aggregator – carries within it new knowledge.  Hence, it requires preservation.  We preserve in an accessible format almost all printed scholarly materials, no matter how useless or bad.  The same principle needs to apply to digital projects.  With the creation of digital repositories and the low cost of storage this should not be overly difficult.  This includes software: Github, now a favorite place to store code and DH data, will eventually disappoint us.  Similarly, just as libraries preserve new knowledge so too do they have methods for cataloging and finding it.  There are already a bewildering array of digital projects and they are not systematically cataloged, whether they are active, on the “way back machine”, or mothballed.  Cataloging and the development of finding aids are desiderata.  In the interim, for those who work in classical antiquity. two lists, here and here, are useful although incomplete and imperfect are useful.

A third issue is the very definition of scholarship.  Although I am now part of several overlapping conversations that are wrestling with the nature of DH scholarship I cannot say that I am much closer to an answer.  Data collection, on its face, shouldn’t be “scholarship” – but then isn’t the creation of print critical editions of texts, which largely involves collation, considered scholarship?   Digital tools – programs – are at heart intellectual models: just as in a monograph, you input data and you emerge with a synthesis or intellectual product.  One of the key differences, in fact, is that scholars writing books are often not as rigorous or explicit about their assumptions and methodologies as is a computer program.  Linkers bring together, even if they don’t synthesize, data in new ways that create research questions and drive our conversations – doesn’t theory do this?  I am not claiming that these should all count a priori as “scholarship”, but it points to a critical need for scholars (especially those in positions of power who hire and tenure) to wrestle seriously with possibility that the meaning of scholarship is shifting in a sharp but recognizable way, and that that is not necessarily bad.

A final thought in an already too-long blog post.  The issue of audience needs to be taken seriously.  A scholarly DH project might justifiably be directed at just a few hundred kindred scholars, just as journal articles or monographs are.  I think for most scholars engaged in DH, though, that seems unsatisfying.  We recognize the enormous potential of these projects not just to speak to specialists but also to teach students and engage a wider public in intellectual pursuits in which we are deeply invested.  The challenge is realizing that potential.  Sites need to be designed to address and engage multiple audiences and that is no easy feat.  It usually involves creating separate views or portals which is a costly endeavor – the cost of a good accessible interface could run between $15,000-$40,000.  Moreover, we do not yet have good usability studies for such projects or often the infrastructure or resources to conduct them.  Here perhaps we can better draw on the intellectual resources of our academic colleagues in the business schools and psychology who study and teach such things.

I owe special thanks to the organizers of this conference,  Professors Sarah Bond and Paul Dilley.  They created a conference that was of high intellectual value, paced humanely, with a collegial environment that facilitated useful interactions, all the while using remote technologies judiciously and effectively.  As one who has organized several conferences, I know that this is no mean accomplishment.

The conference tweets have been storified and can be seen here, here, and here.