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The Mesha Inscription has attracted much attention and scholarly debate ever since its discovery. King Mesha of Moab, mentioned in the Bible, threw off the yoke of Omride supremacy and reigned from his capital of Dibon over a kingdom that extended both north and south of the Wadi Mujib (the river Arnon). The identification of modern-day Dhiban with Dibon has never been doubted. In this article, however, it is suggested that Dibon, mentioned in the inscription, was not Mesha's capital, but the tribe of which he was the leader. Mesha forged a tribal confederation into a tribal kingdom in Moab. The name of Mesha's capital was Carchoh, also mentioned in the inscription and located at present-day Dhiban. Biblical Kir-Hareseth is identified with this same Carchoh, and the heartland of Mesha's kingdom is north of the Wadi Mujib.
2011 •
Societies on the periphery of empires experience a spectrum of changes as a result of their interaction with or incorporation into empires. One discernible pattern is that of sociopolitical and economic intensifi cation that becomes visible at roughly the same time as the onset of imperial rule. This paper investigates the role of the peripheral elite in such processes of intensifi cation through a study of the Ammonites, a small, tribally organized society on the far edge of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires (ca. 750–500 ). As subjects of these empires, the local Ammonite elite were actively involved in the processes of intensifi cation. In this sense they were imperial collaborators, taking advantage of their mediating position between these empires and the local context to improve their own status, wealth, and power.
Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
Tribes, Trade, and Towns: A New Framework for the Late Iron Age in Southern Jordan and the Negev2001 •
Recent research on the Transjordanian Iron Age kingdoms stresses their tribal nature, involvement in the Arabian trade, regional variation, and the mixture of pottery traditions. To determine how this system functioned in southern Jordan (Edom) and the Negev, 19th-century ethnographic data from the same area is used to derive a model of how different tribal groups interacted. The model is based on five aspects: territory and movement, trade, interaction with a gateway town, relationship to central government, and relationship with an imperial power. It is proposed that this model can be appropriately applied to the late Iron Age in southern Jordan and the Negev. Edom was composed of largely independent tribes connected by bonds of allegiance, who interacted with others from Arabia, the Negev, and the west, and con- trolled the trade among Arabia, Edom, the Beersheba Valley, and Gaza. Certain towns on this route were gathering places for such groups or centers controlling Assyrian interests in the Arabian trade.
2011 •
2011 •
We propose that an early Moabite territorial entity emerged south of Wadi Mujib (the biblical Arnon) in the late Iron I – the late 11th and 10th centuries BC. A chain of fortresses protected Khirbet Balu a — the hub of this polity — on the north and east. The Balu a Stele may be associated with this polity. We further propose that the prime-mover behind the rise of the south Moabite territorial entity was the trade of copper from the Wadi Faynan area south of the Dead Sea. Its abandonment in the late 10th century BC may have been the result of the campaign of Sheshonq I in the south and the diversion of at least part of the Arabah copper flow to the west, in the direction of the Mediterranean coast and Egypt.
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Antigüedad in progress... Actas del I Congreso Internacional de Jóvenes Investigadores del Mundo Antiguo (CIJIMA I(26-29/03/2014). Pedro D. Conesa Navarro, José J. Martínez García, Celso M. Sánchez Mondéjar, Carlos Molina Valero, Lucía García Carreras (Coords.). CEPOAT, Universidad de Murcia
Amón, Moab y Edom: Una aproximación al nomadismo durante la Edad del Hierro en Transjordania2017 •
Near Eastern Archaeology
A Landscape Comes to Life: The Iron I Period1999 •
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Iron Age Transjordan (ca. 1400-500 BCE). In The …
The kingdoms of Ammon, Moab and Edom: the archaeology of society in Late Bronze1995 •
Chapter 51 of Steiner, Margreet L. and Ann E. Killebrew, The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant, c.8000 - 332 BCE. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Moab during the Iron Age II Period2014 •
Journal of The Economic and Social History of The Orient 43(3): 221-256
THE POLITICS OF MESHA: SEGMENTED IDENTITIES AND STATE FORMATION IN IRON AGE MOAB2000 •
2008 •
Persian Period in Transjordan:Towards a characterisation of ceramic tradtions of an obscure period
Persian Period in Transjordan:Towards a characterisation of ceramic tradtions of an obscure period2006 •
2011 •
Near Eastern Archaeology
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Palestine exploration quarterly
Lipschits, O. 2004. The Rural Settlement in Judah in the Sixth Century BCE: A Rejoinder. Palestine Exploration Quarterly 136: 99-107.2004 •
In J.M.Tebes (ed.), Unearthing the Wilderness: Studies on the History and Archaeology of the Negev and Edom in the Iron Age. Leuven, Peeters, 1-30, 2014.
Socio-Economic Fluctuations and Chiefdom Formation in Edom, the Negev and the Hejaz during the First Millennium BCE2009 •
Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University
Some Thoughts on Khirbet En-Nahas, Edom, Biblical History and Anthropologya Response to Israel Finkelstein2006 •
Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory
The Pottery Informatics Query Database: A New Method for Mathematic and Quantitative Analyses of Large Regional Ceramic Datasets2014 •
Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 24(1): 27-54
Feeding the Community: Objects, Scarcity, and Commensality in the Early Iron Age Southern Levant2011 •