A Late Iron Age Cult Stand from Gezer

Material Culture MattersEssays on the Archaeology of the

Southern Levant in Honor of Seymour Gitin

Edited by

John R. Spencer, Robert A. Mullins, and Aaron J. Brody

Published on behalf of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeology by

Eisenbrauns Winona Lake, Indiana

2014

Offprint From:

v

Contents

Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viiPreface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

John R. SpencerSy Gitin: A Fellow’s Reminiscences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvi

Aaron J. BrodyPersonal Reminiscences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xviii

Robert A. MullinsBibliography of Seymour Gitin—Update . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxi

The Umayyad Pottery of Palestine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Marwan Abu Khalaf

Marked Jar Handles from Tel Miqne–Ekron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17David Ben-Shlomo

The Southwestern Border of Judah in the Ninth and Eighth Centuries b.c.e. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Jeffrey A. Blakely, James W. Hardin, and Daniel M. Master

Interregional Interaction in the Late Iron Age: Phoenician and Other Foreign Goods from Tell en-Nasbeh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Aaron Brody

Three Middle Bronze II Burials from Tel Zahara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69Susan L. Cohen and Wiesław Więckowski

A Late Iron Age Cult Stand from Gezer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81Garth Gilmour

Tomb Raiding in Western Ramallah Province, Palestine: An Ethnographic Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Salah Hussein al-Houdalieh

Lambs to the Slaughter: Late Iron Age Cultic Orientations at Philistine Ekron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

Edward F. Maher

Competing Material Culture: Philistine Settlement at Tel Miqne–Ekron in the Early Iron Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

Laura B. Mazow

vi contents

Mother-and-Child Figurines in the Levant from the Late Bronze Age through the Persian Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

Beth Alpert Nakhai

The Evolution of the Sacred Area at Tell es-Sultan/Jericho . . . . . . . . . . 199Hani Nur el-Din

“Ashdod Ware” from Ekron Stratum IV: Degenerated and Late Philistine Decorated Ware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209

Steven M. Ortiz

New Perspectives on the Chalcolithic Period in the Galilee: Investigations at the Site of Marj Rabba . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

Yorke M. Rowan and Morag M. Kersel

An Overview of Iron Age Gaza in Light of the Archaeological Evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

Moain Sadeq

Tobacco Pipes and the Ophir Expedition to Southern Sinai: Archaeological Evidence of Tobacco Smoking among 18th- and 20th-Century Bedouin Squatters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

Benjamin Adam Saidel

King David in Mujīr al-Dīn’s Fifteenth-Century History of Jerusalem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

Robert Schick

An Iron Age II Tomb at ʿAnata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281Hamdan Taha

The Ups and Downs of Settlement Patterns: Why Sites Fluctuate . . . . . . . 295Joe Uziel, Itzhaq Shai, and Deborah Cassuto

The Horned Stands from Tell Afis and Hazor and the “Crowns” from Nahal Mishmar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309

Alexander Zukerman

81

A Late Iron Age Cult Stand from Gezer

Garth GilmourUniversity of stellenbosch

IntroductionDuring the 1973 season of Phase II of the Hebrew Union College–Harvard Se-

mitic Museum excavations at Tel Gezer, directed by Joe D. Seger, a red-slipped cy-lindrical fenestrated stand was uncovered in Field VII (figs. 1–3). The stand, object 2119, was found in several pieces in mixed fill layer 36038A in Field VII. The object is incomplete, and part of the profile is missing above the shoulder ridge, below the rim. 1

The stand, which had a diameter at the base of 18.7 cm and was at least 39 cm high, was wheel-made as a cylinder. The ends are open and at the top is a rounded rim. A row of four rectangular windows was cut into the stand when the clay was leather hard. The windows are approximately 6 cm high and 5 cm wide, and some of the corners are roughly rounded. The base is 5.7 cm high, after which the walls gradually taper inwards until 6.4 cm above the windows a pronounced ridge separates the top of the stand from the body below. This ridge is 14.8 cm in diameter, and the top of the stand f lares from a diameter of 12.6 cm just above the ridge to 15.2 cm just below the rim.

The Gezer stand falls generally into the corpus of cylindrical stands that appear in the Levant from the Middle Bronze Age to the 10th century b.c.e. (Mazar 1980: 93–96), though its shape is unusual, even when taking into account the variety of this corpus. The high base and tapered profile are echoed in several stands (e.g., Tell Qa-sile stratum X [Mazar 1980: 87–89, fig. 23] and Beth Shean stratum V [Rowe 1940:

1. St

Author’s note: It is a pleasure to dedicate this paper to Sy Gitin, a scholar who has shown the way to me and many others by example, in kindness, and with much good humor. I am grateful to the Department of Old Testament, University of Stellenbosch, for their support in the preparation of this paper.

and 2119 is to be published in Gezer VI: The Objects from Phases I and II (1964–1974) (Gilmour forthcoming). This is a publication project based on the assemblage of several thousand objects excavated during the 11 years of the Tell Gezer field project (1964–74), directed by W. G. Dever and Associate Director H. Darrell Lance (1964–71), and Joe D. Seger (1972–74).

Offprint from:Material Culture Matters: Essays on the Archaeology of theSouthern Levant in Honor of Seymour Gitin, edited by John R. Spencer, Robert A. Mullins, and Aaron J. Brody© Copyright 2014 Eisenbrauns. All rights reserved.

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pls. 14:3, 16:2]), but the wide, slightly f lared rim above a shoulder ridge is rare, perhaps unparalleled.

The stand was found in locus 36038A in Field VII at Gezer. This locus was part of a massive backfill from Stratum III, dated to the late third and second centuries b.c.e., that extended across Field VII and raised the level of the tell by up to two meters (Gitin 1990: 31). The contents of the locus were mixed, with small numbers of Chalcolithic, Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age sherds, and some Hellenistic sherds. However, the bulk of the pottery from Fill 36038A was dated to the late Iron Age II, which was to be expected as the backfill was created by digging large pits into the late Iron II levels.

Development of Cylindrical Cult StandsCylindrical fenestrated stands are unusual in Iron IIC, though other examples from

Tel Miqne–Ekron, Jerusalem, and Tel Halif (Lahav) in the northern Negev suggest that a new category of stands confined to southern sites in the late Iron Age is indicated here.

Tall cylindrical stands have a long history in the ancient Near East, dating from at least the beginning of the 3rd millennium b.c.e. Their development in this early period

Fig. 1. Cult Stand 2119 from Gezer (drawing: D. Karges).

83A Late Iron Age Cult Stand from Gezer

is recorded especially in glyptic art, and by the 2nd millennium their presence in exca-vated contexts becomes more marked. Their numbers increase in the Late Bronze Age in Canaan, to the extent that they can become a significant element in Canaanite material culture. Their numbers reach a peak in the early Iron Age, especially in the Jezreel and Beth Shean valleys, before they decline in popularity during the period of the Divided Monarchy.

Cylindrical stands serving a variety of purposes, including cultic, have a wide dis-tribution in time and space in the ancient Near East. They feature early on in Meso-potamia, where representations on cylinder seals from the mid- to late-3rd millennium b.c.e. onward show simple pinched-waist cylindrical stands that served several pur-poses, usually in cultic contexts, including libations, as pots containing trees and fruit and possibly as burners with f lames (e.g., Pritchard 1969: nos. 525 and 698; Frankfort 1939: pl. 25c; Buchanan 1966: no. 342). In Egypt, a very thin, high stand appears in artistic renditions from Old Kingdom times as a support for food offerings, incense, libation, f loral, and even burned offerings (Smith 1958: pls. 13, 39A; Aldred 1978: 3.1; see Frankfort 1924: 128). They are known in excavated contexts at a number of sites, including Amarna (Peet and Woolley 1923: 37; pls. 46.II/1034B–C, II/251) and Deir el-Medineh (Nagel 1938: figs. 19.62, 72.24–25).

Fig. 2. Cult Stand 2119 from Gezer (photograph: G. Gilmour).

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In the Aegean, particularly in Crete, tall stone lamps dating from the early 16th century to the end of the palatial period in the 14th century are noted by Meyers (2003: 77). In addition, cult stands with mul-tiple loop handles and occasionally molded snakes be-come common in cultic and domestic contexts in Late Minoan III in Crete (Gesell 1976).

In the Levant, the concept of the cult stand dates back to the Chalcolithic, where fenestrated pedestalled bowls appear in pottery and stone. The type develops throughout the Bronze Age, but its function (and par-ticularly its association with cult) is not always clear (Amiran and Porat 1984; Amiran 1989; 1992; Braun 1990). During the 2nd millennium, these stands un-dergo a change, with the bowls being separated from the stands and the stands themselves acquiring a variety of decorative embellishments and occasionally handles. By the early Iron Age, the variations are manifold, with windows being oval, rectangular, or triangular; plastic molding ranging from simple ring molding as in earlier periods in Egypt and Mesopotamia to leaves or lugs, animals, and human figures; and painted decoration ranging from simple red slip or wash to elaborate red or red and black decoration.

The proliferation of stands in the late 2nd millennium reaches its apex in the 11th to 10th centuries in the Jezreel and Beth Shean valleys, with the greatest number of stands from any one level coming from the lower level V temples at Beth Shean itself, where 10 complete examples and fragments from 43 more are recorded (Rowe 1940: 38–42; Gilmour 1995: 78, 306–15). 2

Cylindrical stands are found in a variety of contexts in Iron Age I, including do-mestic areas, temples, secondary cult sites, and workshop areas, while their Late and Middle Bronze Age predecessors came almost exclusively from temple contexts.

The function of these stands in their early Iron Age contexts remains unclear, but if their Mesopotamian predecessors are at all indicative they probably served a number of purposes. However, although they are often referred to in the literature as incense burners, there is little evidence that they performed this function. Although incense

2. Rowe lists 43 complete and fragmentary stands from both Lower Level V temples, in three categories: cylinders, shrine-houses, and sacred “boxes.” In my doctoral dissertation, I listed refer-ences to 53 stands from Fitzgerald 1930; Rowe 1940; and James 1966. It is possible that in the case of a few of the fragments listed in my catalogue, different pieces came from the same stand, thereby reducing the total number of stands by a small amount.

Fig. 3. Cult Stand 2119 from Gezer (photograph: G. Gilmour).


became more widely available in the later Iron II period (Gitin 1992; 2002; see also Haran 1993), its use in the early Iron Age would have been limited due to its restricted availability and expense. Consequently, it was probably confined to temples. In addi-tion, and critically, very few of the bowls associated with these stands show any sign of burning, which suggests that they had other functions as well. Among the several likely possibilities are that they served as elaborate containers for food offerings, libations, and vegetation offerings, and even as holders for sacred trees. They may also have served as stands for lamps (Meyers 2003: 75).

In the area of Philistia in the southwest, a local variation in cult-stand decora-tion occurs in the form of cut-out designs. These occur at Tell Qasile (Mazar 1980: fig. 23) and at Dor (Stern and Sharon 1995: 28). The Tell Qasile stand design depicts four people striding. The Dor stand, which consists of a bowl on a short, four-sided stand, has cut-out designs on two of the sides of the stand. They are executed in reverse technique to the Tell Qasile stand, so that the cut-out part forms the image of a dancing figure. Both stands have another possible but more-distant companion in the 10th-century musicians stand from Ashdod, where part of the central figure (“Musician 1”) was created by spaces cut into the wall of the stand (Dothan 1977; Ben-Shlomo 2005: 180–84, fig. 3.78.1). 3

Cylindrical Stands in the Iron Age IICCylindrical fenestrated cult stands are rare in the later Iron Age, particularly in the

period following the destruction of Samaria in the late 8th century b.c.e. The type de-clines, though it does not disappear. A few stands from the period have been found in the south of the country and in Philistia that serve as comparative types to the Gezer stand.

AshdodAt Ashdod, a type of cylindrical stand with doors rather than windows is present in

9th- and 8th-century b.c.e. contexts (Dothan and Freedman 1967: fig. 38:6, pl. 25:9; Dothan 1971: figs. 44:15, 16, 18), but this type does not appear to continue into the later Iron Age.

Among the stand types that is prominent at Ashdod is a white-slipped cylindrical object with knobs, or lugs, sometimes in two rows, around the top (Ben-Shlomo 2005: 212, fig. 3.95:8). They range from around 10 cm (Dothan and Freedman 1967: figs. 38:7–8; Dothan 1971: figs. 96:4, 103:7; Ben-Shlomo 2005: fig. 3.110:3–4) to almost 25 cm high (Ben-Shlomo 2005: fig. 3.95:8). The stand is tapered at the waist and then f lares slightly to the rim. It is unclear which way up it should stand, on the knobs or on the rim. Ben-Shlomo suggests that the large example from strata IX–VIII

3. At the conference Forces of Transformation: The End of the Bronze Age in the Medi-terranean, which took place at St John’s College, Oxford, on 25th and 26th March 2006, Stephen Bourke announced that an almost identical stand to the Tel Qasile stand was excavated recently at Pella in the Jordan Valley.

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in Area K at Ashdod, the rim of which was modified or scraped off, may have originally been designed to stand with the knobbed side down but in secondary use was placed with the knobbed side up, as it was found in situ (Ben-Shlomo 2005: 212).

This type begins in the late 9th or 8th century at Ashdod and continues through to the end of the Iron Age. Although it appears to be a typically local form at Ash-dod, Ben-Shlomo draws attention to a similar item from Ashdod Yam (Kaplan 1969: fig. 8.6), as well as an unpublished example from Tel Hamid (Ben-Shlomo 2005: 212).

Tel Miqne–EkronThe type found at Tel Miqne–Ekron is a development of stands with pendant

leaves or lugs that are common in the early Iron Age (e.g., Loud 1948: pls. 87:12, 145:15; Rast 1978: fig. 54). The design continues, particularly on chalices (e.g., Her-zog et al. 1984: fig. 15; Gitin 1993: fig. 5b), though it is also found on stands. Examples of the latter come from Tel Miqne–Ekron, where several tall stands with similar leaves or lugs were found in the stratum IB destruction layers dated to the end of the 7th century b.c.e. One of these, from the elite zone in Field IV, has three or four rows of windows, with lugs just below the rim. Another stand came from a room in the stratum IA “Assyrian” type courtyard building, dated to the early 6th century b.c.e. It is shorter and wider than the first, though without the sharply pinched waist generally found on the ubiquitous pot stands. It has two rows of inverted triangular or rhomboid windows, with molded ridges above and below the rows of windows, but no slip or painted decoration (Gitin: oral communication). 4

JerusalemKenyon’s excavations on the east slope of the City of David produced three stands

from Cave 1. Stand 270 is a tall, cylindrical stand covered with a thick-red slip and fenestrated with two rows of triangular windows (fig. 4). Fragments of two similar stands, numbers 321 and 1158, were also found in the cave (Eshel 1995: 54, fig. 31:12, pl. 17:10).

Cave 1 was originally carved near the base of the east slope of the City of David as a burial cave in the 9th or 8th century b.c.e. It was then cleared of all burial remains and served for a while as a water reservoir before being transformed in phase 3 into a storage area for a large number of household utensils. This phase witnessed a violent destruction when more vessels fell into the cave along with burned bricks and other debris. All the pottery from the cave came from phase 3, which was dated by the excavator to the early to mid-7th century b.c.e. This was followed by a final phase, phase 4, when the cave was completely abandoned and blocked off by new late Iron Age II buildings outside the entrance (Eshel 1995: 11–17, 54–62).

4. I am grateful to S. Gitin for permission to refer to these unpublished items from Tel Miqne–Ekron.


A large number of pillar figurines, horse figu-rines with sundiscs on the foreheads, other animal figurines, and religious paraphernalia led Kenyon and others to suggest that at least some of the con-tents of the cave, including the three stands, came from a nearby sanctuary (Holland 1995: 187).

Like the Gezer stand, the Jerusalem stands seem to fall well within the corpus of 12th- to 9th-century red-slipped fenestrated stands and, for this reason, appear to be among the earliest items in the cave. Triangular windows such as those on the illustrated Jerusalem stand occur in earlier peri-ods. In addition to the two Iron Age IIB examples from Hazor stratum V and Tell en-Nasbeh cited by Eshel (Yadin et al. 1958: pl. 57:22; Wampler 1947: pl. 77; cited in Eshel 1995: 54), triangular windows also feature in the possible shrine room 49 in stra-tum V at Lachish (Aharoni 1975: pl. 43:3) dated to the 10th century, in stratum VI at Megiddo (Loud 1948: pls. 87:10–11, 145:11–12) dated to the 11th century (Harrison 2004: 11–13; Stager 2004), and in the large corpus of stands from Beth Shean Lower Level V dated variously from the 12th to the 10th centuries (Rowe 1940: pls. 14:3, 17:8; Panitz-Cohen and Mazar 2009: 13). All of these comparative stands predate the early to mid-7th-century date ascribed to the corpus from Cave 1.

Tel Halif (Lahav)Two stands from Tel Halif also fall within the corpus of Late Iron Age fenestrated

cylindrical stands. The first was found in the late-8th-century destruction level in Field IV, in the broad, rear room of a four-roomed house that showed evidence of ritual or religious activity as well as food consumption (Hardin 2010: 209, pl. 4:7). The stand is well preserved, but the rim has been damaged (fig. 5). Hardin suggests that this was caused by the object’s being used as a pot stand. However, the stand may origi-nally have been taller than its present 25-cm height, with the new rim being roughly smoothed after the break that removed the original upper part of the stand. The stand has seven small round windows and four larger, roughly rectangular windows. The exterior surface is covered with a reddish-brown slip, with incised, banded decoration.

The second example from Tel Halif is another fenestrated cylindrical stand from a deep debris layer in stratum VIA in Field II, dated to the early to middle 7th century b.c.e.

Fig. 4. Cult Stand from Jerusalem, Cave 1 (after Eshel 1995: fig. 31.12; reproduced courtesy of the Council for British Research in the Levant).

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The debris came from the destruction and collapse of the stratum VIA structures. The stand was not slipped or burnished and was broken, with its top missing. Its preserved height is 25.5 cm. It has seven roughly rectangular windows in two rows (Seger: oral communication). 5

5. I am grateful to J. Seger for permission to refer to this unpublished item from Tel Halif (Lahav).

Fig. 5. Cult Stand from Tell Halif (Lahav), Field IV (after Hardin 2010: pl. 4:7; reproduced courtesy of Lahav Research Project).


GezerFinally, Macalister found an elaborately decorated cylindrical fenestrated stand at

Gezer itself, in Tomb 142, the contents of which all point to an Iron IIB–C date (Macalister 1912: vol. 2.353–54, pls. 103, 106:6). The presence of a characteristic small black juglet with handle from rim to shoulder (pl. 103:11) and a piece of a glass bottle suggest that the tomb should be dated later rather than earlier in Iron II, though it may have been in use for some time. The stand is incomplete, and its base is not preserved. The surviving upper portion has two rows of rectangular windows, the lower row of windows being slightly larger than the upper row. A slight ridge above the windows tapers very slightly to a pronounced rim.

Macalister describes the stand as being “of light red ware, ornamented with painted decoration in red and black. The curious irregular pattern round the top is remarkable” (Macalister 1912: vol. 2.354). It is unclear from this description whether the stand was covered in red slip, or whether it was the clay that was light red in color. However, the rest of the decoration is indeed striking. Banded decoration with thick red lines and thinner black lines is found at the bottom of the preserved part of the stand, above and below the two rows of windows, above the ridge, and on the rim. Two bands of painted geometric decoration surround the top of the stand, between the top three red and black bands. The lower of the two decorated bands is the narrower and consists of a rough zigzag line with occasional vertical lines along its length. The upper band is wider and more elaborate, with a zigzag line creating space for filled standing triangles. The pendant triangles created by the zigzag line are unfilled. As in the lower band, there are occasional vertical lines that cut and occasionally interrupt the zigzag line. A rectangle divided vertically in two and containing three horizontal lines provides the start and end point of the zigzag line.

Macalister’s stand has no direct parallels but is somewhat similar in decoration to stands from stratum X at Tel Qasile (Mazar 1980: 93, fig. 27, reg. no. 3604) and Beth Shean lower level V (Rowe 1940: pl. 15:2). The small rectangular windows are also reminiscent of 10th-century stands. On the basis of these parallels, then, the stand should be dated to the 10th century b.c.e. While the context is a cave tomb that con-tained later items almost exclusively, the absence of any contemporary parallel for this stand suggests that it is a survivor, perhaps an heirloom from the earlier period that was placed in this tomb in the 7th century b.c.e.

Conclusion

The Gezer cult stand adds significantly to the small corpus of late Iron Age stands from Israel and Judah. While it is no surprise that such stands should be few in num-ber in the north following the destruction of Samaria by the Assyrians and the exile of large numbers of Israelites at the end of the 8th century, the relative paucity of stands in 7th-century Judah may be a product of the changes in religious attitudes and

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activity in the Southern Kingdom in the later years of the monarchy. The maturing of the centralized cult in Jerusalem throughout this period and the emphasis on formal-ized religion based in the Temple might be expected to result in fewer manifestations of popular cult or folk religion in the 7th century. However, the biblical record of apostasy during the reign of Manasseh coupled with the archaeological evidence of many if not all of the religious practices outlawed in Josiah’s reforms that followed (Dever 1994) strongly suggest that the temple cult in Jerusalem, at least in its idealized form as presented in the Bible, was not as dominant in the first half of the 7th century as it later became under Josiah.

The prevalence of small pillar figurines, confined almost completely to Judah in the late 8th and 7th centuries (Holladay 1987: 276–78; Kletter 1996: 40–48; Dever 2005: 179–80), aptly demonstrates that whatever the official proclamations from the center were, a thriving popular religion continued to be manifested. Large numbers of horse-and-rider figurines, indicative of the inf luence of Assyrian astral religion (Cogan 1974: 84–88; Ackerman 2001: 94–99) and small stone incense altars associated with the worship of the Queen of Heaven (Ackerman 2001: 91–92; King and Stager 2001: 344–53; Gitin 2002) are also among the variety of religious objects from the late 8th and 7th centuries that testify to this alternative, popular cult.

The small corpus of fenestrated cylindrical cult stands in Judah and Philistia dated to the late 8th and 7th centuries, now augmented by the stand from Gezer, is a further significant element of this popular religion. In addition, the Israelite and even Canaan-ite precursors of these late Iron Age stands show that elements of the former religious practices continued to be retained by the people of Judah at the same time as they adopted and adapted new ideas introduced by the Assyrians.

This essay was originally submitted in April 2006.

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A Late Iron Age Cult Stand from Gezer

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