arqueologia

Folha Online: 01/02/2006 – 10h26

da Efe, no Cairo

Arqueólogos alemães encontraram duas estátuas de Sekhmet, deusa faraônica da guerra, e outra de uma rainha núbia, de 3.400 anos, na cidade de Luxor, cerca de 760 quilômetros ao sul do Cairo. As três relíquias foram encontradas nas proximidades do templo do faraó Amenhotep III, em Luxor, à margem oeste do rio Nilo, informou o Conselho Supremo de Antiguidades em comunicado divulgado ontem pela imprensa local (cont.)

Leia Mais:
Egyptology News

Tomei conhecimento do detalhado artigo do jornal israelense The Jerusalem Post sobre as escavações recentes feitas em Jerusalém e de seu possível significado.

Um debate que vem já de algum tempo, como pode-se ver aqui mesmo neste blog.

Em The once and future city, assinado por Rena Rossner e datado de 26 de janeiro de 2006, às 15h51, pode-se ler sobre as recentes descobertas arqueológicas feitas na “cidade de Davi”, as opiniões dos que defendem um grande reino davídico/salomônico no século X a.C. e dos que o negam.

E qual deve ser a relação entre arqueologia e Bíblia? E qual é a agenda política de quem defende a autenticidade da descoberta de um suposto “palácio de Davi” por Eilat Mazar? Leia o artigo, que vale a pena.

Mas aproveito para citar um pequeno trecho, exatamente sobre a “agenda política”, até mesmo porque a situação volta a se tornar muito tensa na região com a vitória do Hamas nas eleições parlamentares palestinas desta quarta-feira, dia 25:

But neither the Ir David Foundation nor the Shalem Center are funding these digs solely in order to understand more about the past. In interviews with IJ, representatives of both organizations acknowledged that their involvement was geared towards bolstering Israel’s current claims to the Jerusalem as Israel’s united capital and developing the ancient city of Jerusalem as a constitutive component of Jewish identity. According to Doron Spielman, spokesman for the Ir David Foundation, their goal has always been to secure as much land as possible in the area, though both settlement and purchase. To this end, philanthropist Nissan Khakshouri had contributed more than $3 million to the excavation project, but stopped funding the project in 2003. Today, Spielman refuses to say who is funding the project at this time, saying that the funding comes from Ir David’s “operating budget.” However, sources close to the project believe that at least some of the funding can be directly and indirectly linked to funders in the United States who have regularly supported right-wing and settlement activities throughout Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Tomb raiders

Three years after Iraq’s ancient treasures were first stolen and smashed, the cradle of civilisation is still being looted. It’s a catastrophe, says former arts minister Mark Fisher.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Friday January 27 2006

In the article below, we said that Switzerland continued “to refuse to ratify the 1970 Unesco Convention on Illegal Exports of Works of Art”. That is completely incorrect. Switzerland in fact ratified the convention on October 3 2003. Earlier, on May 28 2003, Switzerland became the first country to introduce UN security council resolution 1483, dated May 22 2003, to facilitate the return of cultural assets to Iraq. This meant that the import, transit and export of Iraqi cultural property stolen in Iraq, or illicitly exported from Iraq since August 2 1990 was strictly prohibited.

 

‘Pillagers strip Iraq museum of its treasure,” the New York Times reported on April 13 2003 as Baghdad fell to coalition forces. The next day the Independent reported that “scores of Iraqi civilians broke into the museum … and made off with an estimated 170,000 ancient and priceless artefacts”.

The media joined archaeologists in condemning President Bush and the US. Eleanor Robson, a council member of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, compared the US under President Bush to the Mongol hordes, and the destruction of the museum’s collection to that of the library of Alexandria in the 5th century. The president of the International Council on Monuments said that the US was guilty of committing a “crime against humanity”. Interpol set up a task force to track Iraq’s stolen cultural property, Unesco organised meetings of experts, and the US sent a multi-agency task force to investigate. It included specialists from the CIA, the FBI, the Diplomatic Security Service and US Immigration and Customs, and was led by Col Matthew Bogdanos, a former assistant district attorney from Manhattan.

Bogdanos announced an amnesty and slowly artefacts began to be returned, including one of the museum’s most beautiful and precious objects: the alabaster Warka Vase, carved in Uruk 5,000 years ago and now brought back in 14 pieces in a plastic rubbish bag. The pictures on the vase tell us much about life in ancient Mesopotamia, showing scenes of agriculture, religious and ritual offerings. Other pieces were recovered in raids, including the Bassetki statue, a copper statue base with the lower half of a man holding a standard or doorpost. It was hidden in a cesspool, submerged.

As these successes were reported, and estimates of the total losses revised down to around 15,000 artefacts, the media’s initial horror was replaced by a mood of relief, even of defiant complacency. David Aaronovitch wrote in this newspaper that “the only problem with [reports that the museum ‘was looted under the noses of the Yanks, or by the Yanks themselves’] is that it’s nonsense. It isn’t true. It’s made up. It’s bollocks.” The robbing of the Iraq National Museum slipped from the headlines. The caravan of outrage passed on. Gradually, however, the extent of the loss and damage to Iraq’s heritage across the country became clearer. Many of the Iraq National Museum’s major pieces, too big and heavy to move, had been smashed. At Mosul, 16 bronze Assyrian door panels from the city gates of Balawat (9th century BC) had been stolen, as had cuneiform tablets from Khorsabad and Nineveh. In Baghdad, the National Library and State Archives building was burned down and the national collections of contemporary Iraqi and European art, including works by Picasso and Miró, were looted.

Even more serious, perhaps, has been the damage to Iraq’s archaeology. In this cradle of civilisation, more than 10,000 sites of interest have been identified, of which only 1,500 have been researched. These sites are currently undefended from looters. Willy Deridder, the head of Interpol, has said that these sites – particularly those in the south, such as the 4,000-year-old ziggurat at Ur – are almost impossible to protect.

Babylon and Ur were requisitioned by the coalition and have had military camps constructed within their ancient sites. At Babylon the US forces flattened 300,000 sq metres and covered the area with compacted gravel in order to create parking lots for military vehicles next to a Greek theatre built for Alexander of Macedon. A dozen trenches, each up to 170m long, have been cut through archeological workings, destroying the evidence that they might have yielded.

A helipad was constructed in the heart of ancient Babylon. For this, ground had to be bulldozed and thousands of Hesco sandbags (made by the US-owned Handling Equipment Speciality Company) filled with earth to provide fortifications. The soil in these bags, dug up from the site, contains archaeological material now ripped out of its context, deracinated for all time. Worse, when more Hesco containers had to be filled, soil was brought in from other sites. The Hesco containers are biodegradable and are already beginning to collapse, leaving a stew of archaeological material that will eventually have to be sifted at vast expense if it is to be of value.

The military have now moved on, but while the helipad was in use the daily flights shook the foundations of Babylon’s ancient walls so severely that the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the 6th-century-BC Temple of Ninmah collapsed.

In the south, the remains of the ancient city of Ur, excavated by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, is still a military camp, while the sites of neighbouring Sumerian city-states (Lagash, Uruk and Larsa) have been so badly damaged by looters that observers have described them as resembling devastated lunar landscapes, with craters 5m deep. These craters have been dug by Iraqis who, now that the sites are not guarded, are “farming” them at night for portable antiquities that can be sold.

The damage to Umma, in the desert north of Nasiriya, is particularly serious. One of the most celebrated of the Sumerian cities, it was not officially excavated until 1996. It has now been so comprehensively looted that what it can tell us of pre-Akkadian times may be irretrievably lost.

How important is this? For the Iraqis, the damage strikes at the heart of their culture and history. Although the Iraq National Museum was founded only in 1923, it was an institution around which all Iraqis, regardless of religion, could attempt to create some shared national identity. There is also considerable significance for the rest of the world: in these sites are buried the roots of western civilisation. A line of influence (philosophical, scientific, artistic, aesthetic) runs from Mesopotamia through Greece to Rome and on to us. This is the birthplace of historiography in that it was here, in Babylonia, in southern Iraq, that writing was invented 5,000 years ago, when cuneiform, etched on clay tablets, allowed the transmission of ideas, of achievements, of records.

In the fertile Mesopotamian lands, we can trace man’s achievements back for at least 10,000 years, to early farming communities of Nemrik, to the al’Ubaid civilisation (7,000 years ago) and to the rule of the Sumerian king, Gilgamesh, which inspired The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2000 BC), one of the greatest works of literature, written in cuneiform on 11 tablets and in which we have the earliest accounts of the great flood.

It is only in the past 150 years that we have begun to retrieve this history and the record of the astounding achievements of the Sumerian and Akkadian empires that succeeded it. We have in the Louvre, in the Philadelphia museum, the Ashmolean and the British Museum glimpses of the sophistication of Ur with its Royal Tombs; of the wonders of Sardon’s palaces at Khorsabad, with their statues of winged bulls; of the Lion Hunts of Ashurbanipal, shown in reliefs from the North Palace at Nineveh.

But these treasures, though mighty, are modest when compared with those in the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad: the Lion Hunt stela from Uruk; the now-eyeless copper head of the Great King Naram-Sin; the stained ivory sculpture known as the Mona Lisa of Nimrud. This has once again survived, as it did in 612 BC when Nimrud was attacked and the head was thrown down a well where it lay submerged for 2,500 years. Along with the Nimrud gold from the tombs of the Assyrian Queens, the head was stored in the “safety” of the vaults of the Central Bank in Baghdad, along with the Nimrud gold from the tombs of the Assyrian Queens. There it avoided being looted, but both gold and head were severely damaged by an apocalyptic flood of 500,000 tons of water that may have been deliberately engineered to prevent Saddam Hussein and his sons from making off with them.

In 2003, in the months when a coalition invasion seemed likely, there was ample time in which to take steps to protect Iraq’s treasures and in which the world’s archeological community could, and did, make representations to the governments in Washington and London. Thousands of objects were removed to places of safety, but the pleas to Bush and Blair were ignored. When Baghdad fell in March 2003, the Iraq National Museum remained unguarded for days and the country’s archeological sites for months.

What can be learned from these unhappy events? What is being done? Unesco has established an International Committee on which 30 countries are represented. The UK’s delegate is Dr John Curtis, keeper of the British Museum’s Ancient Near East Department. Last November the committee agreed a resolution that there should be an independent assessment made of the damage to Babylon. However, the US is reluctant to cooperate unless the assessment is under American control and employs American consultants.

On the security of archeological sites, most are agreed that, if the “farming” of sites is to end, the guards should be restored and their salaries raised. Ideally, there should be aerial surveillance over the most important sites, but here again US cooperation is uncertain.

Action needs to be taken to stop the illegal export of artefacts stolen from museums and sites. There is general agreement with the assessment of the director of the Iraq Museum, Donny George, that Iran and Turkey are “not assisting” in the control of this black market and that many of the exported artefacts are passing through Switzerland, which has the fourth largest art market in the world but continues to refuse to ratify the 1970 Unesco Convention on Illegal Exports of Works of Art.

In the medium term, responsibility for re-establishing Iraq’s museums and sites should be assumed by the interim Iraqi government. This body has recently announced a reconstructing of its cultural ministry into four sections (museums, excavations, conservation, and interpretation and learning). Each section will report to a minister and the role of Dr George, who has done so much to restore order in the past 18 months, will be downgraded. He may retire.

Our worst fears, that “10,000 years of human history has been erased” may not have come to pass, but a similar catastrophe in the future may not be averted unless the US and the UK governments recognise the damage that the war has caused and accept some responsibility for it.

They might profit from reading The Epic of Gilgamesh. Like all great poems, it tells us about ourselves. It is about grief and the fear of death, about man’s quest for wisdom and immortality. Its hero doesn’t understand the difference between strength and arrogance. By attacking a monster, he brings down disaster on himself.

Fonte: The Guardian – Thu 19 Jan 2006

DUtch Symposium of the Ancient Near East, Leiden 2006: Nomadism, Pastoralism, and Current Research.

The first Dutch symposium of the Ancient Near East (DUSANE) is an initiative of students from the Faculty of Archaeology of the Ancient Near East in Leiden. The symposium shall be held on Saturday the eleventh of March 2006 [leia sobre o Simpósio de 2010].

This symposium aims to bring various Dutch scholars together, to enhance the scientific-archaeological work carried out by Dutch scholars in the Near East and to bring this work to the attention of the wider, non-scholarly public. We aim to exchange information among project directors, students, colleagues and all those interested in Dutch archaeological research in the countries of today’s Middle East (…) Our speakers include directors of current key archaeological research projects, Assyriologists, and material specialists.Studenten van het Leidse dispuut van archeologie van het nabije Oosten, Nabu Naíd, van de Faculteit Archeologie in Leiden organiseren in 2006 voor de eerste keer het Dutch Symposium of the Ancient Near East (DUSANE). Het symposium indt plaats op zaterdag 11 maart 2006 in Leiden…

A notícia está no blog Biblical Theology de Jim West, sob o título

Biblical Archaeology Review – Publish Looted Antiquities!

Another major scholar, cuneiformist David I. Owen of Cornell University, has issued a clarion call for the publication of looted inscriptions, despite the fact that they were recovered by criminal looters rather than archaeologists. Writing in Science magazine, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Owen states:”The rigid and uncompromising position of the archaeological establishment [against the publication of unprovenanced cuneiform inscriptions] only compounds the tragedy that the looting of archaeological sites in Iraq (and elsewhere) has presented. Not only have these precious records of the past been ripped from their original context, but now the archaeologists wish to suppress the very knowledge of their existence by banning their recording and publication…” (continua) [Obs.: link quebrado – blog descontinuado]

Segundo o jornal israelense Haaretz, são boas as chances de ter sido descoberto o local onde ficava a antiga cidade de Modin, famosa, porque foi aí que o sacerdote Matatias, contrário à helenização da Palestina, começou a conhecida revolta dos Macabeus em 167 a.C. Leia o artigo.

 

The Hasmoneans Were Here – Maybe

In late 1995, not far from the city of Modi’in, whose construction had begun a short time earlier, several excavated burial caves were found. The find aroused tremendous excitement initially, mainly because on one of the ossuaries an engraved inscription was interpreted to read “Hasmonean.” Had they found a burial plot belonging to the family of the Hasmoneans?

When the discovery was announced, the archaeologist digging there, Shimon Riklin, explained that this was not the grave built by Simon the son of Mattathias the Priest for his father and his brothers, which is described in the Book of Maccabees I. The use of ossuraies – stone containers for secondary burial, in which the bones of the dead who had been removed from their original burial place were placed – began in the second half of the first century BCE, more than a century after the beginning of the Hasmonean Revolt. However, the discovery reinforced the theory that the town of Modi’in, where the revolt broke out in 167 BCE, lay not far from the burial caves, in the area of the present-day Arab village of Midya.

A short time later, the excitement died down. A thorough examination made it clear that the word “Hasmonean” was not engraved on the ossuary. The settlement from which the Hasmoneans embarked on the revolt against the Seleucid ruler Antiochus is still waiting to be discovered, as is the burial plot in which Mattathias and his sons were buried.

New candidates for an old city

In the decade that has passed, two prominent candidates have joined the steadily lengthening list of locations that have been proposed as the site of ancient Modi’in. The most recent is Khirbet Umm al-Umdan, a site revealed in salvage digs conducted in 2001 by Alexander Onn and Shlomit Wexler-Bdolah of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) in the area of the city of Modi’in, on a hill north of the road that connects it with Latrun.

Wexler-Bdolah and Onn propose that the site be identified as ancient Modi’in, because in their opinion, it best suits the information in the sources about the settlement in which the Priest Mattathias lived. According to ancient sources, Modi’in was a rural settlement that lay between the lowlands and the hills, alongside the main road linking Lod with Jerusalem.

“In our opinion, the settlement that we have excavated in Umm al-Umdan is a Jewish village. There are houses there separated by alleyways. It is not a large, planned urban settlement, but neither is it a lone house,” says Wexler-Bdolah. “But the most important find is the synagogue we discovered in the village. The synagogue is one of the earliest ever built – it was constructed during the Hasmonean period, apparently toward the end of the second century BCE or at the beginning of the first century BCE, and it continued to be in use, with certain changes, until the Bar Kokhba Revolt [132 CE]. Next to it a mikveh [ritual bath] was built in the first century CE.”

The synagogue is evidence that, in spite of its relatively modest dimensions, the settlement that was discovered at Umm al-Umdan was an important one, says Wexler-Bdolah. Its location, adjacent to an internal Roman road that led from Lod to Jerusalem, and the series of communities surrounding it – Beit Horon, Kfar Ruth, Tel Hadid, Anaba, Lydda-Diospolis, Emmaus-Nicopolis and Timna – also accord with the description of Modi’in on the Madaba map, a mosaic map located in Jordan, on which Modi’in is called Modita. Moreover, the name of the site, Umm al-Umdan, stems, in the opinion of Wexler-Bdolah, from letters in the Hebrew name Modi’in, making it the most suitable candidate for identification with the ancient city.

However, this is only a suggestion, not a certain conclusion. “Because we didn’t find an inscription that specifically says that Modi’in was here, at the moment you could say that there is no better candidate for this role than Umm al-Umdan,” she explains.

Huge settlement in modern Modi’in

Dr. Shimon Gibson, who conducted the excavations on behalf of the IAA in the area of modern Modi’in in the mid-1990s, when the momentum of construction and development in the area began, actually believes that he has a more worthy candidate. That would be Titura Hill, an archaeological site in the heart of modern Modi’in. In his opinion, one day we will discover that Titura Hill is a site of national importance. At the second Modi’in Conference – a one-day seminar scheduled to take place in the city tomorrow – Wexler-Bdolah and Gibson will present their reasons for identifying each of the sites with the ancient settlement.

At the top of Titura Hill a Crusader fortress was built, but in the excavations Gibson conducted with Egon Lass, he found the remains of settlements from many periods. The most ancient settlement was established there during the Iron Age – in the eighth century BCE – and the hill was populated in later periods as well.

Because an inscription declaring the identity of the site was not discovered on Titura Hill either, we can only rely on circumstantial evidence. Among such evidence, Gibson includes the dimensions of the settlement exposed there. “On Titura Hill there was a real city, Umm al-Umdan is only a village. During the Hasmonean period there was a huge settlement on Titura Hill. This fact is of importance, because the Hasmoneans tended to construct monumental buildings, out of a desire to prove their greatness.”

Gibson, a fellow at the Albright Archaeological Institute, says that Titura Hill has another advantage in the competition: On a clear day you can see the sea from there. From Umm al-Umdan, as well as another site mentioned as possibly being Hasmonean Modi’in, this is not possible. This fact accords with the description in Maccabees I, chapter 13, about the burial plot built by Simon son of Mattathias for his family. According to the description, the burial structure was tall and impressive. It included seven small pyramids and large columns with attractive carving that the sailors could see as well. In other words, from the hill one could see the sea. According to a description written hundreds of years after the death of the Hasmoneans, the burial plot remained in place for a long time afterward. It is described in manuscripts from the Byzantine period, by historian Eusebius in the fourth century CE, and on the sixth-century Madaba map. Crusaders who came to the Land of Israel during the 12th and 13th centuries also reported seeing it. But about 400 years ago, the reports about the Hasmonean graves ended.

The search begins

The matter was pushed to the margins of awareness until the second part of the 19th century, when European archaeologists and scholars began to make an effort to locate the town of Modi’in and the graves. The first proposal was that of a French Franciscan monk, who believed that the name of the Arab village of Midya preserved the name Modi’in. Others considered Tel al-Ras, a hill with ancient ruins, not far from Midya, the site they were looking for. In about 1870, a French scholar proposed that the ancient structure near the gravesite of Sheikh al-Arabawi adjacent to Midya was the Hasmonean grave, but another Frenchman, Charles Clermont-Ganneau, rejected the suggestion. In the early 20th century, students from the Hebrew Gymnasia high school in Jerusalem were hiking in the area, and they came to a site called Kubur al-Yahud, Arabic for “the graves of the Jews.” The place is still called “the graves of the Maccabees,” even though it is clear that the structures there were constructed during the Byzantine period, long after Hasmonean times.

The location of the burial plot constructed by Simon the Hasmonean, and the town where the revolt began, have still not been identified with certainty. Wexler-Bdolah says Khirbet Umm al-Umdan is the site with the greatest likelihood of being ancient Modi’in, but she has doubts, too. Gibson believes that Titura Hill is ancient Modi’in. And he can explain why no traces have been found of the monumental construction of the burial plot or the public buildings on Titura Hill: The buildings were dismantled during a later period, and used to construct other structures, like the Crusader fortress on top of the hill.

Fonte: Ran Shapira – Haaretz: 26.12.2005

Você acompanhou estas duas interessantes notícias de arqueologia?

Em Tell Hamoukar, na Síria, arqueólogos sírios e norte-americanos encontraram os restos de uma grande batalha que destruiu a cidade por volta de 3500 a.C.

 

A huge battle destroyed one of the world’s earliest cities at around 3500 B.C. and left behind, preserved in their places, artifacts from daily life in an urban settlement in upper Mesopotamia, according to a joint announcement from the University of Chicago and the Department of Antiquities in Syria. “The whole area of our most recent excavation was a war zone,” said Clemens Reichel, Research Associate at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Reichel, the American co-director of the Syrian-American Archaeological Expedition to Hamoukar, lead a team that spent October and November at the site. Salam al-Quntar of the Syrian Department of Antiquities and Cambridge University was Syrian co-director. Hamoukar is an ancient site in extreme northeastern Syria near the Iraqi border. The discovery provides the earliest evidence for large scale organized warfare in the Mesopotamian world, the team said (University of Chicago-Syrian team finds first evidence of warfare in ancient Mesopotamia).

E no Mar Morto, que está diminuindo drasticamente o nível de suas águas, duas âncoras, com a madeira bem preservada, acabaram descobertas. A mais antiga pode ser datada por volta de 500 a.C., e a outra é da época romana, por volta do século I d.C.

 

The first anchor, approximately 2,500 years old, was found where the Ein Gedi harbor was once located, and may have been used by the Jews of biblical Ein Gedi. The later anchor, some 2,000 years old, was constructed according to the best Roman technology and probably belonged to a large craft used by one of the rulers of Judea. As the sea recedes further, we may yet get to see the ship to which this anchor belonged. The 2000-year-old anchor, which originally weighed a massive 130 kg., is made from a Jujube tree and was reinforced with lead, iron and bronze. While the wooden parts are very well-preserved, its metal parts have disappeared almost entirely. Their traces have survived only in the crystals encasing the anchor. The design of the anchor is surprisingly modern: there are two flukes which were reinforced with a hook joint and a wooden plate fixed with wooden pegs, and a lead collar. The anchor also had a tripline, which was used to haul it out of the water. The ingenious earlier anchor, with some of its ropes still attached to it, is in an astonishing state of preservation. The oldest Dead Sea anchor known, it was made from the trunk of an acacia tree, with one of its branches sharpened to a point and originally reinforced with metal, to engage the seabed. Amazingly enough, most of the trunk is still covered in bark. The 12.5 meter-long ropes were made from date-palm fibers, each fashioned from three strands and lashed into grooves in the wood. Both anchors were weighted with a heavy stone lashed laterally (The Jerusalem Post).

A Estela de Merneptah, a Inscrição de Tel Dan, o “Palácio de Davi” em Jerusalém… a polêmica sobre as origens de Israel e sobre a existência ou não de um grande reino governado por Davi continua. Acompanhe nos biblioblogs, no começo deste dezembro, mais uma rodada de argumentos.

Leia mais sobre isto, em minha História de Israel, aqui.

Para atualizar suas informações sobre a Inscrição de Tel Zayit após a sessão da SBL 2005, leia:

Tel Zayit (Zeitah) Inscription Session Report

Toma conta da imprensa nestes dias, com tremendo sensacionalismo, a notícia da descoberta de um pequeno pedaço de cerâmica nas escavações de Tell es-Safi, ruínas da antiga cidade de Gat, no qual estão escritas duas palavras אלות = ‘lvth e ולת = vlth que teriam semelhança com o nome גלית = glyth, ou seja, “Golias”. Os nomes podem ser igualmente transliterados como ‘lwt e wlt ou )lwt e wlt, dependendo da convenção que se adote.

O óstracon (do grego, ostrakon, plural ostraka: um caco de cerâmica utilizado para se escrever alguma coisa) foi datado entre os séculos X e IX a.C. e as duas palavras estão escritas em um “proto-cananeu” arcaico. Tudo o que se sabe, por enquanto, é que existe a possibilidade destas palavras serem semelhantes a Goliath, ou Golias, nome que muitos especialistas acreditam ser de origem não-semítica, etimologicamente relacionado com vários nomes indo-europeus, como, por exemplo, o nome lídio Aliates. A escavação é dirigida pelo Dr. Aren Maeir, professor da Universidade Bar Ilan, em Ramat Gan, Israel.

Todo o sensacionalismo decorre da existência da narrativa de 1Sm 17, onde se conta que o jovem Davi, de Belém, no contexto das guerras entre o exército de Saul e os filisteus, enfrentou e matou um terrível guerreiro filisteu chamado Golias, originário de Gat (v. 4: “Saiu do acampamento filisteu um grande guerreiro. Chamava-se Golias, de Gat. A sua estatura era de seis côvados e um palmo“; v. 23: “Enquanto conversava com eles, o grande guerreiro – chamado Golias, o filisteu de Gat – apareceu, vindo da linha inimiga…”). Segundo esta narrativa, o estatura do Golias era de 2 metros e meio, mais ou menos!

A imprensa não especializada já está identificando, precipitadamente, os nomes encontrados em Tell es-Safi com o nome Golias e este com o personagem da narrativa bíblica, em tom bastante apologético, no estilo “a Bíblia tinha razão”. Sobretudo porque há, no mundo acadêmico, entre os chamados “minimalistas” e os “maximalistas”, uma acirrada disputa sobre o valor histórico das narrativas bíblicas, que pode ser vista aqui, e porque há um contexto político em Israel – na complexa luta entre israelenses e palestinos pelo território – que favorece este tipo de coisa. Os especialistas são mais prudentes, embora também neste meio não faltem conclusões apressadas.

A prudência, entretanto, se impõe, pois esta narrativa do livro de Samuel é considerada, nos meios acadêmicos, uma tradição deuteronomista bastante controvertida. Apresento, das muitas existentes, duas razões:
. a Obra Histórica Deuteronomista (OHDtr) foi escrita possivelmente no século VI a.C., em um gênero literário que não corresponde de modo algum ao nosso modo de escrever “história” hoje, herdado da tradição alemã
. por outro lado, o gigante Golias acaba morrendo duas vezes, pois segundo a mesma OHDtr, em 2Sm 21,19 se diz que “A guerra continuou ainda em Gob com os filisteus, e Elcanã, filho de Iari, de Belém, matou Golias de Gat; a madeira de sua lança era como cilindro de tecedeira“. Tentando conciliar as duas tradições, 1Cr 20,5, obra posterior à deuteronomista, diz: “Houve ainda outra batalha contra os filisteus. Elcanã, filho de Jair, matou Lami, irmão de Golias de Gat; a haste de sua lança era como um cilindro de tecelão” (estou utilizando a tradução da Bíblia de Jerusalém, nova edição, revista e ampliada, São Paulo, Paulus, 2a. impressão, 2003 – que, por sinal, erra, ao traduzir, em 1Cr 20,5, a palavra hebraica ‘ah por “filho” e não por “irmão”).