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The relevance of archaeology to the

study of ancient West Semitic religion
Richard Schiemann
Published online: 15 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Richard Schiemann (1978) The relevance of archaeology to the study of ancient
West Semitic religion, World Archaeology, 10:2, 129-138, DOI: 10.1080/00438243.1978.9979725

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 The relevance of archaeology to the study
of ancient West Semitic religion

Richard Schiemann
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Introduction
Prior to the last decades of the eighteenth century, almost everything we knew
about various ancient religions of Medi-SW. Asia1 was based on biblical and classical
texts. In 1781 A. L. Schlözer coined the term 'Semitic' (using a biblical text), thereby
providing later generations with a tool for a preliminary sorting of those ancient
religions.
During the two centuries which followed this initial insight, there has been not only a
considerable advance in linguistic and ethnic studies but also a quantum leap in the
acquisition of archaeological and religious data and understanding. We now know that
there were multiple, complex, overlapping, syncretistic lifeways in which the Semitic
element played a very important role and which our scholarly ancestors never imagined.
It is clear, moreover, that a variety of religious ideologies and behaviour formed an
integral part of those lifeways.
The upshot of this astonishing increment in our knowledge about those ancient
lifeways of Medi-SW. Asia and about Semitic religious elements in particular, however,
has not been an unmixed blessing. True enough, we have innumerable studies and
comparative collections of so-called cultic remains and temples ; and there is no lack of
reconstructions of mythologies, pantheons and rituals based on textual accounts.
Standing head and shoulders above this crowd in many respects are the collective works
of W. F. Albright, the sweeping syntheses of texts and remains to which many modern
scholars owe a considerable debt (1964; 1968; 1969).
Yet there are tremendous difficulties in accepting this work of the past as definitive or
as being the Procrustean bed to which all future studies must be made to conform.
Consider this partial list of the difficulties: the dominance of linguistic and textual
studies; the unstated assumptions concerning relations between texts and remains; the
simplistic assertions about the identity of the peoples responsible for supposed cultic
remains; the uncertainties and disagreements about what constitute cultic remains; and
especially the vast discrepancy in the usefulness of the data coming from excavations
1
Medi-SW. Asia is an effort to circumvent the use of territorial descriptions which are too much
a part of current political animosities ; the phrase stands for that part of south-west Asia which
runs parallel to the East Mediterranean coast and includes what is frequently referred to as
Syro-Palestine or the Levant, or in present-day realities as western Syria, Lebanon, western
Jordan and Israel.
BWA World Archaeology Volume 10 No. 2 Archaeology and religion
 130 Richard Schiemann

even up to the present. These and other matters should cause us to be chary about
specific assertions and general schematizations concerning the religious element in the
lifeways of ancient Medi-SW. Asia (cf. Campbell 1976: 5-6; Roberts 1976: 77-8).
It is possible that we really need a total reassessment of the data based on new starting-
points. At the very least it seems necessary to sort out as many as possible of the items in
our treatment of ancient West Semitic religions in order to straighten out some of the
circular reasoning which has become entrenched therein. As one step in this direction,
we intend to focus our effort on understanding the relevance of archaeology to the study
of some ancient West Semitic religions.
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1 Religion and West Semitic studies

There does not seem to be a natural starting-point for our investigation. However, we
will make little headway until we spell out what is intended by the use of 'ancient
West Semitic religions'.
In the first place, then, consider the meaning of religion. The scientific study of religion
began at about the same time as supposedly objective logical procedures were being
applied to most other humanities and social sciences, specifically, in the nineteenth
century (see the very helpful survey in Malefijt 1968, chapters 2-4). This discipline, as
others, has suffered through all the excesses of proponents and opponents, and through
all the reductionisms of psychological, sociological, philosophical and economic types of
interpretation. By virtue of this honing process we seem to be heading towards a
consensus, not on a definition of religion, but on how we view religion.
One of the chief features of this consensus is the recognition that a religion is definable
only within its own historical-cultural milieu. This understanding forecloses on any
imposition of preconceived structures ; it is, in effect, a shift from deductive to inductive
procedures. The changeover has been especially valuable for improving the modern
western scholar's understanding of the eastern religious consciousness.
A brief but useful discussion of this approach by E. E. Best appeared recently under
the title, 'The Definition of Religion and the Interpretation of Evidence: the Role of
Religion in Contemporary Japanese Society' (1976). Best's basic observation is that
Japanese religion is not a collection of parallel institutions (sects, denominations), or a
particular set of beliefs and rituals, but the way things are done; there are no deities or
dogmas, simply a religious way of doing things, an elusive quality of living with meaning.
This religious way (surely to be associated with the rather widespread oriental concept
of the tao) is reflected in numerous private and public, 'sacred and secular' patterns
of behaviour - tea ceremonies, calligraphy, ceramics, flower decorating, family life,
festivals, corporation loyalty and personal health.
This is not an attempt to equate ancient West Semitic religion with modern Japanese
religious life. However, the description can serve a heuristic purpose, calling our
attention to the widest possible range of religious impact in the material remains of the
ancient Semitic world. We do not intend to encourage the religious interpretation of
archaeological remains as a court of last resort but rather as a typical alternative hypo-
thesis subject to investigation. There is today no excuse for the blind acceptance or the
 The relevance of archaeology to the study of ancient West Semitic religions 131

out-of-hand rejection of religious interpretations of cultural debris: rigorous inductive

procedures are as applicable here as they are in virtually every discipline.
A different way of stating this consensus concerning our understanding of religion is to
assert that religion is to be viewed in dynamic and holistic terms. That is to say, com-
munities then as now were organismic: they were living systems, and religion must be
seen in that light. Religions functioned and had meaning within a whole ideological-
behavioural network of mutual adaptations, or symbiotic situations (cf. Willey 1974:
330; particularly enlightening in regard to the New World is the article and special
bibliography on ideological aspects by Lathrap, et al. 1977).
Given these alternatives for understanding religion - the deductive, static versus the
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inductive, dynamic - it is easy to see where part of the problem arises when one tries to
deal with the relevance of archaeology to the study of any religion: our view of religion
is a determinant of how we read the material remains. Yet it is not quite that simple
because there is a feedback system in operation: the archaeological procedures which
have dominated work in Medi-SW. Asia, for instance, have produced the kind of
information which tends to support a deductive, static treatment of religion. Our
thesis, then, is that an inductive, dynamic view of religion will place a much heavier
responsibility on the archaeologists' shoulders. We will discuss the archaeological
situation in more detail below.

As mentioned in our introduction, A. L. Schlözer coined the term 'Semitic' as a tool for
making linguistic analyses. We know that during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
the term went through various stages of interpretation and misinterpretation. As a result
it has come to bear racial, socio-cultural and geographical connotations as well as
linguistic ones (cf. Moscati 1957: 421; Albright and Lambdin 1970: 134).
Regardless of the connotations, the fact remains that the linguistic denotation is
determinative: based on increasing discoveries of ancient texts, linguistic studies have
provided direct evidence for both geographical and chronological boundaries as well as
ethnic and cultural affiliations. In other words, the combination of archaeology and
linguistic studies has established the broad frame of reference for all Semitic studies.
The general picture is that the Semitic element which manifests itself strongly
throughout most of SW. Asia towards the end of the third millennium B.c. has already
gone through a complex evolution. Indeed, we cannot speak of Semites in any simple
sense of the word: there is no Semitic language, but instead Semitic languages and/or
dialects (apparently an unresolved distinction among Semitists); there might have been
a heartland for Semites, but we know only certain territories of varying Semitic social
and political impact (e.g. Agade, Amurru and Ebla in the third millennium B.c.).
From the linguistic viewpoint, this complex situation has been defined more carefully
by positing two major classifications, North and South Semitic, along with a variety
of subclassifications, all having geographic associations (cf. Albright and Lambdin
1970: I34ÍF.; Hammershaimb 1967, col. 1694). We will not get involved with South
Semitic (mainly Arabic and Ethiopie) at all because it falls outside the scope of this paper
in terms of geography and chronology. North Semitic stretched across what we have
called Medi-SW. Asia in the west as well as across what might be called Meso-SW.
Asia in the east (the latter referring to areas surrounding the Euphrates and Tigris river
 132 Richard Schiemann

systems). It has been subdivided accordingly as East (or NE.) Semitic (usually called
Accadian) and West (or NW.) Semitic. We have chosen to focus on the latter branch.
The establishment of West Semitic studies as a specific discipline occurred over a
relatively brief span of about fifty years, approx. from the late 1880s through the late
1930s (Albright 1964: 107-16). It was the result of serendipitous discovery as much as
of excavation or linguistic research. Furthermore, the finds came from far beyond our
basic Medi-SW. Asia geographical region, almost as much as they came from within it.
However, it seems unnecessary for our purposes to attempt to list all the data (using a
great deal of caution, one can benefit from consulting the material listed in Driver 1976,
Part II). Suffice it to say that West Semitic was fleshed out with material related to
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Amorite, Canaanite, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Proto-Sinaitic, Hebrew and Aramaic, as the

principal categories for grasping this phenomenon.
Since the end of that half-century of West Semitic studies, and until very recent times,
no major changes have had to be made in the overall structure. The development of
epigraphy has provided us with better control of the sequences and relationships between
the languages and scripts. Archaeology has been going through a period of radical
reorientation in terms of theory and practice, but that has had little effect on West
Semitic studies so far.
Now, however, the material for a substantial review of West Semitic studies has been
brought to the light of day at Tell Mardikh/Ebla (Pettinato 1976; Matthiae 1977).
Instead of having a few hundred West Semitic texts from the middle of the second
millennium B.C. and later, we have jumped suddenly to a couple of thousand such texts
from the middle of the third millennium B.C. 1 Because the excavation-publication process
is still going on, we must be satisfied merely with being cognizant of the possibility of
forthcoming alterations in our perspective. It seems sure that more texts will come from
that site; and we should not be surprised if other major sites in the region produce
comparable material.

2 West Semitic religions and archaeology

Within the vast, evolving discipline of west Semitic studies, we are confronted by an
incredible number of efforts to come to grips with the religions or religious elements of
that ancient world. Various approaches have been taken, including sociological analysis
(W. R. Smith 1889), ethnographic analogies (Curtiss 1903), artefact and symbol identi-
fication (Yadin 1970), comparative mythology (Wensinck 1916), historical reconstructions
(Albright 1968), presentation of single-site arrays (May and Engberg 1935), and the
like. In most of these approaches the static idea of religion is regnant.
Perhaps the most common and fundamental flaw in all of these studies, though, is the
indifferent use of the West Semitic subdivisions as if they somehow defined religions.
We must remind ourselves constantly that the West Semitic subdivisions receive their
definition in the first instance from textual-philological-linguistic studies; we have yet to
find a convincing demonstration that language and religion form perfectly symmetrical
correlations. In a slightly different context, James F. Strange chides his fellow archaeo-
logists for an equally indifferent attitude towards the 'types of religions represented
 The relevance of archaeology to the study of ancient West Semitic religions 133

(simply * 'Judaism* * and "Christianity" and "Judeo-Christianity" are not enough)'

(1977: 66). The amazing fact is that there have been almost no studies which have
attempted to investigate or formulate what archaeology per se reveals about ancient
West Semitic religions, so that we could escape the simplistic use of 'Canaanite',
'Phoenician', 'Israelite', or the like. In order better to understand the implications of this
assertion, let us consider two disparate treatments of the subject at hand.
On the one side is an article, 'Syrian and Palestinian Religions' (=our ancient West
Semitic religions) by Delbert R. Hillers, found in the highly influential Encyclopedia
Britannica (1975). The article is a paradigm for the treatment of the subject as currently
understood. The presupposition with which we are concerned at the moment is this:
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'Written evidence is supplemented by a great quantity of strictly archaeological material

from numerous excavations in Palestine and Syria: temples, cultic utensils, amulets,
and images and symbols of the gods' (p. 967, my italics). As one peruses the article it is
difficult to detect the use of archaeological evidence in any way that would reflect its
'great quantity' even as supplemental material. We are not trying to fault Hillers,
particularly given the character of an encyclopedia article for the most part; rather, we
are trying to get closer to the issue of the relevance of archaeology to the study of ancient
West Semitic religions.
On the other side is the work done by Stanley Arthur Cook several decades ago, most
notably The Religion of Ancient Palestine in the Light of Archaeology (1930). The book
was based on his Schweich lectures of 1925 which in turn seem to have been a natural
development from his much earlier study, The Religion of Ancient Palestine in the Second
Millennium B.C., in the Light of Archaeology and the Inscriptions (1908).
Cook's title for the first chapter is not encouraging: 'Miscellaneous Examples'!
Nevertheless, as we read through it we see Cook struggling with the fundamental
problems involved in his long-range goal. Concerning the connection between written
and unwritten evidence, and in stark contrast to the stance taken by Hillers, Cook says :
'It is, to be sure, a delicate task to determine the contribution of archaeological evidence,
taken by itself, to our knowledge of Palestinian religion. Much could be attempted by a
judicious use of other evidence, literary and monumental... but this would involve
discussion that would be out of place here' (pp. 67-8, his italics). Because it is a 'delicate
task' is no reason not to pursue it.
If we can reconstruct his procedure, we might obtain some important insights about the
relevance of archaeology to the study of ancient West Semitic religions. First, he resolves
the conflict between those who would place texts and remains in a ruler-vassal relation-
ship simply by rejecting all subordination schemes: for Cook, neither texts nor remains
stand over the other but each has its own path to follow (p. 1).
Secondly, having freed the slaves from the master, he also frees them from each other
by averring that 'nothing is negligible' (p. 3). In our generation this might be translated
into an equality of significance for debris layers and city plans, Ayyubid and Israelite
remains, flora and fauna as well as figurines.
In the third place, Cook discusses the interpretation of the data, starting with the
object itself, although 'precisely what may safely be inferred from each object is often
disputable' (p. 4). This openness to meaning, on the other hand, is not allowed to serve
as an excuse to eschew the effort. Additionally, the object must be understood in its
 134 Richard Schiemann

larger historical-cultural milieu, including analogies from later and different systems
(pp. 4-9).
What else is this but the affirmation of rigorous, inductive procedure? (For a parallel
explicit statement concerning European prehistoric religions, cf. Maringer i960, p. viii;
concerning recent discussions of the procedure, cf. Swartz 1967; Salmon 1976.) And
once Cook had delineated his procedure, he proceeded to fill chapter I with his miscel-
lany of remains grouped according to a certain typology. The next two chapters present
a necessarily sketchy reconstruction of a history of the ancient religions of Palestine: 'It
is, in fact, impossible to present a consecutive sketch of the historical development of
Palestinian religion on the basis of archaeology alone, partly by reason of the difficulty,
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not only of interpreting but also of dating our material, and partly on account of the
unequal distribution of the material, and the many gaps in the history' (p. 72). Apart
from improved dating techniques today, that summary of the difficulty remains valid
and, in part, is an indictment of archaeological work in the past half-century.
We can only applaud Cook's effort to perform the 'delicate task'. Unfortunately,
shortly after his presentation, ancient West Semitic studies were overwhelmed by the
discovery (and on-going publication) of the Ugaritic texts. The study of ancient West
Semitic religions headed full-steam in a completely different direction from Cook's
lead, to the extent that archaeological evidence once more was relegated to a status of
vassal, subordinate to and only supplementary to literary and linguistic evidence. Despite
the undoubted value of the Ugaritic texts in and of themselves, their constant use as
definitive for our understanding of ancient West Semitic religions appears to be the
lazy way out for archaeologists. No doubt the Mardikh/Ebla texts, being of much
earlier date and much more numerous, will pose an even greater threat to the integrity of
the archaeologist as he or she attempts to study the ancient religious elements.
In no way are we suggesting that textual evidence is irrelevant or that archaeological
data could tell a whole story on its own. We do think, however, that the study of ancient
West Semitic religions demands a greater independence of the two disciplines: note the
commonality of observation in the following quotations:
'The archaeological evidence for attitudes to life after death does not accord well with the
impression we get from the literature' (Frankfort 1969: 98, concerning Sumerian religion)
'Her excellent exposition and discussion of the monumental remains highlight the contrast
between the archaeological and early literary evidence' (Dietrich 1975: 292, reviewing
Vermeule's Götterkult which treats ancient Greek religion)
'Falsification of the historical and the archaeological map begins with the activity of
"dovetailing"' (Franken 1976: 3, referring to a method in biblical archaeology)
'What sort of conclusion is to be reached when carefully excavated archaeological evidence
does -not seem to meet the minimum requirements of the historical implications of the
biblical texts?' (Miller 1977: 88)
The differences between archaeological and textual evidence can no longer be ignored or
resolved out of existence by the creation of sweeping syntheses.

The possibility of doing archaeology independent of textual material was not something
which S. A. Cook dreamed up, of course. It was de rigueur for archaeologists, or at least
 The relevance of archaeology to the study of ancient West Semitic religions 135

was recognized as the fundamental operation. At the end of the nineteenth century,
David Hogarth edited a collection of interesting essays, the subtitle of which was,
'Essays on the Relation of Monuments to Biblical and Classical Literature' (1899). In
his own preface to the collection (especially pp. v-vii) Hogarth set forth the three con-
notations of archaeology in his day: (1) a discipline along the lines of what we frequently
call Art History; (2) the Greater Archaeology - the utilization of both literary and
material remains to reconstruct the whole human past; and (3) the Lesser Archaeology -
a concern with material remains only, stopping 'short of any possibility of truly re-
constituting the picture of the human past; for to that end the literary documents are all
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essential' (p. vii). These distinctions, or connotations, have stayed with us; they appear
in Albright's works as comparative archaeology, archaeological history, and field
archaeology respectively (1964: chapter 4; 1969: chapter 1, section 1).
We assume that even the novice would recognize that field archaeology has priority
in terms of providing basic data for all other archaeological endeavours; all other archaeo-
logy is of the arm-chair variety, trying to interpret the data, seeking correlative data, and
the like. But are we agreed upon the theory and practice of field archaeology?
Our working definition is that field archaeology is the search for 'unique events'
(Willey and Phillips 1970: 2), with the immediate aim of the recovery and/or recording
of those events in three-dimensional (or stratigraphie) terms ; we might want to call it the
acquisition of a data base. As soon as the archaeologist goes beyond that acquisition
level, he or she has entered a different realm of archaeology in which inductive logic and
analogy play crucial roles and from which one can generate testable hypotheses which
might feed back into the acquisition process.
In that light, field archaeology by itself has no relevance for the study of ancient
West Semitic religions; but without it there could be no such study in relation to archaeo-
logy at all. Field archaeology is the sine qua non for archaeology and it is the character, or
quality, of the acquisition process which establishes the credibility of the rest of the
archaeological enterprise. David Hogarth said long ago that 'All explorers can be
thorough, careful, unprejudiced, systematic - and therein lies the root of the matter!'
(1899: xi). We might take exception to his confidence in the possibility of being un-
prejudiced, but surely we would not demur in the matters of being thorough, careful and
systematic. Or would we?
A glance at excavation reports related to sites which are cited frequently as important
for understanding the ancient West Semitic religions (e.g. Alalakh, Amman, Arad,
Beth-shan, Byblos, Dan, Gezer, Hazor, Lachish, Megiddo, Nahariyah, Qatna, Shechem,
Tainat, Ugarit) indicates that such rigorous acquisition procedures have been honoured
in the breach as much as in the observance. No amount of glossy photographs can
disguise this fact.
What other reason except this patchwork of procedures can explain the recently
published and very welcome demand of the official 'Statement of Standards and
Procedures' of the American Schools of Oriental Research? - 'Although methods of
investigation vary from project to project, they must reflect a high level of concern for
the complete, careful and systematic recovery of evidence and for a complete and clear
record of that evidence' (1978: 3). Without intending any reflection on the work spon-
sored by ASOR in the past, it is obvious that the expressed concern has not become
 136 Richard Schiemann

universal (cf. Aharoni 1973 ; Dever 1973 - for presentations of arguments revolving
around this very topic).
Our major interest in this matter of field archaeology, though, is not to castigate
archaeologists past or present who might be guilty of a cavalier treatment of the non-
renewable archaeological heritage; rather we want to state in no uncertain terms that we
reap what they sow. To the extent that archaeological evidence of any kind is intention-
ally destroyed and unrecorded, so far is our effort to realize a portrait of the ancient
religions flawed. Indeed, the longer that careless archaeology is allowed to happen at
all, the greater becomes our inability to recapture the more balanced picture of ancient
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West Semitic religions which archaeology promises. The relevance of archaeology to the
study of ancient West Semitic religions is in direct proportion to the quality of its
acquisition process.

Conclusion
We have tried to indicate that the two basic components of our paper, archaeology and
religion, can be understood in quite divergent ways. Furthermore, we have tried to show
that these divergent perspectives define the meaning of relevance. It is our contention
that an archaeology free from all restraint either to shed light on textual materials or to
be clarified by textual materials, and an archaeology based on rigorous recovery and
recording procedures bears the greatest promise to provide new information related to
an organismic view of the ancient West Semitic religious life. Otherwise we seem to be
stuck with a literary-dominated and therefore lopsided and static concept of this religious
heritage, to which archaeology continues to add an example of this or that but essentially
would not be missed if it were absent. In that light we can conclude that the relevance of
archaeology to the study of ancient West Semitic religions is one of indispensability
versus unessentiality.
10.iv.1978 Houston, Texas

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Abstract
Schiemann, R.
The relevance of archaeology to the study of ancient West Semitic religions
The paper attempts to reveal a general picture of the state-of-the-art in the disciplines of
religion, West Semitic studies, archaeological history and field archaeology in order to shed
some light on the future prospects of archaeology for the study of religion. The widespread use
of inductive procedures in the fields of religion and archaeology no longer allows us to be
satisfied with a temples-and-texts concept of ancient West Semitic religions for which archaeo-
logy is of little or no significance. On the other hand, a rigorous archaeological procedure is far
from being universal in the homelands of those religions. Therefore, we can see that a state of
limbo exists and the only real prospect for the future is that archaeology becomes relevant by
becoming free.