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November 18, 2008

Found: An Ancient Monument to the Soul

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

In a mountainous kingdom in what is now southeastern Turkey, there lived
in the eighth century B.C. a royal official, Kuttamuwa, who oversaw the
completion of an inscribed stone monument, or stele, to be erected upon
his death. The words instructed mourners to commemorate his life and
afterlife with feasts "for my soul that is in this stele."

University of Chicago archaeologists who made the discovery last summer
in ruins of a walled city near the Syrian border said the stele provided
the first written evidence that the people in this region held to the
religious concept of the soul apart from the body. By contrast, Semitic
contemporaries, including the Israelites, believed that the body and
soul were inseparable, which for them made cremation unthinkable, as
noted in the Bible.

Circumstantial evidence, archaeologists said, indicated that the people
at Sam’al, the ancient city, practiced cremation. The site is known
today as Zincirli (pronounced ZIN-jeer-lee).

Other scholars said the find could lead to important insights into the
dynamics of cultural contact and exchange in the borderlands of
antiquity where Indo-European and Semitic people interacted in the Iron
Age.

The official’s name, for example, is Indo-European: no surprise, as
previous investigations there had turned up names and writing in the
Luwian language from the north. But the stele also bears southern
influences. The writing is in a script derived from the Phoenician
alphabet and a Semitic language that appears to be an archaic variant of
Aramaic.

The discovery and its implications were described last week in
interviews with archaeologists and a linguist at the University of
Chicago, who excavated and translated the inscription.

"Normally, in the Semitic cultures, the soul of a person, their vital
essence, adheres to the bones of the deceased," said David Schloen, an
archaeologist at the university’s Oriental Institute and director of the
excavations. "But here we have a culture that believed the soul is not
in the corpse but has been transferred to the mortuary stone."

A translation of the inscription by Dennis Pardee, a professor of Near
Eastern languages and civilization at Chicago, reads in part: "I,
Kuttamuwa, servant of [the king] Panamuwa, am the one who oversaw the
production of this stele for myself while still living. I placed it in
an eternal chamber [?] and established a feast at this chamber: a bull
for [the god] Hadad, a ram for [the god] Shamash and a ram for my soul
that is in this stele."

Dr. Pardee said the word used for soul, nabsh, was Aramaic, a language
spoken throughout northern Syria and parts of Mesopotamia in the eighth
century. But the inscription seemed to be a previously unrecognized
dialect. In Hebrew, a related language, the word for soul is nefesh.

In addition to the writing, a pictorial scene chiseled into the
well-preserved stele depicts the culture’s view of the afterlife. A
bearded man wearing a tasseled cap, presumably Kuttamuwa, raises a cup
of wine and sits before a table laden with food, bread and roast duck in
a stone bowl.

In other societies of the region, scholars say, this was an invitation
to bring customary offerings of food and drink to the tomb of the
deceased. Here family and descendants supposedly feasted before a stone
slab in a kind of chapel. Archaeologists have found no traces there of a
tomb or bodily remains.

Joseph Wegner, an Egyptologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who
was not involved in the research, said cult offerings to the dead were
common in the Middle East, but not the idea of a soul separate from the
body – except in Egypt.

In ancient Egypt, Dr. Wegner noted, the human entity has separate
components. The body is important, and the elite went to great expense
to mummify and entomb it for eternity. In death, though, a life force or
spirit known as ka was immortal, and a soul known as ba, which was
linked to personal attributes, fled the body after death.

Dr. Wegner said the concept of a soul held by the people at Sam’al
"sounds vaguely Egyptian in its nature." But there was nothing in
history or archaeology, he added, to suggest that the Egyptian
civilization had a direct influence on this border kingdom.

Other scholars are expected to weigh in after Dr. Schloen and Dr. Pardee
describe their findings later this week in Boston at meetings of the
American Schools of Oriental Research and the Society of Biblical
Literature.

Lawrence E. Stager, an archaeologist at Harvard who excavates in Israel,
said that from what he had learned so far the stele illustrated "to a
great degree the mixed cultural heritage in the region at that time" and
was likely to prompt "new and exciting discoveries in years to come."

Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute, said the stele was a
"rare and most informative discovery in having written evidence together
with artistic and archaeological evidence from the Iron Age."

The 800-pound basalt stele, three feet tall and two feet wide, was found
in the third season of excavations at Zincirli by the Neubauer
Expedition of the Oriental Institute. The work is expected to continue
for seven more years, supported in large part by the Neubauer Family
Foundation of Chicago.

The site, near the town of Islahiye in Gaziantep province, was
controlled at one time by the Hittite Empire in central Turkey, then
became the capital of a small independent kingdom. In the eighth
century, the city was still the seat of kings, including Panamuwa, but
they were by then apparently subservient to the Assyrian Empire. After
that empire’s collapse, the city’s fortunes declined, and the place was
abandoned late in the seventh century.

A German expedition, from 1888 to 1902, was the first to explore the
city’s past. It uncovered thick city walls of stone and mud brick and
monumental gates lined with sculpture and inscriptions. These provided
the first direct evidence of Indo-European influence on the kingdom.

After the Germans suspended operations, the ruins lay unworked until the
Chicago team began digging in 2006, concentrating on the city beyond the
central citadel, which had been the focus of the German research. Much
of the 100-acre site has now been mapped by remote-sensing magnetic
technology capable of detecting buried structures.

This summer, on July 21, workers excavating what appeared to be a large
dwelling came upon the rounded top of the stele and saw the first line
of the inscription. Dr. Schloen and Amir Fink, a doctoral student in
archaeology at Tel Aviv University, bent over to read.

Almost immediately, they and others on the team recognized that the
words were Semitic and the name of the king was familiar; it had
appeared in the inscriptions found by the Germans. As the entire stele
was exposed, Dr. Schloen said, the team made a rough translation, and
this was later completed and refined by Dr. Pardee.

Then the archaeologists examined more closely every aspect of the small,
square room in which the stele stood in a corner by a stone wall.
Fragments of offering bowls to the type depicted in the stele were on
the floor. Remains of two bread ovens were found.

"Our best guess is that this was originally a kitchen annexed to a
larger dwelling," Dr. Schloen said. "The room was remodeled as a shrine
or chapel – a mortuary chapel for Kuttamuwa, probably in his own home."

They found no signs of a burial in the city’s ruins. At other ancient
sites on the Turkish-Syrian border, cremation urns have been dated to
the same period. So the archaeologists surmised that cremation was also
practiced at Sam’al.

Dr. Stager of Harvard said the evidence so far, the spread of languages
and especially the writing on stone about a royal official’s soul
reflected the give-and-take of mixed cultures, part Indo-European, part
Semitic, at a borderland in antiquity.

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