On Tuesday, the autonomous government of the Gaza Strip announced the discovery of a figure believed to date to the Bronze Age on agricultural land in Khan Yunis, the southern strip’s capital. According to the first reconstructions, the statuette represents the head of a female deity and originally had to have a body that was almost one meter high. At the moment it is on display in a historical building in the old city of Gaza.
Finds of this kind are not uncommon in the area between the south-eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, inhabited for millennia and always at the center of trade, wars and migrations: the case of the statuette of Khan Yunis is interesting for several reasons, including fact that it will be exhibited in a museum. Palestine has had serious problems with looting and poor protection of archaeological assets for decades.
Furthermore, no one can say with certainty what the statue represents: and the dispute over what it represents is inevitably intertwined with the deep conflicts of identity, ethnicity, and territory that characterize this slice of the world.
Gaza: The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in Gaza announces the discovery of a Canaanite statue in a land in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, dating to 2500 BC. BC. pic.twitter.com/o3Zsw6L06F
– Lebanese News and Updates (@LebUpdate) April 25, 2022
Israel, Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon are countries with very ancient histories. From here, at the end of the last Ice Age ten thousand years ago, the first farmers came to Europe in search of new fertile soil.
In the following millennia, these lands were disputed by dozens of peoples because of their strategic location at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea, halfway between Europe, Asia and Africa, and because of the favorable climate. All the great civilizations of history have left traces of their passage or domination in these places.
A scholarly American map of the migrations of early European farmers
The resulting abundance of archaeological finds has always attracted thieves and looters. Even today, the governments of countries in the region do not have the strength to prevent hundreds of artifacts from being stolen and sold on the black market each year, sometimes shortly after their discovery. It’s an even more serious problem in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, two areas governed by semi-state entities that lack the resources or powers of a real state.
A few years ago, Saleh Sawafta, then director of the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism’s Department of Archaeological Heritage Protection, told Al Monitor that the Palestinian Authority, which governs part of the West Bank, has had to deal with illegal archaeological excavations since its inception in the 1990s .
Complicating the problem is that about 60 percent of known archaeological areas lie in what is known as Area C of the West Bank, where civil and military control would belong to Israel, but which it exercises in a haphazard and inhomogeneous manner and has more of its own interests in mind than that of the Palestinians. In Area C alone, Sawafta says, there are about 7,000 archaeological sites and about 50,000 historical buildings.
The network of plundering and marketing of archaeological goods is so extensive that the finds are sometimes stolen shortly after the excavation. In 2013, a perfectly preserved bronze statue of the Greek god Apollo was found off the coast of Gaza. The statue was immediately confiscated by Hamas, the radical group that rules Gaza, and nothing has been heard of it since. Among other things, Hamas is known for its disinterest in archaeological finds, especially those that are not particularly prominent. The Canaan Team association, which monitors the state of archaeological sites in the Gaza Strip, estimates that at least 31 archaeological sites have disappeared due to the frenetic urban development of Hamas, which, among other things, has never compiled a central register of the Strip’s archaeological sites.
Things are a little different with the character Khan Yunis. Hamas announced their discovery with a triumphant press conference and promptly exhibited it in central Gaza, attempting, by some, to exploit their discovery for political ends.
The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities of the Gaza Strip writes in a press release that the statuette depicts the goddess Anat and dates back to 2,500 BC. BC, i.e. at the beginning of the Bronze Age.
In reality, it is very difficult to understand when the statuette is dated, but above all to identify exactly who it represents.
It may seem strange today, but in the Bronze Age Middle East, deities had far less defined outlines than we are used to. We certainly know that different peoples of the region worshiped a goddess, partly called Anat, to whom they ascribed various qualities and associated with very different activities, including war and hunting, but also the administration of justice. .
In a 1991 study, Old Testament and Hebrew scholar Neal H. Walls of Wake Forest University argued that a number of Bronze Age texts found in modern-day Syria “present Anat chiefly as a female deity, but with traits of gender ambiguity” By assuming the masculine attributes of hunter and warrior, Anat rejects the usual roles of mother and wife, thereby threatening the order of patriarchal society. Still, Anat cannot deny her own feminine nature, and the tension between her masculine and feminine characteristics contributes to her ambiguous identity ».
Anat was not the only goddess to exhibit such qualities. In his 2008 book The Many Faces of the Goddess, historian Izak Cornelius writes that during the final phase of the Bronze Age, the female deity worshiped in the region had similar but at the same time fluid and heterogeneous characteristics, which today is very difficult to distinguish deities . For example, the figure of Anat is associated with that of Astarte, another goddess of the region with very similar characteristics, but also with Asherah, a female deity mentioned about forty times in the Hebrew Bible and who, according to some theories, at least at the dawn of Jewish monotheism was the companion of the one God worshiped by the Jews.
The sound of the name Anat also closely resembles that of Athena, the Greek goddess of war and justice, whose image Anat may have been coined. At the end of the 19th century a bilingual inscription in Greek and Phoenician was found in Cyprus, in which the name Anat in the Phoenician text is translated in Greek as “Athena”. The name “Athena” is not of Indo-European origin, thus the ancestor of all Western languages, and it is plausible that the Greeks borrowed it from some other people.
Among other things, the statuette of Khan Yunis depicts what appears to be a snake, instead of the hair of the goddess: and the snake is one of the animals closest to Athena in the representation of the goddess, even in classical Greece.
Canaanite sculpture from 2500 BC. which was discovered in the Gaza Strip.https://t.co/zhafTcJoCs pic.twitter.com/pwdU5aDNEi
– Wafa News Agency – English (@WAFANewsEnglish) April 25, 2022
But this feature gives us no further clues as to the identity or origin of the people who made the statuette of Khan Younis. The image of the snake is found in many other Bronze Age female deities, for example in the goddess statuettes found in the Palace of Knossos in Crete, but also in some statuettes found in Serbia dating to around 5,000 BC depicting a snake goddess.
Some Neolithic European and Middle Eastern cultures are believed to have associated female deities of life and regeneration with serpents, as these animals have been known since ancient times to mutate throughout their lives.
A statuette of the snake goddess found near Belgrade, Serbia, with scaly thighs and ankles; Drawing from the book The Living Goddesses by Marija Gimbutas, Medusa Editions, 2020
The fact remains that securely identifying a statuette that has just been pulled from the ground and has not yet been examined by art historians and archaeologists remains very complex. Aren Maeir, a distinguished archaeologist at Israel’s Bar Ilan University, told the Jerusalem Post that the statuette “looks like nothing I’ve ever seen. I don’t recognize it, I don’t know what it is and it’s even difficult to understand what period it belongs to ».
For this reason too, it seems unscrupulous to make a connection between the statuette and the present, as Hamas attempted when announcing its discovery. “These results prove that Palestine has a civilization and a history, and no one can deny or falsify this history: we have evidence of the Palestinian people and their ancestors, the Canaanites,” said Jamal Abu Rida, an official with the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities Gaza Strip.
Hamas has a keen interest in showing that the ancestors of today’s Palestinians invaded the Gaza Strip as early as 2,500 BC. late. “We are the Canaanites,” said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2018. “This land belongs to the people who were here five thousand years ago.”
Such theses leave the time they find, also because in reality objects like the statuette show how intertwined were the cultures and populations that inhabited this region in the Bronze Age: The female deity that is perhaps represented in the statuette of Khan Yunis , was worshiped throughout the region, albeit with slightly different names and attributes.
So the Canaanites spoke a Semitic language, a relative of today’s Hebrew, had a religion not so far removed from Hebrew and inhabited a large area that today extends over various states. Additionally, according to a much-cited 2020 study of the DNA of some Bronze Age Canaanite tombs, “Both Jewish groups, people of Levantine ethnicity, and Arabic-speaking people have a genetic makeup that is more than 50 percent descended from people from groups who lived in the Bronze Age in the Near East ».
In other words, many of the people living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip today are related, albeit very distant. And no statuette can prove otherwise.