Helen M Dixon
Phone: 252-358-6094
Address: Dr. Helen M. Dixon
Department of History, East Carolina University
East 5th Street, A-316 Brewster Building, Greenville, NC 27858-4353
https://history.ecu.edu/faculty-staff-directory/
Address: Dr. Helen M. Dixon
Department of History, East Carolina University
East 5th Street, A-316 Brewster Building, Greenville, NC 27858-4353
https://history.ecu.edu/faculty-staff-directory/
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College course called “Gods of the Biblical World: Polytheism, Magic and Israelite Religion,” and imagined around the use of two objects donated by an alumnus to the Wofford College Fine Art collection: two unprovenanced clay molds for making small figurines or amulets of divine images (one in the shape of the Egyptian god Bes, 2.63 x 1.63 x 1 inches; the other in the form of the divine enthroned Isis, nursing her child Horus on her lap, 3 x 1.25 x 1.25 inches: http://tinyurl.com/WoffordMolds), probably dating to the New Kingdom period (16th-11th centuries BCE). Rather than simply showing the ancient molds in class and asking students to imagine how they were used, this project allowed students to act as Bronze or Iron Age Levantine craftspeople and religious practitioners, creating their own clay figurines from 3D-printed copies of the molds themselves. This allowed students to explore the lived experience of worship and ritual in the ancient Near East through both the hands-on figurine-making workshop and the subsequent designing of a plausible first-millennium BCE ritual around the figurine they’d made.
Prof. dr. Helen Dixon (East Carolina University): "Phoenicians Abroad:
Diaspora communities and trade-based encounters in the first
millennium BCE"
Dr. Céline Debourse (University of Vienna): “Between Real and Ideal:
The Babylonian New Year Festival in Text and History”
The history of the Phoenicians, or inhabitants of the Iron Age northern coastal Levant, has long been told from the perspective of their neighbors – via the texts of the Hebrew Bible, Greek and Roman authors, and inscriptions from Western Phoenician and Punic “colonies.” This has been the case in part because the most significant Phoenician cities (e.g. Byblos, Beirut, Sidon, Tyre) have been continually inhabited since the Iron Age (or earlier), and extensive excavation in these urban centers is not fully possible. However, a significant number of Iron Age burials found outside settlement boundaries – in the form of isolated tombs, clusters of graves, and extensive cemeteries – have been explored or excavated since the 1850s throughout coastal southern Syria, Lebanon, and northern Israel. This project catalogs the more than 1400 burials known from the Phoenician “homeland” to date, offering a substantive contribution to a social history of the Levantine Phoenicians in the earliest periods of their cultural distinctiveness.
The study begins with a reassessment of all inscriptions relating to Phoenician mortuary practice thought to date to the Iron I-II (chapter two) and Iron III – Greco-Roman (chapter three) periods. The literary sources for Phoenician mortuary practice are then analyzed, first addressing the biblical texts (chapter four), and then classical sources (chapter five). This newly evaluated textual corpus is finally supplemented with a discussion of the burial database and mortuary landscapes of the Iron I-III period northern coastal Levant (chapter sixr). All of this material is incorporated into a discussion of the treatment of the dead as a stage for Phoenician meaning-making in the Iron I-III periods, and a reassessment of Phoenician social identity in this period (chapter seven).
An examination of the Phoenician mortuary record indicates no sharp regional distinctions in material culture reflective of an expected city-based model of Phoenician identity. Instead, a significant degree of variation is evident in individual cemeteries, indicating that Iron I-II period Phoenicians wished to “signal” not political allegiance or ethnic identity, but other aspects of their social identities in death. Contrasting the burial data from these early centuries with the innovative mortuary practices which arose in the better-documented Iron III (Persian) period illustrates how Achaemenid influence in the region seems to have significantly altered these early Phoenician concepts of social status and affiliation.
College course called “Gods of the Biblical World: Polytheism, Magic and Israelite Religion,” and imagined around the use of two objects donated by an alumnus to the Wofford College Fine Art collection: two unprovenanced clay molds for making small figurines or amulets of divine images (one in the shape of the Egyptian god Bes, 2.63 x 1.63 x 1 inches; the other in the form of the divine enthroned Isis, nursing her child Horus on her lap, 3 x 1.25 x 1.25 inches: http://tinyurl.com/WoffordMolds), probably dating to the New Kingdom period (16th-11th centuries BCE). Rather than simply showing the ancient molds in class and asking students to imagine how they were used, this project allowed students to act as Bronze or Iron Age Levantine craftspeople and religious practitioners, creating their own clay figurines from 3D-printed copies of the molds themselves. This allowed students to explore the lived experience of worship and ritual in the ancient Near East through both the hands-on figurine-making workshop and the subsequent designing of a plausible first-millennium BCE ritual around the figurine they’d made.
Prof. dr. Helen Dixon (East Carolina University): "Phoenicians Abroad:
Diaspora communities and trade-based encounters in the first
millennium BCE"
Dr. Céline Debourse (University of Vienna): “Between Real and Ideal:
The Babylonian New Year Festival in Text and History”
The history of the Phoenicians, or inhabitants of the Iron Age northern coastal Levant, has long been told from the perspective of their neighbors – via the texts of the Hebrew Bible, Greek and Roman authors, and inscriptions from Western Phoenician and Punic “colonies.” This has been the case in part because the most significant Phoenician cities (e.g. Byblos, Beirut, Sidon, Tyre) have been continually inhabited since the Iron Age (or earlier), and extensive excavation in these urban centers is not fully possible. However, a significant number of Iron Age burials found outside settlement boundaries – in the form of isolated tombs, clusters of graves, and extensive cemeteries – have been explored or excavated since the 1850s throughout coastal southern Syria, Lebanon, and northern Israel. This project catalogs the more than 1400 burials known from the Phoenician “homeland” to date, offering a substantive contribution to a social history of the Levantine Phoenicians in the earliest periods of their cultural distinctiveness.
The study begins with a reassessment of all inscriptions relating to Phoenician mortuary practice thought to date to the Iron I-II (chapter two) and Iron III – Greco-Roman (chapter three) periods. The literary sources for Phoenician mortuary practice are then analyzed, first addressing the biblical texts (chapter four), and then classical sources (chapter five). This newly evaluated textual corpus is finally supplemented with a discussion of the burial database and mortuary landscapes of the Iron I-III period northern coastal Levant (chapter sixr). All of this material is incorporated into a discussion of the treatment of the dead as a stage for Phoenician meaning-making in the Iron I-III periods, and a reassessment of Phoenician social identity in this period (chapter seven).
An examination of the Phoenician mortuary record indicates no sharp regional distinctions in material culture reflective of an expected city-based model of Phoenician identity. Instead, a significant degree of variation is evident in individual cemeteries, indicating that Iron I-II period Phoenicians wished to “signal” not political allegiance or ethnic identity, but other aspects of their social identities in death. Contrasting the burial data from these early centuries with the innovative mortuary practices which arose in the better-documented Iron III (Persian) period illustrates how Achaemenid influence in the region seems to have significantly altered these early Phoenician concepts of social status and affiliation.
"This course aims to provide an introduction the fields of epigraphy and paleography (as well as related disciplines), presenting the study of alphabetic Greek inscriptions as a useful tool for historians of the ancient world. Students will learn to reconcile disparate translations of Greek texts, and evaluate other scholars' dates, interpretations, and discussions of Greek inscriptions on a variety of media. In particular, facility with electronic resources and databases will be encouraged. Students enrolled in the course will produce one close study (and critical edition) of a Greek inscription for their midterm inscription project (worth 25% of the course grade), and will produce a longer discussion of a historical question dependent on inscriptional evidence for their final writing project (worth 35% of the course grade). A student presentation of an inscriptional case study (preferably connected to the student's final writing project, worth 25% of the course grade) will also be required of registered students."
A different picture arises, however, when Phoenician Levantine religious structures are studied as a discrete data set. This paper will provide a survey of all known religious structures from the Iron Age II and III (ca. 1000 – 300 BCE) period Phoenician “homeland,” emphasizing diachronic change and regional diversity in the period in question. A more inclusive accounting of the varieties of religious space in operation in Levantine Phoenicia raises new research questions about the social dimensions of religious practice in this period of accelerating political change.
This reanalysis shows that a land blockade of the island of Tyre is more likely than the 13-year military siege described in later literary texts, while highlighting the difficulties of separating legend from historical reality in this period in the Levant. When this revised understanding is examined alongside the Hoftkalender Prism and Nebuchadnezzar II’s inscriptions at Wadi esh-Sharbin (along with three others at the Nahr el-Khalb and in the Beqaa), our picture of Neo-Babylonian “policy” in Phoenician territory can be considerably refined.
A brief reconstruction of Phoenicia’s political structure and economic role under Neo-Babylonian rule will be offered, moving site-by-site through its territory to illustrate the available evidence. Diachronic change at each site will be discussed where possible. Although this is difficult to detect in a period lasting just sixty-five years, data from the early Achaemenid period in Phoenicia may in some cases shed light on the status that certain sites carried over from Neo-Babylonian arrangements. Finally, Phoenicia’s value to the Babylonians will be assessed given the implications of this new reconstruction.
Utilizing information from the excavation of domestic contexts (in Beirut, Sarepta, and other sites), a database of over 1400 burials from the Levantine Phoenician homeland, inscriptions and other sources, this paper explores the extant evidence for these Iron Age I-III Phoenician women. What can burials of women tell us about their social roles and values? How applicable is information on women obtained from Neo-Hittite, Aramean, Israelite, or Judahite sites? The challenges of locating women archaeologically, given the specific limitations of Phoenician homeland archaeology, and of weighing textual evidence from neighboring Iron Age I-III period cultures will also be addressed.
But might a better understanding of the range of human mortuary practices in the Phoenician Levant shed light on the significance of these dog burials? Referencing a database of over 1400 human burials from the northern coastal Levant, this paper examines whether these dog burials should be seen as evidence of an extension of “Phoenician” mortuary rites to non-human members of the community, or as a product of a distinct cult that required the ritual burial (or slaughter) of these canines. Given the complex continuum of Iron Age Mediterranean beliefs about the dog, an analysis of “internal” evidence from the northern coastal Levant may well offer additional insight into this puzzling practice.
This paper examines intentional dog burial as a Mediterranean phenomenon, seeking to understand the Phoenician examples in light of the treatment of dogs at death (and their ritual associations in other contexts) in neighboring Mediterranean cultures. Examples from the Aegean, Anatolian, and Egyptian cultural spheres will be examined. Rather than seeing the Levantine burials as evidence for a Phoenician practice to be delineated on a purely “ethnic” basis, a more complex continuum of Iron Age Mediterranean beliefs about the canine will be proposed as necessary to understand this phenomenon.
Examining these museum-oriented policies will assist not only in crafting our own guidelines for academic “best practices,” but will also highlight the dangers of relying on decisions made by museums in determining what “should” or “shouldn’t be” fair game for study and publication. As we continue to wrestle with the questions that came up in last year’s workshop – Do museum catalogs count as a “first publication”? Are items on permanent loan from private collections subject to the same ethical standards as other museum collections? Is “public access” to artifacts more important than their “cultural patrimony” or the integrity of the archaeological record? Etc. – a closer examination of how the museum field has envisioned and articulated its own ethical role seems a crucial next step.
Using a database containing every known burial from homeland Phoenician mortuary deposits in the form of cemeteries, "tophets," and individual or clustered burials (some discovered as early as the 1860s), I will explore the potential and limitations of this sporadic and uneven data set. Implications for our understanding of the social history or cultural diversity of Iron I-II Phoenicia will be discussed, drawing on anthropological models and other regional case studies of this kind.