ARAMAIC BASALT STATUES FROM TELL HALAF,SYRIA: LOCATING THE ANCIENT QUARRIES

Tell Halaf is the locality of the ancient Aramaic city of Guzāna (c. 1000–800 bc ) in Syria. The statues of Tell Halaf were made from monolithic basalt blocks, comprising massive as well as amygdaloidal types. However, the exact location of the original quarries was as yet unknown. Reconnaissance mapping and sampling concentrated on the four basaltic centres in the vicinity of Tell Halaf, covering both south‐eastern Turkey and north‐eastern Syria. In addition, basaltic artefacts from the two archaeological sites of Tell Beydar (c. 2700–2300 bc ) and Djebelet el Beda (c. 2600–2350 bc ) were investigated. All basalt samples were analysed for their bulk rock major and trace element compositions by X‐ray fluorescence, ICP–MS analysis and the mineral chemistry of individual minerals by combined electron microprobe analysis and laser‐ablation ICP–MS. The data show that basalt works of art from all three archaeological sites were derived from the Syrian basalt plateau of Ard esh‐Sheikh, approximately 57 km south of Tell Halaf. Accordingly, this basalt quarry was actively exploited over a considerable time span of c. 1900 years. This study demonstrates that petrographic and geochemical investigations of basalt, combined with electron microprobe and laser‐ablation ICP–MS analysis of minerals, are powerful tools to discriminate between possible sources of raw materials, especially if isotopic data yield unsatisfying results.     

A WORLD CONNECTING? FROM THE UNITY OF HISTORY TO GLOBAL HISTORY

Global history looms large in current historiography, yet its heuristic design and political functions remain ill‐reflected. My article seeks to uncover the historical origins of the assumption that the “world” has one common history and that it is feasible and desirable to write it. I analyze the epistemic infrastructure underlying this assumption and argue that global history as practiced today is predicated on a specific mode of world‐making that provides its basic template: Global history both grew out of and intellectually sustains the conception of an increasingly connected world. The type of connectedness thereby implied and reinscribed was established by what I call the “world‐historical process,” a cognitive framework that co‐emerged with the early modern and modern European conquest of the world through expansion, discovery, commerce, and culture. The article investigates how this process‐template emerged out of the crisis of universal history that could no longer integrate and reconcile the multiple pasts of the world. The format of the world‐historical process was central to Enlightenment historians' assertion of the secular and scientific prestige of their craft, as much as to its ability to discern global epochs, in particular the modern and the premodern. My article traces the fortunes of this template through historicism up to present‐day global history. Current global history remains structured around the growing connectedness of previously distinct parts of the planet whose pasts are transformed into relevant world history by the very process that makes them increasingly interrelated. Global history may be too much a product of the process of globalization it studies to develop epistemologically and politically tenable alternatives to “connectivity.”     

Possible Evidence for Homicide in an Egyptian Mummy Head

In the present paper we describe the macroscopic, radiological and histological findings for the head of an adult male Egyptian mummy, who presented with a round to oval defect of the left occipitotemporal bone covered by an almost intact layer of soft tissue and skin. The osseous defect showed infundibular widening into the cranial cavity, such as is seen in cases of depressed fracture due to a massive external force applied by a rather blunt weapon. In addition, the slightly increased thickness of the skull bone indicates that even higher mechanical force was necessary to punch out the defect than in other skulls. Because we assume that the defect occurred intravitally, the unusual constellation of this defect provides some evidence that it had occurred during a violent attack, possibly presenting the palaeopathological remnants of a case of homicide.