Hello all! I recently got around to reading the article "'The King of the Sidonians': Phoenician Ideologies and the Myth of the Kingdom of Tyre-Sidon" by Philip J. Boyes (BASOR 365 [2012]" 33-44), and, all in all, it's something of a disaster. I'll give my condensed review here. First let me quote the abstract:

On the strength of the fact that certain kings of Tyre used the title "King of the Sidonians," some scholars argue for the existence of a degree of political unity between Tyre and Sidon, especially during the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. This paper contends that this interpretation is unsound, since it relies to a great extent on stories told long after the period being considered, which are often of dubious historical reliability. An alternative methodology is proposed, which privileges contemporary, direct evidence over later accounts. This affects our ability to tell narrative histories of the kind traditionally presented but results in a more subtle and ambiguous interpretation with a more stable evidential basis.

By sources "of dubious historical reliability," Boyes means the Bible as well as fragmentary Phoenician records translated into Greek by Menander of Ephesus (preserved for us mainly as extracts/quotations in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews and Against Apion). Boyes dismisses the former without much discussion on the grounds that it's not contemporary and that, well, it's the Bible. The relevant passage here is 1 Kings 16:31 and its reference "Ethbaal king of the Sidonians," father of the infamous Jezebel. (For the curious, Jezebel's name appears in Phoenician as yzbl on an unprovenanced seal, which N. Avigad dated paleographically to the ninth or eight century; it probably didn't belong to the Biblical Jezebel, but that hasn't stopped some scholars from arguing that it did.)

Boyes then cautions against using Menander because "it was very probably third- or fourth-hand, and probably subject to significant distortion through translation and transmission." For the record, the relevant passage here is that Ithobaal (that is, Ethbaal) the "priest of Astarte" seized the Tyrian throne in c. 880. Nevertheless, Boyes appears to be completely unaware of the manuscript corruptions that account for some of the oddities in Menander, as revealed by his skepticism that Ithobaal could have mounted a coup at the age of sixteen; in fact, the Codex Laurentianus, our main manuscript for Josephus' Against Apion (where the Tyrian king-list appears), states that Ithobaal was thirty-six when he ascended the throne. Edward Lipiński has also addressed this topic quite thoroughly (though I have various quibbles) in his book On the Skirts of Canaan in the Iron Age (Leuven: Peeters, 2006)--which Boyes cites in his bibliography but apparently did not read beyond pp. 178-9. On the other hand, the "contemporary, direct evidence" he claims to emphasize is far more limited; almost no Phoenician texts have survived from this period, and what little remains cannot, in my view, reveal much about Phoenician political history. Thus, Boyes essentially throws out the main evidence and replaces it with his own interpretation.

But I digress. Quite simply, as it turns out, Boyes has managed to overlook important, contemporary evidence that Tyre and Sidon were indeed under the rule of one king after the mid-ninth century. Specifically, the annals of Shalmaneser III of Assyria record that the king "received tribute from Ba’ali-manzeri of Tyre [=Baalmazer II, son of Ithobaal] (and) from Jehu [=king of Israel] (Iaua) of the house of Omri (Ḫumrî)" in his eighteenth regnal year, or 841, while a variant of this passage states that the Shalmaneser "received tribute from the people of Tyre, Sidon, (and) from Jehu (Iaua) of the house of Omri (Ḫumrî)" in his eighteenth regnal year; this clearly implies that Tyre and Sidon were both under Baalmazer II. A separate text, which records that the king "received tribute from the boats of the people of Tyre and Sidon," depicts in an accompanying picture only the king and queen of Tyre (who are standing in front of their island-city, seeing off the boats). Over a century later, a letter by an Assyrian official to Tiglath-pileser III in 733/2 reports: "Hiram [=king of Tyre] cut down the (sacred) tree of the temple of his gods, which is at the entrance to Sidon, saying: 'I shall move it to Tyre'. I made him stop this: the(sacred) tree, which he cut down, is at the foot of the mount". Even as an Assyrian vassal, Hiram's actions make no sense if he did not also exercise authority over Sidon. [1] Boyes does accept the possibility that Hiram [II] was king of both Sidon and Tyre (see below) but he is evidently unaware of this particular source.

At this point, the Assyrians seem to have appointed Luli (Eloulaios in Menander) as king of Sidon (the first king of Sidon mentioned in Assyrian texts until now!), thereby depriving Hiram of power. But Boyes comments: "There are problems with Josephus' account... [H]is claim that Luli ruled for 36 years contradicts the report in the annals of Tiglath-Pileser of a Tyrian king Mattan paying tribute during that time. The only way Josephus' [=Menander's] history can be reconciled with contemporary sources is if Luli gained control of Tyre only after he had already ruled in Sidon for some time..." In fact, a number of scholars (including Lipiński) have pointed out that Mattan was probably an usurper; he offered an enormous quantity of gold and silver as tribute to Tiglath-pileser III in 729/8, apparently as a bribe, and yet Luli (re-?)gained control of Tyre sometime after the death of the Assyrian king. Even if we ignore Menander's account that Luli (as ruler of Tyre) fought against Shalmaneser, the annals of Sennacherib indicate that Luli ("king of Sidon") was in control of Tyre (Boyes acknowledges this) and imply that he had made it his capital. In 701, Luli fled from Tyre to Cyprus, though Sennacherib does not claim to have ever conquered Tyre. The Assyrian designated Tuba’lu (Ethbaal in Phoenician) as the new king of Sidon, an act which, Lipiński says, marked the end of Sidonian-Tyrian unity.

Boyes concludes in the end that, for the eight century, "[s]ome sort of political union between Sidon and Tyre seems plausible." He even notes that in one extant inscription, Hiram [II] refers to himself as the "king of the Sidonians" (mlk ṣdnm), and that "Hiram seems to be a name particularly associated with the Tyrian royal house." As for Luli, "there appears to have been a period of separate monarchies, with Luli reigning in Sidon and Mattan II in Tyre... Sidon appears dominant, with every indication being that Tyre was the subsidiary to it. The Sidonian king Luli ruled both cities..." Now to sum up Boyes' own summation, if we remove evidence (from the Bible and Menander/Josephus) that Ithobaal ruled over both Tyre and Sidon, then there is no evidence that Tyre and Sidon were under one king until Hiram II surfaces in the historical record. Nonetheless, as I have already suggested, this proves misleading in that it ignores Assyrian sources which generally group Tyre and Sidon together as one unit as well as the fact that these sources do not mention any Sidonian kings until Luli, who also ruled over both Tyre and Sidon. Furthermore, things actually make more sense if we add Menander's testimony to the picture. As I mentioned above, Menander says that Ithobaal/Ethbaal was the "priest of Astarte" when he took power in Tyre; the joint priesthood-kingship is in fact attested in earlier Sidonian inscriptions (e.g., KAI 13: ’nk tbnt khn ‘štrt mlk ṣdnm, "I Tabnit, priest of Ashtart, king of the Sidonians...").

All of this has been discussed in detail by earlier scholars, and Boyes would/should have addressed the Assyrian evidence had he read both his primary and secondary sources more closely. This is especially glaring given that he cites Lipiński's On the Skirts of Canaan once in his footnotes, a book that conveniently refers to all the extant evidence!

Correction: Tabnit inscription is later (early-fifth cent.) not earlier.

If you read this far, thanks for putting up with my ramblings! :D

[1] See Lipiński, On the Skirts of Canaan, 187 on the reading of the text; cf. Steven W. Holloway, Aššur is King! Aššur is King!: Religion in the Exercise of Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 306, who reads an otherwise-unknown Nergal-iddina instead of Hiram. The text itself (Nimrud Letter XIII, ND. 2686) is published in H. W. F. Saggs, "The Nimrud Letters, 1952: Part II," Iraq 17.2 (1955), 130f.

• Brother Cadfael's Herb Garden: An Illustrated Companion to Medieval Plants and Their Uses, 1997

Picked this up on a whim and loved flipping through it for a couple of hours. This is an index of all the plants mentioned in the 20-book series that gathers together plant lore and medical uses from medieval sources into a nice picture-laden coffee table book. Would be a nice resource for aspiring fiction writers in this historical period, or fantasy writers. Absolutely popular history publishing at its best. Unfortunately out of print but used copies seem ample and reasonably priced.

• An undergraduate’s term paper on Farinelli

On Thursday morning I got a google alert for this undergraduate paper that a young man has put up on his little online portfolio. He’s studying computer science so I think it’s rather curious but cool of him to put this paper on his online portfolio. But if you’re putting your term papers on the Internet that means it’s fair game for me to review, and I’m tired of reviewing academic books. And I don’t get to grade papers in real life, and I have an overwhelming fondness for working with young undergrads at the library, they are my favorite sort of patron. So let’s see what Andrew King has contributed to the scholarship of castrati.

Okay, first off, I love the cover page. Very cool, very modern. Is this what you do in college now? Back in my day you just had a plain one, if you had one at all. I also had to print my papers out unless the professor was with it and cool, so I wouldn’t have done that because color prints were 25 cents a page and black and white ones were 10. That’s beer money. I only ponied up for color prints on my undergrad thesis. I think Andrew submitted electronically, that cover page would use a lot of toner.

His paper is wholly appropriate to its modest scope, it starts with a brief summary of the history of the castrati before launching into Farinelli in particular. It focuses on his opera career, as is appropriate to a music class, but gives fair time to his post-opera life in Spain which is nice. He gives us the second-hand story of the Farinelli vs. Trumpet battle from Charles Burney uncritically, whereas a trumpet solo apparently doesn’t actually appear in the opera it’s traditionally attributed to, nor has any musicologist been able to pin this down to any particular Farinelli opera, so it’s more likely a legendary amalgamation of things from his career. But I wouldn’t expect a student to know that after short research, so I won’t dock him for it.

Andrew makes a few typos:

No castrato was so reputable, respected and then infamous as Carlo Broschi

Lol. Infamous for famous makes for the funniest mixups.

Porpora taught many excellent castrati including Cafarelli

Andrew why did you spell Caffarelli’s magnificent name wrong? Twice in the paper! Bad enough you insist Farinelli was the greatest castrato… Caffarelli’s vengeful ghost will rise from his grave in Tuscany and come shit in your mailbox for this insult.

Then there’s this delightful little line:

Each summer Farinelli was in London he went on vacation.

I had to hold back a giggle when I read that. He travelled out of London in the summer yes, but he was working! Framing it as “What Farinelli did on his Summer Vacation” is just pure charming undergradness.

And he closes the paper with a succinct commentary on his motivating goal with undertaking this scholarship:

2193 Words

For an undergrad student in an unrelated field this paper ain’t bad at all though. He cites Daniel Heartz and Roger Freitas which are great musicologists of the castrati, but I’m taking points for uncritically citing a 60 year old book that itself doesn’t really “do” citations. And the apparent lack of proofing. Andrew seems like a good student and I think he can do better. A-.

• Katzoff, Binyamin. ""God of our Fathers": Rabbinic Liturgy and Jewish-Christian Engagement." Jewish Quarterly Review 99.3 (2009): 303-322.

So when I saw this, I was hoping for a detailed review of the liturgical response to competing theologies in antiquity. Instead, it was an article on a specific phrase in Jewish liturgy, "God of our fathers". It's essentially a detailed review of the phrase in Rabbinic liturature, with the thesis that the phrase spread from earlier origin to emphasize Judaism's continuity within the Jewish people.

Now, I'm a sucker for papers that go through copious Jewish texts on a particular theme. But while I enjoyed reading it, the argument was unconvincing. The argument essentially went through references to the phrase, and argued that they're later interpolations, throwing a liturgical phrase into anachronistic contexts. Mostly, it uses the fact that the phrase is much more common in the later Babylonian Talmud than the earlier Palestinian Talmud. However, the article also puts forth the (less contraversial) assertion that Christians, and dialog with them, was more common in Palestine than in Babylonia! One would expect, therefore, that the phrase would originate in Palestine and be common in the Palestinian Talmud, not in Babylonia. And the support for the reasoning behind the phrase reads, to me, like a logical inference with some fallacious post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. The actual textual support for that reasoning is rather scant, especially in light of the conflicting geographic origin I just mentioned.

Also, it mentions but ignores an early text (Mishnah Bikkurim 1:4) which reads

וכשהוא מתפלל בינו לבין עצמו, אומר, אלהי אבות ישראל. וכשהוא בבית הכנסת, אומר אלהי אבותיכם

And when he [a convert] reads on his own, he says "God of the fathers of Israel". And when he is in the synagogue, he says "God of your fathers".

The context of this is in discussion of how converts say a phrase in the giving of the first fruits, which references forefathers. In case you're curious, the halakhah does not follow the Mishnah in this case, and converts say the same liturgical text as everyone else nowadays.

About this, he says:

the mishnah does not specify the liturgical context in which this was said, and it is by no means clear that a particular prayer with fixed words was involved

and then cites a couple of other texts, discussing how this may not imply a set liturgy. But I think he's missing the point. Discussing the phrase without a specific liturgical context means the reader is assumed to know one, indicating that the phrase was commonly known at the time. The implicit assertion that references to the phrase somehow don't count if they're not written in a liturgical text whose text we have is difficult to understand.

So it's an excellent analysis, but I found the argument to be lacking.

• Chazan, Robert. God, Humanity, and History: The Hebrew First Crusade Narratives. Univ of California Press, 2000.

This one got fast-tracked off the reading list for a question about the crusades (some other texts did, too, but this one was the only one that I would've read anyway). And I'm glad it did. It's an analysis of the massacres of 1096 in Jewish texts. It essentially goes through all of them and discusses them in detail. I found it quite interesting.

• Bachrach, Bernard S. Early medieval Jewish policy in western Europe. U of Minnesota Press, 1977.

So this text is on a topic that I love finding books about, because there are very very few Jewish texts from the period and locale (to the extent that I'd say "the Dark Ages" is not a misnomer for Jews in the region, even if it is in general), so it's less accessible or known to the average Jewish studies/history guy. The book goes through a variety of early Medieval environments, and discusses the government and religious policy on Jews.

I found it extremely illuminating. It's not an area I knew much about, so I learned quite a bit. I had some trouble contextualizing, because the political climate is so foreign to me--I realized I know nothing about the political entities they were discussing.

I did have one gripe. It constantly takes at face value Christian claims that Jews were actively getting people to convert, based on Christian policies telling them not to. I think that accepting them unquestioningly is a bit naive. Christian claims of Jews going around converting people when it seems to not have been the case occur from time to time. While the main reason for not doing so, fear of persecution, was less of a factor than later, it at least bears questioning. And while there's nothing Western Europe specific, there's very little evidence of serious Jewish attempts at converting people after the 1st century from Jewish texts.

• Smallwood, E. Mary. The Jews under Roman rule: from Pompey to Diocletian: a study in political relations. Brill, 2001.

I loved this one. It's an analysis of how Jews did under Roman rule, focusing on how the politics played out with Jews within the empire. I found it really helpful. It also presents first century political developments in a fairly readable way, much better than trying to sort through Josephus (on whom that narrative is fairly reliant). The narrative in popular understanding tends to focus on the revolts in 70 and 135, while neglecting things before, after, or anything outside Judea. This does an excellent job covering everything.

I've been reading up on the consolidation of Germany under Bismark. Quite fascinated by the way he used external threats to motivate internal unity. Can anyone recommend a good biography?

I'm looking for a good biography of Lord Byron, any recs?