In the years 1983-2013, an archaeological expedition under the auspices of the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology of Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, was active on Mount Carmel, Israel.

In the years 1983-2013, an archaeological expedition under the auspices of the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology of Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, was active on Mount Carmel, Israel. The expedition comprised archaeologists, team members, students and other professionals, as well as pupils from schools in the Sharon and Daliyat el-Carmel. This book describes ten rural mountain sites through which it seeks to reconstruct the character of all the settlements on the mountain and at its foot, from the Persian through the Byzantine periods.

In Western tradition, St. George is known as the dragon slayer. In the Middle East, he is called Khidr (“Green One”), and in addition to being a dragon slayer, he is also somehow the prophet Elijah. In this book, Robert D. Miller II untangles these complicated connections and reveals how, especially in his Middle Eastern guise, St. George is a reincarnation of the Canaanite storm god Baal, another “Green One” who in Ugaritic texts slays dragons. Combining art history, theology, and archeology, this multidisciplinary study demystifies the identity of St. George in his various incarnations, laying bare the processes by which these identifications merged and diverged. Miller traces the origins of this figure in Arabic and Latin texts and explores the possibility that Middle Eastern shrines to St. George lie on top of ancient shrines of the Canaanite storm god Baal. Miller examines these holy places, particularly in modern Israel and around Mount Hermon on the Syrian-Lebanese-Israeli border, and makes the convincing case that direct continuity exists from the Baal of antiquity to the St. George/Khidr of Christian lore. Convincingly argued and thoroughly researched, this study makes a unique contribution to such diverse areas as ancient Near Eastern studies, Roman history and religion, Christian hagiography and iconography, Quranic studies, and Arab folk religion.

Geography, Religion, Gods, and Saints in the Eastern Mediterranean explores the influence of geography on religion and highlights a largely unknown story of religious history in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the Levant, agricultural communities of Jews, Christians, and Muslims jointly venerated and largely shared three important saints or holy figures: Jewish Elijah, Christian St. George, and Muslim al-Khiḍr. These figures share ‘peculiar’ characteristics, such as associations with rain, greenness, fertility, and storms. Only in the Eastern Mediterranean are Elijah, St. George, and al-Khiḍr shared between religious communities, or characterized by these same agricultural attributes – attributes that also were shared by regional religious figures from earlier time periods, such as the ancient Near Eastern Storm-god Baal-Hadad, and Levantine Zeus. This book tells the story of how that came to be, and suggests that the figures share specific characteristics, over a very long period of time, because these motifs were shaped by the geography of the region. Ultimately, this book suggests that regional geography has influenced regional religion; that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are not, historically or textually speaking, separate religious traditions (even if Jews, Christians, and Muslims are members of distinct religious communities); and that shared religious practices between members of these and other local religious communities are not unusual. Instead, shared practices arose out of a common geographical environment and an interconnected religious heritage, and are a natural historical feature of religion in the Eastern Mediterranean. This volume will be of interest to students of ancient Near Eastern religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, sainthood, agricultural communities in the ancient Near East, Middle Eastern religious and cultural history, and the relationships between geography and religion.

Drawing on the expertise of archaeologists, historians, biblical scholars, and social-science interpreters who have devoted a significant amount of time and energy in the research of ancient Galilee, this accessible volume includes modern general studies of Galilee and of Galilean history, as well as specialized studies on taxation, ethnicity, religious practices, road systems, trade and markets, education, health, village life, houses, and the urban-rural divide. This resource includes a rich selection of images, figures, charts, and maps.

Hagith Sivan offers an unconventional study of one corner of the Roman Empire in late antiquity, weaving around the theme of conflict strands of distinct histories, and of peoples and places, highlighting Palestine's polyethnicity, and cultural, topographical, architectural, and religious diversity. During the period 300-650 CE the fortunes of the 'east' and the 'west' were intimately linked. Thousands of westerners in the guise of pilgrims, pious monks, soldiers, and civilians flocked to what became a Christian holy land. This is the era that witnessed the transformation of Jerusalem from a sleepy Roman town built on the ruins of spectacular Herodian Jerusalem into an international centre of Christianity and ultimately into a centre of Islamic worship. It was also a period of unparalleled prosperity for the frontier zones, and a time when religious experts were actively engaged in guiding their communities while contesting each other's rights to the Bible and its interpretation.

Bringing together a wide array of modern scientific techniques and interdisciplinary approaches, this book provides an accessible guide to the methods that form the current bedrock of research into Roman, and more broadly ancient, wine. Chapters are arranged into thematic sections, covering biomolecular archaeology and chemical analysis, archaeobotany and palynology, vineyard and landscape archaeology and computational and experimental archaeology. These include discussions of some of the most recent techniques, such as ancient DNA and organic residue analyses, geophysical prospection, multispectral imaging and spatial and climatic modelling. While most of the content is of direct relevance to the Roman Mediterranean, the assortment of detailed case studies, methodological outlines and broader 'state of the field' reflections is of equal use to researchers working across disparate disciplines, geographies, and chronologies. The study of ancient Roman wine has been dominated until recently by traditional archaeological analyses focused upon production facilities and ceramic evidence related to transport. While such architecture and artefact-focussed approaches provide a fundamental foundation for our understanding of this topic, they fail to provide the requisite nuance to answer other questions regarding grape cultivation and wine production, consumption, use and trade. As the first compendium of its kind, this book supports the embedding of modern scientific and experimental techniques into archaeological fieldwork, research and laboratory analysis, pushing the boundaries of what questions can be explored, and serving as a launching point for future avenues of interdisciplinary research.

Despite the large number of well-preserved domestic contexts in Bronze and Iron Age sites, household archaeology has not been a common approach to studying the material culture of Ancient Israel. Until recently, the dictates of “Biblical Archaeology” led to a narrow set of questions that ignored issues such as gender, status and production within the household. The present volume, which grew out of a session at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research, attempts to redress this issue. The seventeen papers herein reflect innovative viewpoints on the theory and praxis of household archaeology in this region. The next step in household research is presented here, with the use of tailor-made data collection strategies designed to answer specific questions posed by household archaeology. "The neglect of households and the archaeology of the activities of its members are ambitiously attended to in this volume. Its exceptional breadth of various modes of inquiry coupled with the application thereof justifies the household as a topic of discussion. I would highly recommend this book for institutions, libraries, scholars, and students interested in any aspect of daily life in the southern Levant, and I very much look forward to the future research projects it will inspire." Cynthia Shafer-Elliot, William Jessup University "...as a whole the work is impressive, and most contributions are commendable for their sophistication in engaging interdisciplinary research in order to understand the nature and function of households in ancient Israel and surrounding areas." Carol Meyers, Duke University

The book investigated the life of the people of Mt. Carmel in 1908, and it was written in German by Graf Mulinen. Mulinen studied the area and the people historically, anthropologically and culturally. He studied the people and the villages where they used to live such as: et-Tre, Ikzim, Beled esh-Shkh, Dliet el-Kirmil and many others . He talked about their religions, customs, social life, Arabic dialects, their families, their names and the way they lived in the Area at that period of time. As a result, Without Mulinen’s book it was so difficult to document the life of those people at that time, in these details. The Editor Mahmoud El salman

This collection of over twenty essays brings together scholars from three continents to discuss the early synagogue. It addresses the questions of: When and where did the synagogue originate? What was its early distribution? What was its role in Judaism? The print edition is available as a set of two volumes (9789004112544).