 Well, it's it's my pleasure to welcome our internet audience back to our second presentation in our Unsilencing the Archives Zoom lecture series. And before I introduce today's speaker, I'd like to pass the baton over to our Associate Curator, Brooke Norton, who will read our land and decolonization statement. Brooke. We would like to begin by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the huge soon, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo alone. We respect the land and the people who have stewarded it throughout many generations. And we honor their elders, both past and present. We're living in a moment that warrants deep reflection on our past, wherein even our most venerated figures deserve reasonable scrutiny. During his time directing the archaeological excavations at Tel Nasbah, WF Bade participated in harmful stereotyping of Palestinian Arabs that was common among white Americans and Europeans conducting fieldwork in British mandate Palestine. Some of these attitudes appear in print in his popular 1934 book, A Manual of Excavation in the Near East. Museums are also scrutinizing their collections, including evaluating the legal status and the ethics with which they were acquired. As stewards of the legacy of the Bade Museum and its holdings, it is our responsibility to faithfully evaluate the process by which the collections were acquired within the context of our contemporary moment. One approach is to ask new questions of the archival materials in order to examine critically the manner and impact of archaeological work on indigenous communities and to investigate the colonial conditions in which it played a part. The Bade Museum recognizes that its location and collection are part of an ongoing and painful colonial legacies that contributed to historical inequalities. These legacies have directly and indirectly impacted populations locally and abroad in Palestine where the excavations were conducted under the authority of the British mandate government of Palestine. In an effort to bring to light these issues, to serve a broader public audience online and to connect to the local community that it serves, the museum is taking action to become more inclusive, welcoming and equitable institution that practices the philosophy of radical inclusion adopted by its parent institution, Pacific School of Religion. One of these three steps is the creation of open access web exhibitions and public programming like this lecture series which highlight decolonizing themes. We invite you to participate in these programs so that together we can listen, learn and work towards creating a more inclusive museum community. Thank you for joining us today. Sorry Felicity would you like to provide your the PEF's statement? Well I should explain for those who are new to this that the PEF is one of the sponsors of both the online exhibition which Melissa and Sam made and also this lecture series. The PEF fully endorses the Bade Museum's statement on decolonization and supports their efforts in this regard. As a funding organization we were very pleased to support the Bade Museum's project to create an online exhibition to highlight the lives and work of the Arab workforce at the Tel Anas Bay excavations and these online lectures exploring the contribution of the local population to the archaeology of Palestine. As another Western colonial era organization our own history shares many of the same characteristics which have just been described and we are keen to play our part in this process both as co-hosts of these lectures and with our own initiatives. Thank you so much to both of you and it is my distinct pleasure to introduce today's speaker Jeffrey R. Zorn who is an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. Jeff's BA, MA and PhD are from the Near Eastern Studies Department at the University of California at Berkeley so in many ways he's digitally at at home with the host today or with several of the hosts today. His field work was conducted primarily at Tel Dor on the eastern Mediterranean coast as well at at the sites of Yoke Neon and Tel Dan. His scholarly interests focus on the analysis and publication of excavations at Tel Anas Bay. The field work that was done from 1926 to 1935 as well as area G at Tel Dor which was excavated from 1986 to 2004. He has also published on the 6th century BCE or the Babylonian period on topics of demography, burial practices, ceramics and ancient warfare among other topics so it is my distinct pleasure to introduce our internet audience to Jeffrey Zorn and Jeff the floor is yours. Okay is everybody seeing things properly? We're actually seeing your talk I believe and not the slides. All right well let's try that again it should be the other thing. Okay all right let's try that now how's that? Perfect excellent okay well thank you Erin for the introduction it's always nice to sort of be in Berkeley again so before I officially begin I would like to offer special thanks to a few of the many people who've assisted me in my work if I were to thank everybody right now my talk would be half over before I really get going so there's going to be an MCU like black screen at the end with tiny white names in print listing everybody else. So first I want to thank the staff of the Bade Museum Professor Erin Brody, Dr. Melissa Craddock and Sam Feister for all their help especially in locating photographs. Second comes the Bade family including Ellie Bade the wife of William F. Bade's son Bill and her son Alan. Both of have been instrumental in locating images and correspondence for me. Finally a shout out to Professor Eric Klein I hope he's listening of George Washington University who also has a deep interest in the mostly hidden backstory of the archaeology of the era about which I will speak. His work and mine have overlapped in a variety of ways and we've had a most friendly and helpful swapping of data and ideas over the last few months. Okay when one recalls the names of archaeologists active in British Mandate Era Palestine the giants of the so-called golden age of biblical archaeology between the world wars names like Petrie, Starkey, Garstang, Guy, Garrett, Fisher, Albright, perhaps even our own WF Bade among others come to mind. Very few would know the name of Labib Soriel Abdel Malik or have any clue of the length and breadth of his career in archaeological field work which spanned from 1917 to 1935 and stretched from south of Luxor in Egypt to southern Turkey. One reason why Labib Soriel is so little known today is that he was a Middle Easterner during the years of the West's global colonial enterprise. Local workers even those as skilled as Soriel are barely mentioned in excavation reports or appear hardly at all in excavation photographs. Yet Soriel was a fairly well-known figure and valued professional in the archaeological culture of that era. Indeed in many ways he's a unique figure occupying a liminal position between the Westerners who directed the excavations and the local laborers and Egyptian rices or foremen who did or supervised the digging. Now before moving on I need to admit the shortcomings of my data. The materials with which I've had to work to reconstruct a bare outline of Labib Soriel's career are diverse, scattered and all too partial. My gleanings have come from excavation publications, dig directors diaries, the mandate era archives posted online by the Israel Antiquities Authority, excavation account books, personal or official correspondence, photographs from various sources and even newspaper clippings. I even met a 96-year-old man Dr. James Beshai who knew Soriel when he was a grade school student in Luxor back in the 1930s. Some aspects of Soriel's life are mentioned only once in a single source which makes it impossible to know if the lack of additional references is happenstance or truly reflects the one-off activity. All right, the beginning of his career. Labib Soriel graduated from Asuit College which was really more of a high school in 1917. So far this is the earliest point in his life that I've tracked. He appears in the school's graduating class photo which still hangs on the wall of the old Taggart library. He is last on the right in the second row from the front, follow the red arrow. Asuit College was part of the American Presbyterian Mission in Egypt. After the death of his father in October 1935, Soriel taught at least for a while at the American Mission School for Boys in Luxor. Because of his family's connection with the Presbyterian Mission movement, I believe that Soriel was part of the Egyptian Presbyterian Church also known as the Synod of the Nile. The Asuit picture syncs up well with a reference to Soriel in Fisher's 1917-1918 Dendra Memphis Dig Diary. During the fall winter Fisher worked at Dendra and during spring-summer he was at Memphis or Mitrahina. In the diary, Fisher notes that he'd been in contact with the president of Asuit College about procuring someone from the school to assist him in his work, someone competent in both Arabic and English. The entry does not explain the nature of the work but does state that Soriel was a star graduate and on that basis Fisher hired him. So far I've identified 13 sites at which Soriel worked over the 18 years of his archaeological career from 1917 to 1935. The list includes sites in Egypt, Palestine and Turkey, from Drabu El Naga on the south to Antioch on the Orontais in the north, a distance of about 1200 kilometers. Mr. Soriel had a widely traveled career, probably more so than most professional archaeologists working in the Middle East today. And this is a pretty nice graph. It gives you an idea of how busy he was in any given year. So for example, 1930 down here he started off the year in January at Hermopolis. He then hopped over to the spring in the spring to Jerash. During the summer he was at Tel-Bait-Mercy and then in the fall he was back at Jerash. It was a very busy year for him. And then there are some years like 1934 where I can't find anything for him. He doesn't seem to have been in the field then. Oops. Okay, so the Egyptian sites he worked at Memphis and Dendera with Fisher from 1917 to 1920 and Drabu El Naga from 1921 to 1923, probably. I haven't, some of the dig diaries seem to be missing. He was at Hermopolis in 1930 working with Gunter Roder and these photographs were just sent me last week by people publishing Roder's excavation material. So this is all brand new stuff for me. The 11 team sites he worked at include Beshan from 21 to 23. And if you do the math you can see he was working at Beshan part of the year and then part of the year, both Fisher excavations. He was at Megiddo 1925 to 1927. And this tune plan here is the only thing that I know of that he drew or that that's published that he drew that I found other than material from Telenazbe. Maybe more will turn up. And there is Libib right there. He was at Beth Shemish in 1929. He was at Jerash both in the fall and the spring in 1930 and 1931. He was with Albright at Tel Bait Mersim in the summer of 1930. He was at Beth Zur in 1931 and I particularly like this photo because here we have a nice smiling Libibsorial. This is his cousin William Gad who worked on many other excavations in this era. This is a young man, Boulouse L. O'Rage, who graduated from the Romala Friend School, who worked at Telenazbe and a number of other digs in the 1929 to 1935 era. Probably you all recognize Albright here. This is Nelson Glick. And there are probably just a couple of people in the audience who recognize this guy who looks like a rugby player as a very young Cyrus Gordon. Okay. He was at Tel Abu-Hawam in 1932 and 1933 at Antioch in 1933 as well. And then, of course, at Telenazbe from 1926 to 1935. And besides Baudet, he was the only member of the staff there for all five seasons. And here he is again. Again, his cousin William Gad. Here's Boulouse L. O'Rage, professor in Mrs. Baudet. And this is Joe Wampler who produced the Telenazbe pottery report. Now, what was the nature of his work? First, unlike so many of the Egyptians working in Mandate-era Palestine, Libibsorial was not a rice or a pottery mender. He did not supervise work in the field. If one knows Libibsorial's name at all, it is as what today would be called a dig architect. This is because the publicly accessible records that mention him that his site reports generally refer to him as a mapper or surveyor. Occasionally, there will be references to him drawing plans and sections in general or to him doing the site contour map or the like. Such references as these are fleshed out by letters and dig diaries, which report that he is the one who sets the survey pegs and lays out the site grid or undertakes a triangulation to link up excavation areas or works on corrections to the grid. Sometimes, there will be a reference to him drawing a specific building, like a fort. In one letter to Baudet, he mentions drawing a tomb at Megiddo and from the contents of the tomb, it must be tomb 39, which is the one that I showed you before. At Antioch, his main job seems specifically to have been to draw what's called Bath Sea. And he could also draw a men pottery when needed. But Sorio was much more than a dig architect. Fischer and Baudet counted on him to locate and vet Egyptian staff for their dig, such as the rices, potmenders, and even house staff like a cook or a wait boy. For example, at one point, he tries to assure Baudet that the temper of the rice met Wally could be managed and that he should be brought along because he was good at clearing tombs. That only did Sorio locate these workers, but he also arranged for their passports and visas to Palestine and arranged their railway passage. He also negotiated the salaries of the other Egyptians, carefully considering their rank, years of experience, previous pay, and so on. He also conducted negotiations when needed with local workers and also was involved in paying them their wages. In fact, he often took care of the excavation accounts. At Jerash, he was once entrusted with what today would be about $13,600 to pay the workers. Sorio could be left in charge of the dig when the excavator and other staff had to be away. At Megiddo, he seems to have functioned as a sort of super rice who supervised the supervisors. He was also entrusted with various logistical duties. For example, in Egypt, he procured and packed supplies for the Besshan excavations, even building the crates himself. He also evaluated and secured light rail tracks and carts for moving to debris at Besshan. At Tel Anasbe, there are various references to him accompanying Bada to secure supplies. He was also something of a handyman who could undertake various kinds of construction projects. For example, at Memphis, he laid out and began foundations for the additions to the dig house, and he seems to have assisted in similar work at Hermopolis. He built shelves, desks, and a photography tripod at Besshan, and at Tel Abu-Hawam, he built a latrine. These skills would later prove useful in Berkeley. Finally, he built not just with dig directors, but also with their bosses. For example, he had direct dealings and negotiations with Brested at Megiddo. At Besshan, he was entrusted with taking Dr. Gordon of the Penn Museum on a walking tour. Soriel later wrote to Gordon directly seeking back pay for the guards at Memphis and to try to secure reimbursement for himself in another Egyptian who had at one point had to make up the back pay. Soriel was out at that point about $1,230. I don't know if Gordon actually paid up. Soriel seems to have been reasonably well paid and received various perks befitting his educated status as attested by his title of offending. I have no record of his starting salary with Fisher, but in early 1918, he received a raise to about $450 by today's currency. At Megiddo in 1927, he was up to $1,600. At Tel Bait-Mercy in 1930, it was $1,900. At Jarash in 1931, he was up to $2,000. His highest wages that I have seen were at Tel Abu-Hawam in 1933, where he made $2,500. Hamilton so wanted to keep him on there that he tried to get the Department of Antiquities to agree to $3,000, but that was too rich. Because of the Great Depression, Soriel took a pay cut for the last season at Tel Anas Bay in 1935. He went down to $2,200 to help make sure that the excavation could happen. For most of his career, Soriel was being paid much more than most junior staff on digs today who often worked for room and board, travel expenses, and perhaps a bit of pocket change. His compensation also included, all his travel expenses such as for passports and visas. His railway passage was always second class, whereas the rice went third class. The Jarash account books even record a $9 lunch for him in Jerusalem. The Jarash account books are really fascinating. This is an example of one page. So you can see that Soriel is the highest salaried non-Westerner on the dig by far, making a third again as much as this cousin William Gad, similar to what you see over in the Talbate Mercy material here, or the head rice barberry, though the rice could make up the difference through Bakshish. So you see here Soriel's half month salary of 11, which makes 22 for a month. Gad is making seven and a half, so 15 for the month. And then here we have the rice barberry, who's getting eight or 16, but he's also getting nine pounds in Bakshish. And you can see the difference between him. He's the head rice versus the other rice. So for example, Abdul Rahman here is only getting 350 and Bakshish a five. So about half of what barberry is getting. Really interesting stuff that you can find in those account books. In 1927, Soriel was doing well enough that he could ask Bade to pick up a NYXIS camera and field glasses for him in Germany when Bade was there on a trip. He was willing to pay up to about $1,300 for both, and that was about two thirds of one month salary for him at that time. Like many a grad student today, when he was not on a dig, he was living at home in Luxor with his family. That probably helped him to afford such items. Let's see, a 20-something year old interested in techie gadgets. Some things never change, do they? One of the most intriguing aspects of Soriel's career is the one and a half years he spent in Berkeley from the close of the 1927 season at Telenozbe all through 1928. Bade seems to have been interested in helping Soriel in his education. So Soriel took a variety of academic classes at Pacific School of Religion and had hands-on work in museology. However, he did not complete a formal degree. That probably would have taken some additional years. He also took night courses at the California School of Arts and Crafts so he could work on his penmanship for drafting purposes. He also seems to have been a real part of the Bade family during that time. There are a number of pictures of him on outings with the family, and his later letters to Bade always recall the times he spent with the children and the kindness that the family had extended to him. He also assisted Bade in the construction of a house known as Bate-Billy in the Pope Valley region of Napa County. I have to wonder what Soriel thought of overalls. And if he took a pair home to Egypt, I never see him wearing overalls in any of the photographs from Telenozbe, but there he is there. Soriel also accompanied Bade and his wife on their 1929 Trans-Pacific cruise back to Palestine. Now, I still have many questions about this period in his life. First is, why did Bade extend himself to give Soriel this opportunity to travel and study in the U.S.? Was it purely out of the goodness of his heart, or did he believe Soriel's education would make him more useful for the excavation? Also, who paid for his classes and the sea passage to and from the states? Where did he live in Berkeley? With the Bades or elsewhere? Did he have much of a chance to travel while in the U.S.? Bade was the literary executor of the naturalist and environmentalist John Muir, and I like to imagine that Bade would have taken Soriel to see Yosemite. So, by all accounts, Lebeb Soriel was very well respected for the diverse set of skills he could bring his employers on their various excavations. This passage from an April 23, 1927 letter from Breasted to Nelson, director of Chicago House, describes him in such glowing, though colonialized, terms that one would be led to believe that Soriel's future career was well secured. It's worth quoting the relevant passage of the letter in full because of the light it throws on the situation at Megiddo and Soriel standing at the time. The Luxor cop, Lebeb, whom you've met, is, I think, a rather unusual Egyptian. He graduated at the American College at Asouet and is a young man of great intelligence and proved integrity. He keeps all the books of the dig at Megiddo, is pretty good at surveying and drawing what he surveys, and is accustomed to running considerable numbers of men, having had as high as 16 or 20 Egyptian rices with their gangs of locals under his control at Megiddo. He has worked for Fisher for years. In order to save the Megiddo situation, therefore, I offered Lebeb the position as clerk of the works at Chicago House in place of the proposed Syrian clerk, and he was very much pleased. In taking this step under stress, I think it was at the same time doing a good stroke of business. For the Institute has gained, one, an experienced clerk and administrator for Chicago House at a salary of 18 pounds Egyptian a month for six months, the other six being spent at Megiddo. Two, an experienced resident of Luxor who knows all the natives in the whole situation and whose knowledge may be of great use to us. Three, a bedroom saved because Lebeb will live with his family in Luxor and come over every morning early involving us in no social difficulties as he has his meals at present with our little group of offenders at Megiddo, and it would be quite willing to take his lunch every day alone in the small dining room or in his office. Four, half of the traveling expenses which would otherwise be paid to the Syrian clerk. If however, you find that at the end of a year of Lebeb's services, you wish to shift to the Syrian, I am sure that can be done. But the result at Megiddo was very gratifying. I showed Lebeb that I was not discharging Fisher, but that he was refusing a very advantageous offer of an unusually fine position. And I shall be much surprised if Lebeb shows anything but the greatest faithfulness in his efforts to serve our organization. We succeeded through him in holding all the disaffected Egyptians at the mound. And unless Fisher's excited nerves do not prompt him to some wild effort, I think I may safely regard the situation at Megiddo as pretty well nailed down. Okay, yet in the course of a single month disaster would strike. And while Sorio would continue his work in archaeology for another eight years, his future in the field would be severely harmed by a single choice he made. What happened is that Breasted had become dissatisfied with Fisher's work at Megiddo. Breasted had always been distrustful of Fisher as a field director, but possibly a combination of Fisher being laid low by various physical and mental ailments, and Fisher's own prickly personality finally convinced Breasted that he needed to demote him to an advisory role and replace him with PLO Guy at the beginning of the 1927 season. It is important to remember that the Egyptians on the dig were all Fisher's crew, and their passage to Megiddo was likely arranged by Sorio. Guy and Breasted wanted Sorio and his cousin, Gad, who was also at Megiddo, to remain with the excavation. This would give an appearance of legitimacy to the transfer of power. However, several of the Egyptians, including Gad, were unhappy enough that they chose to leave, and Sorio apparently felt that he needed to stand with his mentor, Fisher, and his cousin, and so also resigned his position and left the dig for Nasbe. Long wall of text here. It is evident that Guy saw this loyalty to Fisher, the man who brought all the Egyptians into the field as a betrayal to both himself and to the Oriental Institute, which he now represented. Guy's duplicity and petty vindictiveness towards Sorio and the other Egyptians is quite clear. First, he tries to separate Sorio and Gad from the other Egyptians through promises of raises. Later, when this tactic fails, he claims that he will not stand in the way of Sorio's conscience, but then when Sorio decided to leave, he promised that he would do what he could in his official capacity within the mandatory government to have these Egyptians barred from ever working in Palestine again. So, pretty obviously, he intended to do everything he could to punish Sorio and the others for their consciences. Now, it's what's on the second page of this letter in this area over here that would come back to haunt Sorio in later years. Here Guy pressed Nelson to make sure that Sorio would never work for an Oriental Institute project in Egypt. Moreover, Guy never lost an opportunity to badmouth Sorio and Gad in future correspondence. Guy could not understand how Sorio could choose to be loyal to his mentor, Fisher, rather than to the OI. I often wonder how Breasted took all this, given his previous stated admiration for Sorio. Thankfully, the immediate threat to ban him from work in Palestine proved empty. Sorio, Gad, the Rice Barbary, and even the Cook Gindi would work on a variety of digs in the Levant after this. Guy's spiteful efforts to sabotage Sorio's career would only bear fruit after 1935, after the end of the Tel Enos Bay excavations and the death of Sorio's father in October of that year. Soon after that, Sorio took over his father's teaching position at the American Mission School for Boys and Luxor, a grade school. In a 1937 letter to Chester McCowan, Baudet's colleague and successor as director of the Palestine Institute, Sorio noted that the only positive thing about the job was that he could be with his family, but he hoped his younger brother would take over the job once he finished secondary school and that this would allow Sorio to return to archaeology. Through Nelson of Chicago House, Sorio tried to arrange a meeting with Breasted, apparently to try to secure work at Megiddo, but this seemingly fell through. Similarly, he hoped that McCowan might write to Breasted on his behalf, but this too led nowhere. His situation was no doubt worsened by Baudet's unexpected death in 1936 and Fisher's withdrawal from field work. Almost all of Sorio's career was connected with digs associated with these two men. This was also the middle of the Great Depression. Times were tough everywhere. Perhaps this is why he was not brought to the States to work on the Telenazbe report. Also, archaeological work ground to a halt during World War II, and with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, there would be no more work for an Egyptian surveyor slash architect in what had been Palestine. The last piece of information that I have on Labib's Sorio so far is a 1948 letter from him to Mrs. Baudet, thanking her for sending him a copy of the recently published Telenazbe report. I always wonder what he did with that report once it was sent to him. At that time, he's living at 8 Taha Morsi Street in Cairo. He reports that his daughters are 5 and 3, but neither they nor their mother are named. This means that the oldest girl would have been born about 1943, and so Sorio would have become a father at around age 43 to 45. Unfortunately, he does not say what his work is and only says that times are rough in Egypt for everyone just then. And this is the area of Cairo where he last lived, map showing more specifically the address, and this is a photograph today of that building. And so that's where the trail runs cold for now. Though all is not lost, if you do the math, either or both daughters could still be alive, and there's always the chance that he had later additional children. My hope is to someday locate either his children or grandchildren and fill in to some extent the second half of Labib Sorio's life. It may seem like I've learned a great deal about Labib Sorio Abdel Malik, but there is so much more that is still unrecovered. I've yet to find the names of his father, mother, most of his siblings, his wife, and his children. What did he do between excavation projects? For example, all of 1934 is a blank. What did he do that year? I do not know what he did after leaving archaeology, save for the time he taught at the mission school. I don't know what he thought of Fisher and his mentor's troubled career. Perhaps someday I will be lucky and find correspondence between Sorio and Fisher. What did he think of the other men for whom he worked? Guy, Hamilton, Grant, and Albright. His cousin, William Gad, whose life is even more a mystery, worked on many of the same digs as Sorio. What did these two kinsmen talk about on their long sojourns away from home? Labib Sorio lived through tumultuous times. He knew firsthand British rule over Egypt and the troubles of World War I and World War II. Was he involved in the 1935-36 riots against the British? He would have witnessed the Arab uprisings in Palestine in 1929. His last letters dated the year of the founding of the State of Israel, 1948. What did he think of that? What did he think of the officers revolt in Egypt in 1952 and the rise of Nasser? Did he live long enough to see the various Arab-Israeli wars? Now think about this. He might have even lived long enough to see the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord of 1978, though he would have been about 80 by then. It makes me sad. I just had got to Berkeley in 1976. If he had lived that long, I might have had a chance to know him. So we know nothing of what he thought about any of these things. Breasted called Sorio a most unusual Egyptian. What did he mean by calling him that? I take it to mean that from Breasted's colonialist perspective, Sorio verged on having more of the qualities of a Westerner rather than those of a native of the Middle East or an Oriental as Breasted likely viewed him. I leave it to others to decide if one should think of Breasted's comment as complementary or a slur. What is clear is that Lebeb Sorio is almost a unique figure for the world of Palestinian archaeology during the Mandate period. He is clearly not an invisible excavator because his work is documented in many sources. Yet those sources are not easily available and so few know of his work. On many excavations, he functioned almost as a combination of dig architect and assistant director. He supervised the work of others and was entrusted at times with large sums of cash. Bade thought so much of him that he arranged for him to come to Berkeley for a year and a half for extra training. Yet despite his years of experience and the esteem in which he was held by many others, his career came to an end in 1935, at least as far as I can tell. So possibly we should imagine his career ending for a variety of reasons, the machinations of Guy, Bade's death in 1936 and Fisher's in 1941, the Great Depression, and the advent of World War II likely all played roles. Lebeb Sorio is a truly liminal figure in this interwar era. He was an Arab of the Middle East, but not a Muslim, nor I believe a member of the Orthodox Coptic Church. He was a minority within a minority. He was an educated modern Egyptian, an athende, as marked by the suit and fezi wears and formal photographs. One who was trained in the Western tradition worked for Western excavators, but was not a Westerner. He was a product of the colonial regime and profited from it, but could not control it. On excavations, he truly occupied a middle position. While he might gather the Egyptian Rises and Padre menders before an excavation and might act as a negotiator with local workers, he was not really one of them, as his athende status and superior second-class rail travel show. Yet he did not have an advanced university degree and so was apart from the Western directors and their Western staff. He was clearly valued by them, as Brested's letter show, but he was not one of them. He was a local and could be handled differently, as Brested's letter also shows. The Bade family was clearly very fond of him, but his time rolled along, eventually the contacts diminished and then ceased. The people around him truly liked him and valued his contributions, yet Lebeb Sorio was truly often a man apart. I wonder if he ever felt lonely. I wonder how in 1948 and later he felt about his archaeological career. In many ways he was like a modern PhD student who spent many years getting a degree, only to find that there is no job in the end, and that part of the reason for that was the machinations of professors and situations beyond his control. Having spent decades pouring over Sorio's plans, having spent much of the last year and a half pulling together material about his life, having walked some of the same Berkeley streets, I feel a connection with Lebeb Sorio that probably most others will not. Possibly he would think it funny that someone would spend so much time thinking about and studying him, yet I feel he's a figure just as worthy of study as Albright or Brested. He provides us with another way of viewing that era. His own letters provide a little bit of a window on how the Middle Easterners of that era thought, and they provide a nice counterbalance to the narratives constructed by the Westerners who controlled archaeology and mandate era Palestine. I think I will always feel a little sad that I never had a chance to meet him. And so there are the rest of my credits. It won't roll on for 15 minutes. There will be no cut scenes showing the next movie. So I want to thank all of these people and institutions for their help, and I thank you all for listening. Thank you so much, Jeff, for a really fascinating paper and so many insights into this important figure's life and work in mandate Palestine and elsewhere. So I believe it's time for the questions and answer session, and I will happily pass the baton on to Brooke, who I believe is fielding questions from our YouTube audience. All right. Well, I'd like to thank you again for this fascinating talk. We have a lot of questions coming in from YouTube. Could you discuss some more of Soriel's role as an intermediary between the colonial dig directors and the staff and the workers, both local workers and the Egyptian rice? Specifically, why did this role as a fixer or negotiator? Why would that fall to him? Do you have any insights about how he managed his responsibility from his own writings? That's a long question. Part of it, I think, is something that I just got into recently is his status as an offender. He was of the Egyptian up and coming aspiring middle class. And so by that very status, he's a level above any of the workers. I didn't know this again until recently, the suit he wears, the fez, these are markers of his status as an offender. It's funny. There are many letters where he describes how he's trying to gather the various rices together. And he'll say, all right, so-and-so's red is available, but so-and-so is going to work with somebody else. This person got this much previously and so on. So he's really involved in all the negotiations because he's he knows all these people. He's the guy on the spot. He knows what the going rates for the salaries are. I always wonder how intelligible his Arabic was to the Palestinian workers that he had to negotiate with. There's an interesting moment in one of the dig diaries where Bade describes how Soriel gave a worker who was trying to get extra money, a swift kick, to get him out of the line. So Soriel was not above being almost a colonialist himself. How did an Egyptian rank in the pecking order in Palestine at that era? These are all interesting things and I don't have answers to all of those things. We have a few questions about some of the the archives you've been working with. Someone would like to know the relevant correspondence addressed to Nelson from Breasted Guy, etc. Is this in the archives at the OI or at the Chicago House? Is that Eric Klein? Eric, you know the answer to this. So one of the letters came from Chicago House from the separate archive that they have there and some of the material is coming from the Oriental Institute. Eric, I shared one of the letters with Eric and his first three words in response were wow, wow, wow because he had not seen that letter himself. And then we have another question about the Jarash account books that you mentioned. And this individual would like to know which archives these are in. Oh, those are online. You can find those through Yale Art Gallery. I forget the exact URL, but if you search on Yale Art Gallery Jarash, you'll eventually find them. And there are just pages and pages of account books and there are photographs and all kinds of other things that they've put online. I have no idea how extensive the amount of material is compared to what they have in their archives, but it was really a surprise finding it. And it was really great in terms of the economics of the excavation. So we have a question about the salary. It was fascinating that you could sort of reconstruct his salary in comparison with the other local members of the team, but in comparison with other Western members of the team, how did Libby's salary compare? Just yesterday, I emailed Aaron to see if PSR has any records of Bade's salary from that era. And I'm hoping to track down something like that because I think that would be the most interesting comparison, Bade versus Soriel. But no, I don't have that information now, and it is something I'm thinking about. I know that Soriel got paid a lot more than I ever did as an area supervisor. Have you come across any other comparable figures who occupied a similar role as Libby and Soriel on other dig projects, like other offending? His cousin, William Gad, he's a much more shadowy figure. He's mentioned a lot, but I have never found any correspondence from him or to him. But for example, in 1932, he went with Fisher to work up in Antioch. And after Fisher was sacked yet again after two years from Antioch, he continued on there right up until the beginning of World War II in 1939 and became their champion mosaic lifter. That was his primary role at Antioch, and you can actually find pictures online. If you Google on William Gad Antioch, you can see pictures of him with some of the mosaics that he lifted from that site. So yeah, he's kind of like Soriel, but not quite as well documented. All right, I think that's it for the questions. Thank you very much again for your wonderful talk. Oh, thank you very much for letting me speak. Thank you so much, Jeff, for a really fascinating talk. Soriel is such an interesting character, an Egyptian in Palestine, as you say, he occupies this kind of middle ground between a colonial rulers, as it were in charge, and the local and Egyptian workforces. I wondered about the role of PLO guy. He seems like a really Machiavellian character. Do you think he was like this to everybody? Or did he have a particular thing about the Arab workers? I really don't know. Probably Eric Klein would be better able to address Guy's attitude. But having read Eric's book on the Megiddo excavations, Guy was not a very nice person from what I can tell. So how he treated Soriel seems pretty typical. I would have been interested to see Soriel come to work at Megiddo later when Loud was in charge and how that would have worked. Interesting. Thank you. And the other question I had was really regarding Soriel himself and his own thoughts about the archaeology of Palestine. Do we have any inkling about any theories he might have developed over ceramic chronologies or the architecture or anything like that? No. That's the sad thing. That's why I want to find his relatives, because his letters are business-like. It's like, all right, we've got to get this rice. This is how much it's going to cost. And then at the end, he'll say, send greetings to your family. But he doesn't go on about, well, you remember Room 620? Well, I think it's this, right? There's nothing like that in his letters. I'm sure he must have had his theories and his thoughts, because he had such an extensive career over many different kinds of sites. There must have been all sorts of cogs wheeling way up there. Sure. And I'm sure any dig architect today has their own ideas about stratigraphy and how things fit together that may be the same or may be different from what an area supervisor or director is thinking. That's the benefit of having somebody there who's doing the drawing. They see things a little bit differently. That's right. Absolutely. Thank you very much again for a really fascinating talk and for revealing this amazing personality who I'm sure will come to know a little bit more about over the forthcoming years. And for those of you watching and coming in online, our next talk in this series is on January the 20th, so next year. And that will be by Dr. Hamdan Taha, who is an independent researcher and formerly deputy minister for the heritage and director of the Palestinian Department of Antiquities. And he is going to be talking about colonial archaeology in the Mandatory period in Palestine. So that's January the 20th next year, same time, 9 a.m. Pacific time. Thank you very much.