 Hello. Welcome to our Internet audience, everyone who's tuning in for this installment of the Women and Gender Performance Lecture Series. My name is Melissa Craddock. I am curator at the Bade Museum. Before I introduce today's speaker, I'd like to turn the floor to my Bade Museum colleague, Associate Curator, Brooke Norton, to read a statement on behalf of the museum. We would like to begin by acknowledging that Brooklyn, California is on the territory of the the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenye Allone. We respect the land and the people who have stewarded it throughout many generations, and we honor their elders, both past and present. We are living in a moment that warrants deep reflection on our past and present. Across many global contexts, equal access to healthcare, education, fair wages, and human rights is contested on the basis of sex and gender identity. In an effort to bring light to these timely 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 a 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 steps is the creation of public programming. Through this lecture series, we hope to highlight new and established scholars who are engaging with risky and marginalized topics concerning women, gender performance, and sexuality in the past. 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. Thank you so much, Brooke. It is now my great honor and pleasure to introduce today's very special speaker, Erin Brody. Erin Brody is the robber and Catherine Riddell Professor of Bible and Archaeology and Director of the Body Museum at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. He has excavated primarily at harbor sites in Israel, including Tel Nami, Ashkelon, Dor, and Tel Akko, and participated in projects in the Negev and Akko Plain, and with the aloning Muwekma at sites in Northern California. He's held fellowships at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and the American Center for Oriental Research in Amman. Recent publications have focused on household religion, metallurgy, and inter-regional trade at Tel Nami from holdings in the body and Rockefeller museums. He's a co-editor of a brand new volume titled No Place Like Home, Ancient Near Eastern Houses and Households, which was just published last month by Archaeopress. Other research is focused on specialized religion of Kenanite and Phoenician seafarers. It is out of this background, plus some time affiliated with the Reconati Institute for Maritime Studies at the University of Haifa, that ideas have developed leading to today's presentation. So with that very exciting introduction, Erin, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Melissa and Brooke. And you know, one of the great things about being where I am is working with amazing staff people. And so I just want to put a big shout out to the Bade Museum staff, both present and past, for all the great work that they've done. And also a thank you to our co-sponsor, the Archaeological Research Facility at UC Berkeley, who've done such a wonderful job co-hosting this series and our last two Zoom series from previous years. I'm going to take a second and share my screen. And then I will get on with today's presentation. Maybe if I could just do a brief check-in and make sure from staff members that they can see the image on the screen. Great, I'm getting a thumbs up. Well, a recent research into underwater finds from locations off of the northern coast of Israel and the southern coast of Lebanon has defined these marine assemblages as ritual deposits. Hundreds of ceramic figurines were discovered submerged beneath the waters of the Mediterranean at both Chavet Sion, a locus located between the more prominent urban settlements of Akko and Akzeev, and at a location northwest of Tyre. Geographically and culturally, these sites fall within the regions of Phoenicia in the late Iron Age, Persian, and Hellenistic periods. Despite early interpretations of both sites as the remnants of shipwrecks, no wooden hull remains or other variety of ubiquitous cargo was discovered at either site. Date ranges of finds from either location, the 7th to 3rd centuries BCE at Chavet Sion, and 6th to 4th centuries BCE at Tyre indicate gradual deposition of artifacts over extended periods of time rather than wreck incidents at either site. And if you look at these images here up on the screen, you can see the locations of both of these underwater finds basically in the central part of the eastern Mediterranean coast. And then, of course, you can see the more focused map on the, at least one proposal for the ancient homeland of Phoenicia and how that is right along the Mediterranean coast of the modern states of Lebanon, of course, the heartland going further south into modern-day Israel and further north into modern-day Syria. So that helps to kind of locate us in terms of the geography. And I've already mentioned the time periods represented by both of these finds. Differences between the Chavet Sion and Tyre deposits remain in terms of the gender of the figurines found at each site. The approximately 250 to 300 figurines of several types from Chavet Sion are all female. The chloroplastic finds from nearby Tyre, numbering over 300, are dominated by female figurines, but male statuettes are present as well. I propose that these gender differences from either underwater locus represents differences in ritual performances that took place at either site. While it is not possible to fully equate female figurines with ritual use of these artifacts solely by women or male figurines by men, it is evident that the status of the female figurines, many of which are depicted as pregnant or holding a baby, represents aspects of women's profane and ritual concerns involving the prenatal period, perinatal phase, and care for very young children. These figurines represent uniquely female traits. While it is likely that women's rituals were conducted at both sites, Chavet Sion is unique in that it was solely a locale associated with women's religious culture and rights pertaining thereto and conducted at sea. In this image, you can see some of the assemblages, of course, from both sites, which have remarkable similarities, but then, of course, their own unique qualities. The main difference being while female figurines, of course, dominate the corpus from Tyre, they're also male representations as well. Whereas at the site located a little bit further to the south at Chavet Sion, the corpus is entirely female. So I'd just like to take a moment and lift up the work of Carol Myers, whose definition I'm really basing this idea of women's religious culture on. And so I'll just read a quote from her work from the little volume called Households of Holiness, The Religious Culture of Israelite Women. But I think we can see some wonderful parallels here in the neighboring Phoenician world. So to quote Dr. Myers, women's religious practices can thus be seen as strategies akin to preventative and restorative medical procedures of the modern world, to intervene with the divine forces believed to impact the well-being of mother and child, and to influence them in order to assure their benevolent and protective presence, or to avert their destructive powers. The rituals, surrounded pregnancy, labor, and birth, along with those securing fertility before pregnancy, and those dealing with postpartum lactation, infant care, and circumcision, constitute the religious culture of women more than of men. So I think that again, this concept is very important and is not, of course, just applicable to ancient Israelite culture. This, of course, has been shown through numerous modern anthropological studies of living traditional cultures as well, but also can be seen kind of in a snapshot in the images, which are a little bit pixelated, but that I've depicted on this slide from what used to be called Phoenician bowls. There's not much in the world called Phoenician anymore, and we'll get to that in just a second. But bowls, of course, that are distributed throughout the first millennium, Mediterranean, and go as far east as Iran, but may have had their origins, again on the Levantine coast somewhere, or in a Phoenician colony. But all three of these depicted in there are more in the corpus, show processions and musical performances that are entirely gendered female. Now, who is being worshiped or being celebrated in these bowls, of course, is up to, like many other things, interpretation, whether this is a high status female or is a female deity remains in conjecture. But the fact that all of these depictions are gendered solely female, I think is important. And again, is a representation of women's religious culture. General studies on Phoenician culture have blossomed in recent years. Since Maria Obey's book was published in the early 1990s, there are a score of new volumes by individuals and multiple authors in various research languages. Yet there has been very little attention in these more synthetic treatments to topics related to Phoenician women or gender performance. These more specific studies are found in a handful of articles in specialized journals, many focused on the Western Mediterranean. They were also the topic of a conference in, excuse me, Tubingen, Germany. Several of those papers have been published. And also have been the topic of, I'm sorry, topics delivered at professional meetings that have yet to be published. And here I'd like to shout out to, especially to Helen Dixon's recent Acerware papers, several of which are in the pipeline for publication. So the topic is still really in its nascent despite a decent set of data in terms of material culture, representational, and textual evidence. So the data is there. It's fairly widespread. And of course, excuse me, located in different corpora, but I think there's still a lot of rich work to be done on the topic. And I hope that this is one small contribution today. One should also be aware of recent challenges to the use of the term Phoenician as a cultural descriptor to preface the presentation of materials found at sites in the homeland along the Levantine literal or in various locations of colonized sites throughout the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Iberia and Morocco. For convenience's sake, I'm retaining the use of Phoenician as an edict descriptor used in classical texts to differentiate peoples from Levant and their daughter colonies from the first millennium, which has come into modern usage in a somewhat uncritical fashion borrowed from ancient classical writings. Recent considerations have deemed Phoenician and its Latin derivative Punic an appropriate appellation for groups that shared variations of a Northwest Semitic language, material culture, religious concepts and practices, and economic networks, despite, of course, the drawbacks of this terminology utilized by outside or classical groups with all of their inherent ancient biases. And I think especially the language and material cultural remains are really important here for distinguishing. Of course, there are variations within the Phoenician language itself, dialectic differences between the main city states, fairly minor though. And certainly there was a major language barrier between these Levantine people as they spread out in the Mediterranean and encountered, for instance, Greek speakers, eventually Latin speakers, et cetera, et cetera. So while the language is a Northwest Semitic language, closely related to, of course, biblical Hebrew, other Canaanite languages, Ammonite, Edomite, et cetera, those are more dialectical differences and much more closely related than, of course, languages from different language groups. Of course, language is not the only evidence we have for ancient identity, but also there were material cultural similarities that linked these people. So for instance, there's a daughter settlement along the Moroccan coast at Mogador where the material culture is very similar to that of the homeland and that's an incredible distance. So they clearly were carrying their home culture with them, regardless of what they were calling themselves. And of course, their identities were primarily to the city from which they came and, of course, its surrounding territories. But even that, of course, that sort of notion of homeland was carried with, we have evidence, for instance, that even from the most famous daughter city, which is Carthage or the new city in the Western Mediterranean, that there were yearly celebrations where there was a return to Tyre, for instance. So there was a return to the homeland. So that sense of identity is there even if we don't have that kind of group notion, at least the way moderns would like it to be. And, of course, we don't have the internal evidence for what these folks are calling themselves as a group either. Anyway, we'll continue and use the word Phoenician, the really the Greek word for this people group, because it's better than most of the alternatives. Anyway, the underwater finds from off of the coast near Tyre and Chavitzion are unique. Despite the ubiquitous nature of the locations of Phoenician settlements, along coastal literals and islands from the homeland to outside the Straits of Gibraltar, some comparisons can be drawn to the finds of offerings from underwater at locations around the island of Gader, now Cadiz in southwestern Spain, and to votive metal hordes uncovered at various loci under the Bay of Cadiz. These far western discoveries, however, do not represent the same sort of concentration of ceramic figurines as the ones in the east and have been explained by their proximity to coastal temples or related to ritual concerns after earthquakes and resulting tsunamis. In comparison, the Levantine findspots are not related to any known terrestrial temples and are generally interpreted as marine loci for offerings from ritual performed in fulfillment of vows related to aspects of everyday concerns. So as far as as we can tell, then, these finds from the east are relatively unique. There may be some materials actually also from Cadiz that I haven't had a chance to further investigate, which would balance this out a bit, but I just haven't had access to those publications, unfortunately. The terracotta figurines shown under water near Tyre were scattered along the seafloor more than four kilometers northwest of the settlement. The area was previously looted and numerous barnacle encrusted figurines have appeared on international antiquities on the international antiquities market. Despite these disturbances, however, over 300 figurines were found scattered across the sandy and rocky seafloor during several seasons of excavation in the early 2000s. And so if you look at this slide in the lower right hand corner, you can see an aerial view of the city of Tyre, which of course at that time was an island, but there's since been a tumble load that has developed around that mole that Alexander had built. And then you can see the location over four kilometers, mostly to the west, but a little bit to the north of the city of these underwater finds. And then of course, in these other slides, you can see what the bottom of the sea looks like, not quite reef, not quite sand, a little bit of both. And then some of the figurines actually still in C2. And of course, the numbers would have been even larger if the site hadn't been looted over time. While statistics are not provided breaking down these 300 plus figurines numerically, the excavator divides the group into three main types. The majority of these statuettes are female, either pregnant or nursing a young child. While there are two male figurine types, one in an attitude of prayer or benediction, and the other rendered in an archaic style. None of the female figurines has any symbols associated with them. One of the male figurines was inscribed Eshmun Yeten, which may be interpreted as a prayer to the Phoenician healing God Eshmun, presumably fulfilled in part by the deposit of that motive. Many of the female figurines have a miniature bowl like feature at the feet of the figure that is part of the statuette. These features may have served as a place to light incense as part of the ritual performed before depositing the figurine in the sea. While the gender of the figurines discovered underwater near Tyre is mixed, it is important to note the excavator's interpretation that the group emphasizes female statuettes, especially ones that are represented as pregnant or nursing. This prominence of female votive offerings ritually deposited in a specific location at sea, portraying women in the state of pregnancy, or the care or feeding of young children, is also found over 30 kilometers to the south, also underwater, less than a kilometer offshore at a site called Shavet Sion. But before I focus in on Shavet Sion, I just wanted to take a moment, and here you can see in the slide with images focused on the finds from off of the city of Tyre. Again, you can see just a handful of examples of female figurines, but also balancing out a bit with the minority of male figurines that were found. And also an important reminder, you can see there are two fragments of storage jars. So it's not just the figurines that are being deposited. And we'll see this as well. It was highlighted in an important recent publication of materials from Shavet Sion that these figurines are also being found with other kinds of goods that are being offered, primarily storage jars, but sometimes junglets and other just profane pottery vessels. So moving south to Shavet Sion, the underwater finds discovered near Shavet Sion on the northern coast of modern Israel present interesting parallels and differences with the immersed figurines from Tyre. The location of Shavet Sion is not near any contemporary ancient settlement. Instead, the site is about equidistant from the important contemporary Phoenician cities of Akhzeev, approximately nine kilometers to its north, and Akko, around eight kilometers to its south. While the artifacts submerged near Tyre were found 4.5 kilometers northwest of the ancient city, the Shavet Sion figurines were concentrated less than a kilometer offshore. The white cliffs that descend directly into the Mediterranean and Roshanikra, Razelnakura, are visible from out at sea off of Shavet Sion, and the figurines were offered to the waters just to the northwest of the outlet of a seasonal river, the Nahalbate Emek. At the juncture of this river with the sea, a Byzantine church has been excavated, possibly marking the site of an earlier seaside shrine covered or obliterated by later monumental building activities. So I'm just trying to contextualize, of course, these underwater finds from off of Shavet Sion, the location of which you can see in the left hand, bathymetric slide. It's the lower red star. And then in the middle map, you can see its location, again, about equidistant from Akhzeev to its north and Tel Akko to its south. Probably not quite as visible from these Google Maps images are the fact that from off of the coast, actually from the coast, you can see at Shavet Sion, you can see the cliffs at Roshanikra, Razelnakura, which may have had some kind of landscape influence in the choosing of this location, as it's possible to that the outlet of this freshwater seasonal river, the Nahalbate Emek, which you can see in the lower right hand slide where its outlet is, and the fact that these figurines were found fairly within proximity to that also natural feature may have been important for the reasoning behind the choice of this particular sacred site. Both the tire and Shavet Sion deposits were found on a similar type of seabed, consisting primarily of a sandy bottom and intermittent reef rock. In terms of the finds themselves, each concentration of figurines was accompanied by ceramic utilitarian wares, primarily fragments of storage jars. The gender representations of the Shavet Sion figurines, however, varies from the tire assemblage as it is 100 percent female. Between 250 to 300 female figurines were uncovered at the site, with no male or other gendered statuettes discovered at Shavet Sion. These numbers may change with the ongoing research and Yasser Landau, now focused on the figurines in particular, after having published a recent study on the accompanying ceramics that was in IJNA in 2020. From a gender perspective, the fact that all of the figurines from Shavet Sion are female is of note and is not replicated among concentrations of contemporary figurines found in sacred fevisse at land sites nor underwater near a tire. Thus I posit that the ritual actions taking place offshore near Shavet Sion were solely related to Phoenician women's religious culture. So if we just take a moment again and focus in on this slide, you can see in the bathymetric map on the left, the fine spots. I should also mention too that these figurines were primarily excavated actually in the early 1970s. There were only preliminary publications provided after that. So Alicia Linder was the principal investigator of those early excavations, and then they primarily have sat in storage. So hats off to the group at Haifa University or groups actually. There are two different research groups that have been working on these materials for bringing these back into the light, finding of course unpublished notes, unpublished objects even, and we look forward to future work on the corpus. And then in the right hand part of this slide, you can see that important contribution of course the non-figurine finds from Alicia Linder's excavations, mostly storage jars of these coastal types. Primarily from the Persian period, some have lifespans that can go a little bit earlier, some into the very late Iron Age, some show some tendencies towards again going a little bit later into the early Hellenistic period, but a relatively tight grouping, but again nothing close to the kinds of concentrations that you would have if this was from a shipwreck, which tend to have of course complete finds of contemporary ceramics and then also finds related to the feeding of the crew, et cetera, et cetera. So we just don't have that kind of variety and that sort of time capsule effect that you get from shipwrecks. So these are definitely offering loci. So this gendered inference that I've just presented is further reinforced by the symbolism of many of the figurines and by symbols found on these statuettes. Some of the Shavetsion figurines are depicted as pregnant others hold babies. Many are molded with hand gestures that suggest a pose of blessing. This symbolism suggests rituals involved with the fulfillment of vows related to the success of a pregnancy or perhaps purification after an unsuccessful pregnancy, care for or purification of a mother after giving birth, and sanctification of her care for her young child and the child itself. Symbols found on a few of the female figurines just in Shavetsion provide further insights into the intersections of both the divine and profane feminine at the look at the site as the sign of Tanit and the dolphin are also depicted on several statuettes. So and you can see those statuettes here in the left hand image taken from that recent IJNA publication. You can see in the they are drawn actually. I hope you can see my little cursor arrow there. You know highly representative but these are the drawings of course they're impressed on these mold-made figurines and I believe this is the dolphin representation. And then just as parallels you can see, excuse me, on these images from sacrificial stele from a carthage and from a coin at Carthage, that kind of intimate link between this symbol the sign of Tanit and the dolphin. Again here you can see the sign of Tanit actually atop the dolphin and then in this coin image on one side we have the sign of Tanit behind a female representation and then on the right we have a dolphin and then also just to point out in this one sacrificial stele not only do we have the sign of Tanit and the dolphin but we also have a steering rudder as well. So I'll get back to some of the seafaring implications in just a second. The symbol called the sign of Tanit in Phoenician studies is an emblem consisting of a triangle surmounted by a straight line and a circle at its peak and numerous variations to this basic design. Interpretations of who or what the symbol represents vary widely but as its modern nomenclature indicates the sign has traditionally been associated with the Phoenician goddess Tanit. The goddess Tanit likely pronounced Tinit or Athenit something like that in antiquity was the mother of the Carthaginian pantheon of gods and goddesses. Wedded to the chief god of Carthage Balhamon Tanit was associated with numerous attributes similar to her classical counterparts and we know from inscriptions these included the goddesses Hera and Juno. Tanit was the goddess par excellence of agricultural fecundity and human fertility protectors of mothers pregnancy childbirth and young children. So again in this slide you can see some of those images of this sign that's been associated with the goddess Tanit the triangle with the circle on top and the the lines that you know do look like arms and of course later on in time on the important sacrificial stelae were actually anthropomorphized but it's that kind of direct link between an anthropomorphic representation a few of which I've thrown up here on this slide and this schematized representation is quite lacking. I did show that the coin in the previous image where we have a human head the sign of Tanit on one side and a dolphin on the other but that's pretty scan evidence but I think it's a pretty good fit but that's as far as we can go. Tanit however was also associated with the ritual dedication or sacrifice of newborns and young children together with her consort Balhamon. These ritual dedications took place in specialized sacrificial burial grounds at Carthage and nearby sites in the western Mediterranean called Tophits in scholarly studies. In western Phoenician studies the goddess Tanit has I'm sorry in western Phoenician sites the goddess Tanit has maritime attributes that include her companion animal the dolphin I already showed you some of those images and she is also associated with the protection of seafarers ships and proper navigation. Thus it is not surprising that besides the symbol of Tanit a representation of a dolphin is also present on one of the Shavetsion figurines and I also already showed you some of that Carthaginian evidence for the link of the symbol with the dolphin and then in this slide which is primarily focused on these child sacrifice burial sites or Tophits you can see again from some of the stelae this important link between the sign of Tanit and boats or ships so there's this sort of tantalizing connection with the maritime world here you can see on the left hand lower image the sign is depicted right underneath the stern of a vessel of course the stern is the the area that was so important for steering or safe navigation here in this depiction also from a sacrificial stela you can see the sign of Tanit represented at both the stern and the prow of this ship and then finally here you can see the prow of a warship in this case under the protection of the sign of Tanit so these kinds of links are are definitely present but especially you know more visible in the in the western evidence following recent studies of Phoenician figurines by Barbara Bolognani and other scholars it is unlikely that these female figurines actually represent a deity this is the in this case of course the goddess Tanit rather preferred interpretation is that the female figurine that include the sign of Tanit represents a female worshiper or a dedicated to the goddess Tanit one particularly well-preserved figurine is very telling it depicts a fully-robed female with her left arm raised across her chest with the hand clutched just beneath the chin her right hand is raised vertically with the palm open in a gesture of blessing on her belly the sign of Tanit is prominently depicted perhaps representing a pendant worn around the neck of the adorant so here you can see in the center of this image a figurine found offshore at Chavet Sion on her belly is this sign of Tanit here are just some parallel pendants from the site of Ashkelon actually so the proposal here is that and she's she's fully clothed which is typically also a representation of humans versus divine feminine is often shown nude in the Near Eastern world so the proposal is that this is a representation you know of a worshiper of Tanit wearing some kind of pendant of related to the sign of or depicting the sign of Tanit the intersection of a locus of women's religious culture worshipers of the sign of Tanit the goddess Tanit and the sea is tantalizing another important symbol of the Phoenician mother goddess Tanit not present at the find on the fines from Chavet Sion but critical for Phoenician seafarers was the crescent and disc or the new moon for mariners the new moon symbol of the goddess Tanit represented her protection over proper navigation and wayfinding over the seas could the new moon and its cycles have also had a special connection with the maritime location of Chavet Sion as sacred space related to the goddess Tanit or symbolize the correct lunar time to propitiate the deity with ceremonies at sea and rituals fulfilled by the dedication of female figurines in the waters of the Mediterranean another possible interpretation of the Chavet Sion deposits comes from a comparison with ritual practices in the classical world eras Williams read has recently presented the importance of the sea as a locus of purification for Greek women in relation to religious rituals involving shameful pregnancies read notes in her 2018 Durham University dissertation quote the I know liquefia myth sits within a broader category of myth themes about women who usually in association with a shameful pregnancy either jump or are pushed into the sea often the women and their children are saved by divine intervention and or undergo a life-saving transformation in particular ester eidenau has convincingly highlighted that the sea plays several important roles in this methane the sea is an appropriate place to cast out fallen women because it is a place of no return its waters cleanse the pollution of illegitimate and transgressive acts and conceptually it functions as a liminal space that facilitates transitions between life stages immersion into the sea is clearly an essential component of this myth theme unquote unfortunately we lack a great deal of Phoenician literature and most of what we have preserved is found translated transformed and embedded in classical texts so we have no direct written information regarding Phoenician views about the sea or Phoenician women's interactions with or thoughts about the marine environment could the waters around Shabbat Seon have been imbued with cleansing properties as an important aspect of women's religious culture it took place at the location could this maritime liminal space between the shore and the deep within sight of fresh water of a river outlet and the white cliffs of Roshanikra Razzelnukura have helped women's transitions from pregnancy to motherhood or from breastfeeding to parturation may the goddess Taneet have protected Phoenician women's engagement with the sea in these rites of passage or were these dedications and thanks to the goddess Taneet propitiations that were fulfilled by jettison ancient statuettes to the bottom of the Mediterranean in proscribed locations given the isolated nature of the Shabbat Seon finds kilometers away from the settlements of Uggsy and Akko I propose that the locus was a maritime pilgrimage site as part of the ceremonies performed at the spot people must have traveled by boat in order to finalize their vows with rituals that ended with depositing figurines and ceramics involved in the ceremonies under the water of the Mediterranean so here you can see in this image I've sort of done a composite of my fantasy here the water is of course right off Shabbat Seon here are some Phoenician boats making their way out to the deposition site perhaps the new moon indicating the time of the month that was perhaps even time of the year that was appropriate for these maritime ceremonies at least some if not the majority of these dedicants at Shabbat Seon must have been women women likely transitioning from pregnancy to motherhood or asking the goddess Taneet oops I'm sorry I've lost my space women likely transitioning from pregnancy to motherhood or asking the goddess Taneet for protection during the vulnerable stages of pregnancy the birthing process or breastfeeding young children the sea and its associations with the goddess Taneet was a liminal place appropriate for cleansing impurities and aiding in a variety of transitions like many Phoenician religious beliefs and ritual practices these maritime aspects of women's religious culture were limited to specific locations in these instances off of the coast of Tyre and Shabbat Seon while the rituals performed on the waters near Tyre were more varied from a gendered perspective those enacted near Shabbat Seon can be interpreted as specialized maritime aspects of the religious culture of Phoenician women these ceremonies at sea took place in relation to the divine feminine in particular the goddess Taneet and were rituals that sought sacred protection during critical and vulnerable aspects of the reproduction and futures of Phoenician households and women's religious culture that is pregnancy the perinatal phase and postpartum care for babies and young children so I'd like just like to wind up with words of of thanks especially of course support I've been on sabbatical this fall semester so a big shout out to the Pacific School of Religion for its continued support of my research I'd also like to thank Mikhail Artsy, Noah Shaitzaf, Meir, Edri, Adi Ehrlich and Asaf Yasserolando whose primary research on the fine some Shabbat Seon is fundamental for this presentation also Miriam Seco Alvarez and Ibrahim Noredin who saved the underwater finds from Tyre and published them thus sharing them with the scholarly community so thank you hats off staff at the Bade Museum at Pacific School of Religion for conceptualizing and organizing and implementing this important lecture series and of course our partners at the Archaeological Research Facility at UC Berkeley so thank you all and I look forward to ending this my screen share and perhaps answering a few questions. Thank you so much for this fascinating talk on such a rich assemblage and I want to invite our YouTube audience people who are watching live to submit questions and comments that you have so while a few of those are coming in and we're assembling them I have a couple questions of my own that I want to start us out with and the first question it's kind of basic and I think the answer will be yes but it's also important for supporting your argument so the submerged contexts in which the figurines and pottery deposits are found at Tyre and Chauvet Sion where these originally offshore undersea deposits rather than coastal landsites that have since become submerged with changing shorelines since their deposition. Oh no that that is a really good question and yeah I think that the short answer is yes they were always underwater and they're of course have been important and you know interestingly enough it is of course the coast that chains geomorphologically so much so in places like you know if you've ever been to the coast of Turkey for instance so they're important classical sites that are now you know they used to be on the coast that are now three kilometers inland that sort of thing so it's very appropriate question but in this case and especially around the research of the University of Haifa dealing with the literally the ups and downs of the coastline I think it's been established that these were underwater then and are underwater now and then most of the changes are fairly localized and typically are around riverine outlets where there are sediments that you know build up and things like like that so there along this particular stretch of coast there haven't been radical shifts in terms of sea level okay thank you another question is where else have these female figurines of Phoenician female figurines been found and how do the two assemblages that you've focused on fit within a larger corpus if there is one to discuss I'm sure well you know the figurines are found all over they're they're found in higher concentrations in these you know sacred deposits called fevisse which are sort of the sacred you know trash dumps basically from temple sites so that that's the the parallels are found in terms of concentration at those important fevisse I'm thinking of ones from Teldor there were there was a fevisse recently ish excavated in Beirut for instance and thank you for to Helen Dixon for reminding me of that and also I want to do a shout out to Helen Dixon for having read an early version of this paper I appreciate her feedback of course I'll I'll do the usual scholarly thing which is to say all the mistakes are mine but and then of course there are interesting sort of fevisse from slightly inland in the Shveila as well there's a kind of this interesting phenomenon where you get concentrations of Phoenician presence actually inland at the Shveila probably at these sort of trading hubs but actually as Barbara Bolagnani has pointed out there is a difference these aren't underwater fevisse so you know the nature of a fevisse is that offerings that are given in a temple setting are too sacred to leave in the temple and so when they get cleaned up they get richly deposited you know in a in a trash site but a sort of sacred trash site and what's found under water at Shavetsion and off of Tyre these are not just sort of the sweepings out of of the trash these are direct deposits and so I think Barbara was really correct in pointing out while their parallels in terms of sort of the the concentration of figuring finds the the depositional parallels are not there and so they really have to be interpreted differently despite the you know the this sort of presence of so how they got there is very different yeah okay thank you speaking of Helen Dixon lucky for us she's tuning in today and has submitted a questions I'm going to read a question from her she says thank you so much for this excellent talk and that her question split across oh okay I don't need to read okay she's interested in Carthaginian votive stelae with the ship and the sign of tonnet if these marks sacrifice how do you make sense of the image or do you think this might indicate that they were requests for replacement children after a miscarriage or death ah yeah of all the sticky issues and Phoenician studies this may be one of the stickier ones but but first of all just to sort of back things up I certainly see those precincts as being the locations of child sacrifice so and on occasion there were substitutes but it seems to be you know given the skeletal remains although quite tricky because with uh you know babies newborns and stillborns even you know the the bone materials just not set very well and then of course they were cremated so um uh you know but what essentially what why would you have these maritime reliefs well as Helen knows well um having worked on burials in the homeland um you know the representations may be less about the interd and more about the living and so it may be the case that you know these were vows um made at sea it may be the case that these were vows it may be representation sort of of the profession of the parents who were doing the sacrificing and the burial um you know there there are of course numerous possibilities in terms of the interpretation um but it's they're they're fascinating uh and and it's um you know given the incredible um spread of Phoenician culture in the first millennium literally across the Mediterranean and even outside of the the um uh the pillars of of Hercules or Melchard as the case may be um that you know just an incredible maritime um uh empire uh the amount we know about you know Phoenician or Punic ships is pretty limited and that seafaring world again we only have sort of small glimpses so those those depictions on those stele are really treasures and I think it's it's really um fascinating for instance that only parts of the ship sometimes are represented like the prow or the stern this is you know my my earlier works I don't want to go off too much on it um but you know or things like the steering rudders are represented too and anchors I didn't show any of those images but on occasion we have pictures of anchors on those child sacrifice stele so these are all very adult kinds of imagery and again I would I would say related to the the adults who were doing you know what I would term the ultimate sacrifice so these you know for the the deniers out there it's it's not like you know these groups of western Phoenicians were wanting to you know kill their children it was quite literally the ultimate sacrifice just as that that set of terms you know what what it means in English I think it meant to you know these daughter Phoenician colonies that were being stressed in various ways and this was their way of making right with the divine world. Thank you um so on the same topic of symbols a question from Salonja Ashby who's a future speaker in this series who will be giving a talk in April she asks or she comments I see connections between the symbol of Tani and the Egyptian Ankh sign meaning life as well as the ISIS not as part of the attire of ISIS has anyone discussed connections between these two goddesses I'm less familiar with between the two goddesses and specific there are definitely scholars who looked to the sort of the inspiration for the symbol as being the Ankh. I can't think of I'm less familiar with that argumentation. First of all of course we know that there was a profound influence of Egyptian culture on you know in the Bronze Age on Canaanites and then in the in the Iron Age on the Phoenicians I mean it's just everywhere so not only were there you know of course you know physical connections traveled between the areas trade diasporas between the areas there also clearly was you know intellectual borrowings artistic borrowings etc etc so whether the Ankh has a direct connection to the sign of Tani I'm less familiar with that particular argument but then there a court and especially the later we go in time there are as with most polytheistic cultures there seem to be kind of equivalent you know goddesses and gods and so the the ancients were making these kinds of connections so I mean examples that is not from Egyptian literature where we know for instance that there were again diaspora Phoenician presence in especially in the Delta but you know from from Greek writings where they they simply you know it took Ba'al the storm god and wrote it as Zeus so they were making the translations in their head and literally on you know putting it on paper or papyrus the case may be and I'm sure the same thing was going on me so besides borrowings from the Egyptian pantheon the god best for instance comes to mind that you know the ancients were making these kinds of associations quite freely so I think that's an area that's very rich for you know future explanation exploration but I'm not super familiar with and of course the the origins of that symbol are are you know discussed in several and in several different directions and I think it may be most honest just to say like many Phoenician things it's it's somewhat ambiguous and highly up to interpretation but the you know those the interconnections between those particular ancient cultures were vast so that's perfect transition to my next question which is also on this issue of connections and I'm curious about what kind of relationships you might posit between the Phoenician female figurines and those that have been found in neighboring cultural contexts like Judean pillar figurines for example such as those that have been found atel and nozbe yeah that that's a really good question so you know more or less contempt of course most of the figurines I was showing are a little bit later Persian period but from we we certainly have earlier Phoenician figurines that are contemporary with the pillar figurines you know and it and it's interesting because you get you know differences in terms of manufacturing procedures which is not too surprising you get differences in terms of stylistic so you get sort of regional differences which is part of the reason why we can call you know one corpus Judean because it's primarily from the region of Judah one corpus you know Phoenician because it's primarily from the coastal areas from Cyprus and then of course from the daughter colonies as well there are differences we have Ammonite figurines for instance but and also North Syrian very important corpus of Iron Age late Iron Age figurines what's interesting though is so you do get these you know definite regional differences we can kind of give them national or ethnic names if you want to call that but that oftentimes the poses are similar so we have for instance Phoenician figurines of women who are supporting their breasts and that's you know that is that's universal for the Judean pillar figurines um yeah and that's also symbolism that's found for instance on on Syrian figures I mean and all the way down into the Roman period so and also men on horseback it's very very it's ubiquitous right stylistically we can tell you know a Cypriot version perhaps a Phoenician version and you know and then of course the Judean version etc etc but the again there's some there's I hate to use the word universal but I might as well I might get myself in trouble but whatever these needs these figurines were serving seems to have been ubiquitous right across the families of the ancient world because of course most of these even if they're found in you know highfalutin contexts are you know they're the cheap knockoffs these are the inexpensive votive offerings that could be used in everyday practices and afforded by common families but to me it's interesting that you know and again we get our sort of stylistic regional differences but oftentimes the motifs I guess I would say are similar and I think that has to do again with the the sorts of sacred needs of the of the users which is a kind of common human set of sacred concerns yeah on a related note one final question to wrap to wrap this up for today I'm thinking now of the really excellent recent work by Lauren McCormick on surface decoration and painting on the Judean pillar figurines again some of some of which are from the assemblage at Nala's Bay and the body museum collection which is why I'm thinking of her work but my question is have there been any studies yet on surface decoration or more details about manufacturing technique or or painting on the assemblage that you're looking at from Phoenicia? It's certainly not on these underwater assemblages I'm going to defer to Lauren so I know that there has been some very important work on the on corp coroplastic I'm forgetting the technical term but coloring and I believe that that's been been done mostly on classical figurines mostly by a French researcher and I pardon me I'm forgetting their name but so it's it's starting and you know I think it's a great reminder and Lauren's work has just been sort of blazing trails here which is that just like the geomorphology of the coastline what we're looking at today might not be what was there in antiquity right and that the the coloration of these ancient figurines even for these you know what I've already referred to as sort of the cheap knockoffs that the coloration may have been extremely important and so we're only getting a kind of part of the picture so you know Lauren's work on on one figurine head from our collection of course it's a Julian Pillar figurine it's not Phoenician you know figurine but the the impact that the coloration especially around the eyes has on a modern viewer presumably you know that that was there of course in antiquity and so that that's sort of late quite literally layer of meaning is mostly missing from the modern you know our modern views of these ancient common statuettes polychromy that's the word I'm looking for so I'm hoping that you know and of course no surprise the polychromy studies that have been done are primarily on you know major stone sculptures and this kind of thing I guess there may have been a little bit of work done there are these you know amazing a little bit later in time but sarcophagi from from Sidon where some of the color is still actually extant which is wonderful and also contemporary sarcophagi from the carved sarcophagi from the island of Cyprus but I think it's quite humbling actually when we consider again you know we're trying to come up with these interpretations of these artifacts but it's not the same kind of thing that the ancients were looking at and interacting with and and it's humbling to remember that and to try and you know move forward in I mean I already feel like a lot of what I presented has been sort of interpretations on interpretations but there's obviously there's science behind what the kind of work Lauren is doing and researchers in France but there's also sort of highly interpretive elements to polychromy and of course as moderns we have to be extremely careful I would just add a note of caution especially around skin coloring there's a whole you know very loud controversy you know over the colorization of classical you know pure white marble statues and its effect but how we researchers how we choose to represent skin color is is highly interpretive and can be highly sensitive so I'll just put a kind of general warning again doesn't mean it doesn't it shouldn't be done but it should be done with sensitivity and I'd hate to see polychromy white wash the ancient world so sleep with that. Yeah that's such an important consideration and I just want to add a comment here that is from Lauren McCormick who's also watching right now in the live stream she says thanks for the shout out I agree there's so much more to learn based on color so on that note I'm going to once again thank our speaker professor Aaron Brody for contributing to the women and gender performance lecture series and I would like to invite everyone to join us again as the series resumes in the new year our next talk will be January 12th 2023 with Dr. Christine Garroway whose talk is titled raising children in ancient Israel so we hope that you all join us again then and look forward