Scarabs from Middle Bronze to Late Bronze Age

Contexts in Canaan and the Levant
Manfred Bietak

This grant will be used for the preparation of the publication entitled Scarabs from Middle Bronze to Late Bronze Age Contexts in Canaan and the Levant, edited by Manfred Bietak in collaboration with Daphna Ben-Tor, Christa Mlinar and Nir Lalkin. The aim of this project is to assess, analyse and present scarab material from different sites (e.g. Tel Haror, Lachish, Megiddo, Kamid el Loz, Deir Alla, Saham, Sahab, Amman Airport, Serapta and the Baq'ah Valley Survey, Tell el Dab'a) throughout the Levant and adjacent areas.

An assessment of the Scarab material would help reveal the contacts between the Eastern Mediterranean, Syria, Egypt, and Nubia during two main periods in the Second Millennium BC: the Middle Bronze and the Late Bronze Age.

In the framework of the proposed project it would be possible, in close collaboration with colleagues from Israel/Palestine, to review published and other accessible scarabs and assess the material in respect to typology, chronology/context with seriation studies and distribution patterns. The majority of those seal amulettes was published only in catalogues and often the drawings are inadequate. In recent times the documentation of the scarabs from Israel/Palestine was considerably updated by a team of the University of Fribourg under Othmar Keel. Still a lot of drawing work has to be done. The scarabs envisaged for this project are primarily those where an original context can be reconstructed. Also scarabs without context should be considered when they are important from the typological point of view.