Prof. Dr. Rita Gautschy

The last century in the life of the Jerusalem Temple until its destruction in 70 CE has been an axial age for world history. The religious dynamics of this century with the forming of Judaism and the beginning of Christianity heavily impacted the entire western world. While this century and its dynamic were studied in numerous studies of various methods, the present study suggests a new, yet unexpected way to address its cultural processes and interactions. This is achieved by combining intellectual history, material culture, and the history of science and technology. We suggest an inherently interdisciplinary study about a medium-sized corpus of sundials, i.e., time-reckoning devices from Early Roman Jerusalem, found in archaeological excavations. While achieving only marginal attention in previous studies, we suggest that this corpus, second in size only to the corpus of sundials found in contemporary Roman Pompeii, offers an efficient test-case for evaluating the Roman-Judaean cultural encounter. This corpus is greatly indicative of high culture, shedding light on conceptions of nature, cultural hegemony and hybridity, transmission of knowledge, the development of religious practice, priestly ideals, global interaction in technology, centre vs periphery, cultural acceptance, expression of status, and many more. When examined with the right combination of expertise and collaboration the corpus will have a significant effect.

Over a dozen ancient sundials from the Early Roman period have been discovered in Jerusalem, and about seven items in surrounding regions. These items provide insight about conceptions of temporality and technicalities of time measuring in this turbulent period, at the cradle of Christianity and just before the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Many of the finds stem from the temple environment and the houses of priests, which suggests a religious backdrop for them. Others may have been used in elite mansions, or specifically in gardens, horticulture being a prime expression of prestige in the Roman empire. We study these yet unexplored finds using a combination of methods: the history of geometry and technology, archaeology of Roman Jerusalem, material culture, and religious history of Second Temple Judaea. We explore the relationship of Judaism and Roman culture, whether by influence, assimilation, subversion or resistance. The seemingly modest collection of sundials provides an efficient, indicative and original way to address these grand cultural questions through a manageable dataset that remains hitherto unstudied.

The development and different types of sundials reflect increased geometrical skills and familiarity with projecting the celestial sphere onto different surfaces over time, but they equally reflect the cultural concepts of time, space, order, and religious practice. Furthermore, sundials were not merely tools of practical utility in the Roman world. Rather, they were also ideological instruments, encoding Roman virtues of discipline, order, and domination.

From the mid-1st century BCE (63 BCE) and until the destruction in 70 CE, Jerusalem growingly became a part of the Roman empire and Roman culture, albeit with local inhibitions against full integration. While Judaea was reluctant to integrate Roman policy into its age-old religious tradition, some factors were indeed accepted. Judaeans resisted the Roman Julian calendar, a cornerstone of imperial ideology under Augustus and his heirs, but Roman-type sundials seem to have evoked no resistance in Judaea, which makes them a telling test-case for the study of influence and resistance. King Herod the Great and the subsequent provincial procurators promoted Roman cultural patterns in Judaea. At the same time, Jerusalem went through an enormous wave of growth and expansion, with mansions and private houses following the latest Roman fashion.

From 1984 to 2011, the Swiss Archaeological Mission excavated Tall al-Hamidiya in Northeast Syria. The Late Bronze Age acropolis, with its monumental structures, including the Southwest Palace (approx. 14,500 m²) and the Central Palace (approx. 38,500 m²), was central to a city of approximately 245 ha. The impressive structures and Hurro-Akkadian texts suggest that Tall al-Hamidiya was Taidu, the royal city of the Mitannian empire, which had dominated Northern Mesopotamia and the Levant (ca. 16th-13thcentury BCE). Middle Assyrian kings conquered the site (13th-11th century BCE) and continued its occupation into the Neo-Assyrian period (9th-8th century BCE). This makes Tall al-Hamidiya one of the few sites in the region with a well-documented sequence of Mitanni—Middle Assyrian—Neo Assyrian habitation. 

From 1984 to 2020, Prof. Dr. Markus Wäfler (University of Bern) directed and funded the excavations. Since 2010/2011, the project has been situated at the University of Basel, where Dr. Oskar Kaelin, a project member since 1995 and co-director since 2008, has been affiliated. 

The main goals of the project supported by the Shelby White and Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications and directed by Dr. Oskar Kaelin are:

1. Ensure that all excavated data (photos, plans, drawings) is freely accessible online (in English) through the long-term preservation center DaSCH – Swiss National Data and Service Center for the Humanities to guarantee future accessibility (with Prof. Dr. Rita Gautschy and her team). 
2. Produce a monograph (as a free e-book) analyzing the findings at Tall al-Hamidiya, contextualizing them within the history of the Khabur region and the Ancient Near East, particularly the Mitannian, Middle, and Neo-Assyrian periods. 

Tall al-Hamidiya: https://sites.google.com/site/hamidiyataidu/

DaSCH-Website: https://www.dasch.swiss/

In the late 4th millennium BCE, southern Mesopotamia, i.e. the floodplain between Euphrates and Tigris which extends approximately from modern Baġdād southwards to the Gulf, gave birth to mankind’s first urban civilization. From here, important achievements originated, including the formation of cities; technological innovations; writing; to name but a few. The wave of original contributions to civilization was made possible by favourable environmental, socio-ecological and economic conditions. The basic prerequisite was an extremely high-yield agricultural set-up. Given the aridity of the climate in the region, it depended on irrigation. For that purpose, an ingenious system of rivers and canals was built, and it was this which made agriculture on the attested scale possible. The water for the canals was supplied mainly by two rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, flowing from the Anatolian highlands to the Gulf. While the earliest irrigation systems were based on watercourses formed by natural processes such as avulsions and aggradation on riverine levees, human interaction eventually led to small-scale irrigation systems on crevasse splays and the levee backslopes which could even be operated by smaller communities. The interaction between natural processes and human activities eventually led to a hydraulic landscape characterized by a dense network of natural and large, artificially created canals constituting complex irrigation systems with a variety of hydraulic devices including weirs, dams, reservoirs and a corresponding administrative structure, subject to a varying, size-dependent degree of centralization.

Countless cuneiform tablets and monumental inscriptions, dating from the late 4th to the 1st millennium BCE, preserve the earliest and most extensive corpus of written sources on early irrigation culture. Written in Sumerian and Akkadian, these texts include a broad range of genres: a large part of the corpus consists of royal inscriptions commemorating royal canal building projects and archival documents from institutional households managing irrigation agriculture. A few examples shall suffice, for instance, lexical lists provide vocabulary, mathematical exercises calculate work quota for irrigation works, while literary compositions address agriculture and irrigation. Together, these textual sources draw a very informative picture of almost every aspect involved in these complex processes. Such attention to detail is further borne out by the fact that not just rivers but also all larger and medium-sized canals had their own names, mentioned abundantly in the texts.

Despite the fact that these texts are well-known, the attested canals have so far only been selectively geo-localized and associated with place names of settlements that were located along them. One major difficulty is that over the course of the three millennia under consideration here, canals not only frequently migrated but were also renamed several times. Likewise, rivers were subject to environmental changes (e.g. climate, sea level, tectonics) and, accordingly, their dynamics in terms of discharge, sediment transport and channel stability varied through time, impacting human settlements and irrigation infrastructure. In addition, waterworks were almost always earthen structures, and as such are hardly detectable by traditional archaeological methods. Moreover, because the cuneiform sources are written in two different languages (Sumerian and Akkadian), a systematic, diachronic evaluation of the concordance between settlements, their toponymy and the hydronyms associated with them is lacking. To date, there are no comprehensive studies for the whole of Babylonia linking archaeological, philological, and hydrographical (geographical river reconstruction) data. While many publications discuss the potential link between environmental changes – and especially climatic change and droughts – and major societal changes that affected ancient Mesopotamia, complete datasets with a focus on river networks and river dynamics are still missing. However, they are essential for identifying and understanding the relevant interactions between humans and their environment. 

The aim of the interdisciplinary project is to use formal network analysis to link toponyms and hydronyms mentioned in texts with archaeological data on settlements and hydrographical network reconstructions based on remote sensing. The project will be the first to use a data-driven, Digital Humanities approach to bring together different datasets from different disciplines in an interdisciplinary manner, and from this newly construct a multi-temporal network of rivers and canals, which cover several key periods of the Mesopotamian history from the 4th to the 1st millennium BCE. The complementary combination of different data sets will help fill the gaps of each individual set and improve the level of accuracy. This data will be entered into an interactive database, will be further developed dynamically and will allow for subsequent inclusion of new data sets brought to light by current and future excavation activities. Together, this data forms the basis for the project’s network analysis: with a newly created, multi-temporal network of rivers and canals, the project will analyse changes in hydrography and link the results to knowledge of societal evolution, de- rived from existing archaeological findings. In addition, the purpose-built network will provide the foundation for developing a simple hydraulic model. This model will, in turn, allow a closer investigation of specific environmental changes, such as how aridity affects water flux within a network, and thereby foster further analyses of the impact these environmental changes had on civilization.

The data collected within this Sinergia project will be published as Open Research Data (ORD) in compliance with the FAIR and CARE principles. Digital publication formats aim at human oriented, research data repositories and machine oriented re-use. Research outcome will also be visualized as static maps for the key periods of the Mesopotamian history. 

Das universitäre Forschungsnetzwerk «NOMAD – Naher Osten, Mesopotamien, Ägypten im Diskurs» vernetzt Forschungen zum östlichen Mittelmeerraum, Mesopotamien und Ägypten an der Universität Basel und fördert den Austausch mit der Öffentlichkeit. Im westasiatischen Raum (ca. 10. Jt.v.u.Z. bis 7.Jh.u.Z.) entstanden sesshafte Lebensweisen, Ackerbau, Viehzucht, urbanes Leben, Schriftsysteme, Industrien und Wissenschaften sowie die religiösen Traditionen von Judentum, Christentum und Islam. Ohne Berücksichtigung der Geschichte Westasiens lassen sich relevante Prozesse der Weltgeschichte nicht verstehen. Themen aus dem Bereich des Nahen Osten sind seit Jahrzehnten in Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft relevant, national und international omnipräsent und werden es weiterhin bleiben.

In der Region Basel setzen sich zahlreiche Forschende und Institutionen mit Kulturen, Zeiten, Regionen, Religionen und Sprachen des Nahen Ostens, Mesopotamiens und Ägyptens auseinander. NOMAD hat zum Ziel, diese Kompetenzen und Angebote zu bündeln. NOMAD fördert den für Wissenschaft wie Öffentlichkeit wichtigen Austausch über kulturhistorische, aktuelle und fachübergreifende Themen zwischen (Nachwuchs-)Forschenden, Studierenden und der breiteren Öffentlichkeit.

Am Forschungsnetzwerk beteiligt sind Forschende der Theologischen Fakultät, des Departements Altertumswissenschaften, der Nahoststudien, des Zentrums für Jüdische Studien und der Integrativen Prähistorischen und Naturwissenschaftlichen Archäologie (IPNA) der Universität Basel sowie das Antikenmuseum Basel.

The university research network «NOMAD – Near East, Mesopotamia, Egypt in Discourse» connects research at the University of Basel focused on the Eastern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, and promotes dialogue with the public. In West Asia (approx. 10th millennium BCE to 7th century CE), key developments emerged, including settled ways of life, agriculture, animal husbandry, urbanization, writing systems, industries and sciences, as well as the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Understanding major processes in world history is impossible without considering the history of West Asia. Topics related to the Near East have long played a crucial role in politics, economics, and society – both nationally and internationally – and will continue to do so.

In the Basel region, numerous researchers and institutions engage with the cultures, periods, regions, religions, and languages of the Near East, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. NOMAD aims to bring together these areas of expertise and offerings. The network fosters interdisciplinary exchange on cultural-historical, contemporary, and academic topics among (early-career) researchers, students, and the wider public – an exchange essential to both scholarship and society.

The research network includes researchers from the Faculty of Theology, the Department of Ancient Civilizations, Near and Middle Eastern Studies, the Center for Jewish Studies, the Integrative Prehistory and Archaeological Science (IPAS) at the University of Basel, and the Antikenmuseum Basel.