Foto: University of Chicago.

Los humanos de la Edad del Hierro, en el siglo VIII a.C., ya creían en la separación del alma y el cuerpo. Así lo demuestra una losa de piedra cincelada encontrada en el sureste de Turquía por un grupo de arqueólogos de la Universidad de Chicago.

Los investigadores de esta Universidad señalan que en el descubrimiento se aprecia una incisión en la imagen de un hombre como reflejo de la creencia de la separación entre cuerpo y alma. Además este hallazgo podría explicar la creencia de que, tras la muerte, el alma del fallecido permanece en la estela en la que se tallaba su imagen y se inscribían sus últimas palabras.

Vía: OTR, Chicago | Europa Press, 18 de noviembre de 2008

La expedición Neubauer del Instituto Oriental de la Universidad de Chicago fue la encargada de encontrar esta estela de basalto de 360 kilogramos, 90 centímetros de altura y 60 de ancho en Zincirli, la antigua ciudad de Sam'al. Ésta, que fue la capital de un reino próspero, es ahora uno de los sitios más importantes de excavación y extracción de materiales de la Edad del Hierro.

Esta estela funeraria es la primera de su tipo que se encuentra intacta en su ubicación original, lo que ayudará a conocer las costumbres funerarias y la vida del siglo VIII a.C, momento en el que surgieron grandes imperios en el antiguo Oriente Medio y cuando las culturas israelitas y fenicias pasaroon a formar parte de una interesante mezcla.

"La estela se encuentra en estado casi prístino. Es única por su combinación de imágenes y características textuales y, por tanto, proporciona una importante aportación a nuestro conocimiento de la antigua lengua y cultura", explica David Schloen, profesor asociado del Instituto Oriental y Director de la Expedición Neubauer en Zincirli, en declaraciones publicadas por la web de la Universidad de Chicago que recoge otr/press.

SIERVO DEL REY PANAMUWA

La estela fue descubierta el pasado verano en una pequeña habitación que se había convertido en un depósito de cadáveres para el santuario real de Kuttamuwa, en cuya inscripción se define como un "siervo" del Rey Panamuwa del siglo VIII a.C. Estas palabras fueron escritas en un idioma derivado del alfabeto fenicio y de un dialecto similar al arameo y hebreo.

En la losa encontrada aparece la figura de un hombre, Kuttamuwa, con barba, con un sombrero y con una copa de vino en la mano derecha. En la imagen, aparece Kuttamuwa sentado en una silla delante de un cuadro cargado de alimentos. Según los estudios, este cuadro simboliza la agradable experiencia que vivirá después de la muerte. Junto a la figura del hombre, se encuentra una inscripción que ordena a sus descendientes regular los alimentos para su alma.

Este hallazgo arroja luz sobre las creencias en el más allá durante la Edad del Hierro, concretamente sobre la creencia de que la identidad o el alma de los fallecidos persistía en el monumento en el que se tallaba su imagen y se inscribían sus últimas palabras. Esta creencia explicaría cómo, a pesar de ser contrarias a las prácticas de judíos y otras culturas que confiaban en la unidad entre cuerpo y alma, el hombre que aparece en la estela pudo ser incinerado. Y es que, según la inscripción, el alma de los fallecidos residía en la estela.

Esta estela fue descubierta después de que Schloen y su equipo de la Universidad de Chicago estuvieran excavando en la zona de Zincirli durante dos meses cada año desde 2006. Pero no fueron los primeros. Ya en la década de 1890, arqueólogos alemanes excavaron el sitio y descubrieron numerosas murallas, palacios y puertas, muchas de las cuales se encuentran ahora en museos de Estambul y Berlín.

Photo: Robert Koldewey | KINGDOM PAST A geomagnetic map of the ancient city of Sam’al, which was excavated this summer by David Schloen, an archaeologist, below, and Amir Fink, a student.

"Zincirli es un sitio remarcable", explica Gil Stein, director del Instituto Oriental. "Dado que otras ciudades no se construyeron en su parte superior, tenemos excelentes materiales de la Edad del Hierro en la parte derecha de la superficie excavada. Todos estos testimonios artísticos y arqueológicos se puede estudiar el origen étnico de los habitantes, su comercio, sus migraciones y las relaciones de los grupos que vivían allí", añade Stein.

MOVIMIENTOS MIGRATORIOS

Schloen también señala que el descubrimiento ayudará a explicar los movimientos migratorios desde Indoeuropa hasta la región excavada, que se encontraba bajo el imperio Hitita. Una inmigración que se produjo varios siglos antes ya que en el siglo VIII a.C. los llegados ya hacían uso del dialecto semítico occidental y estaban plenamente integrados en la cultura local.

Esta estela será presentada por Schloen ante un público con intereses académicos el próximo 22 de noviembre en Boston en la reunión de la Escuela Americana de Investigación Oriental. Por su parte y al día siguiente, Dennis Pardee, profesor de Lenguas y Civilización del Próximo Oriente de la Universidad de Chicago, presentará la traducción de las 13 líneas de inscripción de la estela en la reunión anual de la Sociedad de Literatura Bíblica, también en Boston.

** Artículo y fotos de la Universidad de Chicago





Found: An Ancient Monument to the Soul

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, November 18, 2008
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

In a mountainous kingdom in what is now southeastern Turkey, there lived in the eighth century B.C. a royal official, Kuttamuwa, who oversaw the completion of an inscribed stone monument, or stele, to be erected upon his death. The words instructed mourners to commemorate his life and afterlife with feasts “for my soul that is in this stele.”

University of Chicago archaeologists who made the discovery last summer in ruins of a walled city near the Syrian border said the stele provided the first written evidence that the people in this region held to the religious concept of the soul apart from the body. By contrast, Semitic contemporaries, including the Israelites, believed that the body and soul were inseparable, which for them made cremation unthinkable, as noted in the Bible.

Circumstantial evidence, archaeologists said, indicated that the people at Sam’al, the ancient city, practiced cremation. The site is known today as Zincirli (pronounced ZIN-jeer-lee).

Other scholars said the find could lead to important insights into the dynamics of cultural contact and exchange in the borderlands of antiquity where Indo-European and Semitic people interacted in the Iron Age.

The official’s name, for example, is Indo-European: no surprise, as previous investigations there had turned up names and writing in the Luwian language from the north. But the stele also bears southern influences. The writing is in a script derived from the Phoenician alphabet and a Semitic language that appears to be an archaic variant of Aramaic.

The discovery and its implications were described last week in interviews with archaeologists and a linguist at the University of Chicago, who excavated and translated the inscription.

“Normally, in the Semitic cultures, the soul of a person, their vital essence, adheres to the bones of the deceased,” said David Schloen, an archaeologist at the university’s Oriental Institute and director of the excavations. “But here we have a culture that believed the soul is not in the corpse but has been transferred to the mortuary stone.”

A translation of the inscription by Dennis Pardee, a professor of Near Eastern languages and civilization at Chicago, reads in part: “I, Kuttamuwa, servant of [the king] Panamuwa, am the one who oversaw the production of this stele for myself while still living. I placed it in an eternal chamber [?] and established a feast at this chamber: a bull for [the god] Hadad, a ram for [the god] Shamash and a ram for my soul that is in this stele.”

Dr. Pardee said the word used for soul, nabsh, was Aramaic, a language spoken throughout northern Syria and parts of Mesopotamia in the eighth century. But the inscription seemed to be a previously unrecognized dialect. In Hebrew, a related language, the word for soul is nefesh.

In addition to the writing, a pictorial scene chiseled into the well-preserved stele depicts the culture’s view of the afterlife. A bearded man wearing a tasseled cap, presumably Kuttamuwa, raises a cup of wine and sits before a table laden with food, bread and roast duck in a stone bowl.

In other societies of the region, scholars say, this was an invitation to bring customary offerings of food and drink to the tomb of the deceased. Here family and descendants supposedly feasted before a stone slab in a kind of chapel. Archaeologists have found no traces there of a tomb or bodily remains.

Joseph Wegner, an Egyptologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research, said cult offerings to the dead were common in the Middle East, but not the idea of a soul separate from the body — except in Egypt.

In ancient Egypt, Dr. Wegner noted, the human entity has separate components. The body is important, and the elite went to great expense to mummify and entomb it for eternity. In death, though, a life force or spirit known as ka was immortal, and a soul known as ba, which was linked to personal attributes, fled the body after death.

Dr. Wegner said the concept of a soul held by the people at Sam’al “sounds vaguely Egyptian in its nature.” But there was nothing in history or archaeology, he added, to suggest that the Egyptian civilization had a direct influence on this border kingdom.

Other scholars are expected to weigh in after Dr. Schloen and Dr. Pardee describe their findings later this week in Boston at meetings of the American Schools of Oriental Research and the Society of Biblical Literature.

Lawrence E. Stager, an archaeologist at Harvard who excavates in Israel, said that from what he had learned so far the stele illustrated “to a great degree the mixed cultural heritage in the region at that time” and was likely to prompt “new and exciting discoveries in years to come.”

Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute, said the stele was a “rare and most informative discovery in having written evidence together with artistic and archaeological evidence from the Iron Age.”

The 800-pound basalt stele, three feet tall and two feet wide, was found in the third season of excavations at Zincirli by the Neubauer Expedition of the Oriental Institute. The work is expected to continue for seven more years, supported in large part by the Neubauer Family Foundation of Chicago.

The site, near the town of Islahiye in Gaziantep province, was controlled at one time by the Hittite Empire in central Turkey, then became the capital of a small independent kingdom. In the eighth century, the city was still the seat of kings, including Panamuwa, but they were by then apparently subservient to the Assyrian Empire. After that empire’s collapse, the city’s fortunes declined, and the place was abandoned late in the seventh century.

A German expedition, from 1888 to 1902, was the first to explore the city’s past. It uncovered thick city walls of stone and mud brick and monumental gates lined with sculpture and inscriptions. These provided the first direct evidence of Indo-European influence on the kingdom.

After the Germans suspended operations, the ruins lay unworked until the Chicago team began digging in 2006, concentrating on the city beyond the central citadel, which had been the focus of the German research. Much of the 100-acre site has now been mapped by remote-sensing magnetic technology capable of detecting buried structures.

This summer, on July 21, workers excavating what appeared to be a large dwelling came upon the rounded top of the stele and saw the first line of the inscription. Dr. Schloen and Amir Fink, a doctoral student in archaeology at Tel Aviv University, bent over to read.

Almost immediately, they and others on the team recognized that the words were Semitic and the name of the king was familiar; it had appeared in the inscriptions found by the Germans. As the entire stele was exposed, Dr. Schloen said, the team made a rough translation, and this was later completed and refined by Dr. Pardee.

Then the archaeologists examined more closely every aspect of the small, square room in which the stele stood in a corner by a stone wall. Fragments of offering bowls to the type depicted in the stele were on the floor. Remains of two bread ovens were found.

“Our best guess is that this was originally a kitchen annexed to a larger dwelling,” Dr. Schloen said. “The room was remodeled as a shrine or chapel — a mortuary chapel for Kuttamuwa, probably in his own home.”

They found no signs of a burial in the city’s ruins. At other ancient sites on the Turkish-Syrian border, cremation urns have been dated to the same period. So the archaeologists surmised that cremation was also practiced at Sam’al.

Dr. Stager of Harvard said the evidence so far, the spread of languages and especially the writing on stone about a royal official’s soul reflected the give-and-take of mixed cultures, part Indo-European, part Semitic, at a borderland in antiquity.