The Meaning and Origin of the Iconography of the Ritualistic Steatite Bowl from Tel Zeror, Israel

Abstract

The third season's work of the Japanese Expedition to Tel Zeror was carried out under the direction of Prof. Dr K. Ohata in the summer of 1967, when a piece of a broken steatite bowl was found in stratum IX (thel late tenth to the early ninth centuries B. C.). We were not able to delve into studying this piece in full in the report “Tel Zeror III” which was published in 1970.
Here is the first half of our comprehensive survey of the parallels as well as the final result of the restoration of the Tel Zeror piece.
It is very similar to those which are owned by the Museum fuer Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, and the National Museum, Copenhagen. Thus the hand with four fingers on the surface of the bowl was restored as the left foreleg of the lion-protoma which mounted the hollow “handle”. The statement in “Tel Zeror III” that the hand is “human” is now discarded. There has been found another type of the “human” hand (palm) decoration, but in fact it was also not human, but must have been devine.
On the other hand, the chronological analysis of the decorative elements of the parallels from Syria and Palestine has led us to the conclusion that their original home was not Egypt, nor Canaan, nor Anatolia; that most elements came from the artistic motifs of Hyksos and Hurrians in the Bronze Age; that they were synthesized in North Syria in the Early Iron Age under the strong influence of the decorative idea of the Urartu and Luristan arts.
The cardinal points which are to be discussed in the second half of our study will be: that the ritual for which these bowls were used was not incense burning but libation; that this Iron Age cult was Nordic and that for the worship of violence and fury; that the cult was imported by Aramaean and Neo-Hittite people to the land of Israel.