Talk:Apollonia–Arsuf

Arsur, 1101 to 1265

John of Ibelin, Lord of Beirut (1177—1236) became Lord of Arsur not of "Arsuf" in 1207 when he married Melisende of Arsur (born c.1170). Their son John of Arsur, not Arsuf (c.1211—1258) inherited the title. The title then passed to John of Arsur's eldest son Balian of Arsur (1239—1277). He built new walls, the big fortress and new harbor (1241). From 1261, the city was ruled by the Knights Hospitaller. To insert "Arsuf" in this historical era is like saying Peter Stuyvesant was governor of New York.--Wetman (talk) 11:04, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

As I mentioned on Talk:Melisende of Arsuf, modern historians tend to use both Arsuf and Arsur. It's not really the same as New Amsterdam/New York because Arsuf and Arsur are actually the same name, just occasionally spelled differently in the thirteenth century. (We don't say the crusaders ruled "Hierusalem" or "Ierosolym" or any of the other spellings they used for the modern Jerusalem.) Adam Bishop (talk) 02:19, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

Agree with Adam. Several of the books I have that specialize in the Crusader period prefer Arsuf and only note the spelling "Arsur" in passing. They include Ellenblum's "Crusader Castles", Edgington's "Albert of Aachen", Conder's "Latin Kingdom" and Pringle's "Secular buildings in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem". If it is ok for them, we needn't fret about it too much. Zero^talk 02:31, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

still, it's an inexplicable change in consonants; not just a matter of vowels. Don't fret; leave it correct. A Georgian (talk) 02:45, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

There is a partial catalogue of place names used in Crusader-era documents: Otto Heinricht Schmidt, Ortsnamen Palästinas in der Kreuzfahrerzeit: Ortsnamenregister zu den Aufsätzen von Prutz, Beyer und Kob in der ZDPV 4–8, Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins (1953-), Bd. 86, H. 2 (1970), pp. 117-164. For this location it lists Appolonia, Arsin, Arsuf, Arsuph, Arsur, Arsuth, Assur, Orsuf and Sozusa. Zero^talk 04:21, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

Does the village belong here?

@Zero0000, Huldra, and Padres Hana: The 1596 Ottoman-period Arab village, which apparently persisted until 1948 (continuity...? considering abandonment & resettlement pattern in Ottoman Palestine, this is not an empty or ideologically motivated question), was apparently south of the city ruins and next to the maqam/wali (Sidna Ali Mosque) - see the 1932 map, plus considering the name & logic (Mamluk policy of creating Muslim pilgrimage sites meant as nuclei for settlements after the removal of the Franks). Should be clarified, as I am not sure that the village belongs as part of the Arsuf article (same goes for all the Jewish surrounding settlements). The village didn't take the name Arsuf! The 1932 map shows north of it, in an open area, the name Er Rusuf el Qibli, which contains the old name (rsf), but it's at most agricultural land. What is El Hawakir on that map? Probably the neighbourhood (of build-up?) El-Haram village coming closest to the ancient city area. It's a matter of principle as much as a concrete case: if a village stands/stood NEXT TO an ancient archaeological site and is centered on a different nucleus (here the maqam; can be smth. else, too), do we attach it to an article? It might have used the ancient site for agriculture or not, but didn't inhabit the ruins & had a very different raison d'etre and settlement pattern from the old port city. At the very least, a distinction should be made: "near... south of... nearby...". Arminden (talk) 11:05, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

I think the article could benefit from incorporation of the precision you've suggested about the surrounding habitations. One might want to mention Nof Yam, and Herzlia Petuakh, and Kfar Shmariyahu just to bring things up to date. A Georgian (talk) 13:06, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

@Arminden: The name of the village recorded in 1596 was Arsuf (exactly the same Arabic spelling as here). We don't have enough information to say whether it was where the ruins are or where El Haram was. Perhaps there are travelogues which refer to a population. Names like "El Hawakir" on the map are names of plots of land for cadastral purposes. Except for the Negev, most of Palestine in the Mandate period was subdivided into village lands, and those were further subdivided into these named plots. Zero^talk 15:02, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

The chosen wording is puzzling: "In 1596...a third of the revenues from nearby Arsuf went to the waqf of Ali Ibn ʿAleim." I read it as "tithes from the lands known as Arsuf went to the shrine foundation/trust." "Arsuf" is wikilinked to the Arsuf city page, I'll remove it, as it's overlinked anyway. If "Arsuf" is explicitly called a village, it should be mentioned; if not, we do have a problem. Arminden (talk) 20:45, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

Well, regarding the 1596-numbers, Hütteroth and Abdulfattah gives the grid numbers (with 3 numbers each), which in effect define one km2. Clear enough? Huldra (talk) 22:07, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

People paid tithes, not lands. It means that the residents of Arsuf paid tax to support the waqf. The tax of course was calculated from their revenues. I don't think it is unclear. Also, the coordinates given by Hütteroth and Abdulfattah match the ruin and not El Haram, but that isn't really evidence that the village was at the ruin. Hütteroth and Abdulfattah sought to identify names on a 16th century list with known places and they didn't have enough information for absolute precision. I have seen an archaeological claim that the ruin remained unpopulated after the 13th century. That could mean that the 16th century village was somewhere else such as at El Haram, but it could also mean that a small mud-brick village effectively disappeared. Zero^talk 03:14, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

I got carried away. I've been reading about the area, checked out the 3 articles in parallel (Apollonia–Arsuf, Sidna Ali Mosque, Al-Haram) and got the impression that they got a bit too intermixed. That is indeed true, but to a much lesser degree than I had the feeling they were.

My point is : When should a new settlement be mentioned in an article about another, totally abandoned ancient settlement?

The 16th-century "Arsuf" from the Ottoman tax register obviously doesn't offer Palestine grid data, and maybe the clerk just used the best known name from the area for a temporary agricultural camp of a seminomadic clan who only called it "our seaside plot". Or an adobe village that was washed away by history within years. Of course it's people that pay tithes, but they can live in one place or another and work remote plots of land they owe, lease or... find for themselves. See the Essaid article with the very eloquent testimony of the Bir Saba (Beersheba, I guess) man whose family spent some time every year at el-Haram and tended to a garden or alike, but had their main residence and agricultural lands far to the south, at Bir Saba, where they returned for the harvest. And he's among the 1948 refugees! So not even talking of Mamluk or early Ottoman times. If it was a similar case in the 1500s, the Turks probably taxed them where they could catch them, rather than charging the el-Haram tax through a heroic Negev-based tax collector.

The village from Jacotin's map seems to be right next to the shrine. I really don't think it belongs on the Apollonia/Arsuf page at all, but only on the el-Haram page.

Maybe it's obvious, but I want to get it off my chest. So, when does a new settlement belong in an article about another, totally abandoned ancient one? A settlement has certain characteristics: it is rural or urban, has a certain nucleus from which it might expand, has (a number of) name(s), the inhabitants often start by being homogenous (or at least have a common reason to move to that place) and might become less so with time (or the opposite happens, especially in rural communities), and quite essentially, it has a certain reason for being where it is, which creates its character. The nucleus and reason to be might be prosaic, like a road crossing, a ford or bridge, leading to the establishment of a market, of an inn, etc.; a good water source in an arid region; good agricultural land, etc. Or it can be more specific: a natural bay evolving into a port; a strategic location, say, at the exit of an important mountain pass; a religious shrine, be it in the middle of nowhere, attracting visitors of which some settle down permanently; and so on. Arsuf was a port city; el-Haram was a village that grew out of the Ayyubid and Mamluk counter-Crusade policy of creating legends & shrines as nuclei for new, Muslim settlements in order to replace the Frankish ones; the Bir Saba man is part of another pattern, of seminomadic seasonal settlement, of an either agricultural type (see the Palestinian fauqa-and-tahta pattern, of hill and plain twin villages used seasonally by the same clan), or of pastoral transhumance; the khirba/khirbet phenomenon in Palestine of abandoned, sometimes resettled, sometimes re-abandoned sites, is very widely spread in the tumultuous 19th century; and so on. We should always pay attention to that.

Placing whole sets of details (number of households & bachelors, types or orchards, exact amounts of taxes paid in long-forgotten currencies, etc.) may look weird, to say the least, among paragraphs dealing as concisely as possible with significant periods of settlement, especially when the connection to the main topic at hand is not very obvious. I fully understand that that's all we might have about a village, and when it was destroyed in 1948, it has an additional, memorial value. But then we should be careful with where exactly we place those sets of data. Thanks and have a good time, Arminden (talk) 14:18, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

That was tl, dr, but it does appear that Karmon made a mistake(?) I cannot find a "village" mentioned on Jacotin's map by Arsuf (while Karmon says so, on p. 170 in his article)

Btw; the article is now off-line link (first time ever I have seen that), has anyone forwarded the error screen to www.jchp.ucla.edu's WebMaster?

As for what goes into where: I have lost track of how many times the history of a Palestinian -48 village has found itself in the history of the Jewish post-48 place....Do you think that is correct? Huldra (talk) 22:32, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

To editor Huldra: To editor Arminden: Karmon is correct. The confusion is caused by Jacotin marking Arsouf in the wrong place. Please look at the lower left of this map and note the scale. You can see Ali Ebn harami with a mosque, and "Village" 1km to the north. This is precisely the distance between El Haram and Arsuf (compare to PEF map 10) and corresponds to Karmon's identifications. Jacotin marks Arsouf ruin 10km to the north, which I have seen in later maps too but it isn't the currently accepted location. Since Jacotin's accuracy along the coast is better than in the interior (given that the French army traversed it), this is actually good evidence that Arsuf was inhabited at the time. Maybe it is mentioned in the accompanying travelogue. Also, Arminden, I really can't give any credence to your theory that "Arsuf" wasn't called "Arsuf" in 1596. Such a thing could be claimed about any village, also with no evidence. Zero^talk 04:52, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

Irby and Mangles, Travels in Egypt (1817) write "In the afternoon we passed through a wild but pretty country, and crossed the nahr Arsouf, leaving the village of that name (the ancient Appollonias) on our left" (p189). It isn't clear the exact location they refer to, but they did think there was a village called Arsouf. Oddly, Buckingham (traveling north to south) placed Heram (description of mosque with minaret) two hours north of Nahr-el-Arsoof. Zero^talk 06:58, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

The thing is, what we do know is the location of the 19th-20th-century village of Haram, and its name, and that village, with its group of families, is at the shrine. It's all about settlement patterns: in the Middle East, the transition of communities between nomadic, seminomadic and sedentary life style is very fluent. Maps as immovable proof is a European approach in a place where the tribe or its subset, the wider family (hamūla), gives one's identity, rather than a fix location. If a hamūla stays in a place for a couple of decades and moves on, and we can't be sure where exactly they've lived, it's arguable how much they belong here or there, but it should be mentioned in connection to that site as what it was. When you have a strong spring, it will always attract new settlers and the old ones will try their best to hold on to the place, creating a continuity of settlement; think of Jericho with its 'Ain es-Sultan/Elisha's Spring. But the location of Arsuf doesn't seem to be any better than a site two km up or down the coast. The ruins offered good construction material, and the late Haram inhabitants took it and moved it 1-2 km south to their place near the mosque. I came across a line that - I think in the 19th c. - the Turkish authorities have built a jetty to help put the produce from Haram and maybe from the wider area on boats. So they repeated the process that gave life and a long-term lease of life to Arsuf. Only this time the "budding port" didn't survive for a long time, not even into the 20th c. it seems. In short, it seems to me very risky to try by ourselves to create strings of related facts out of imprecise mentions in old sources. That's the job of specialised academics, and they often contradict each other until they finally reach some half-hearted consensus. Here I can't see any such existing consensus. Wikipedia becomes an activist for what's percieved to be a recuperation of a certain "Palestinian" history. I'm dying to know the demographic and settlement history of Palestine, but the real one, resulting from an approach informed by the realities of the place. That's my issue here and elsewhere. Have a great weekend, Arminden (talk) 10:34, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

@Huldra: hi. I hope that my posting here-above answers part of your question. If there is some type of continuity, which can consist in the character of the settlement, its location, maybe at least in part of the inhabitants (see for instance Jaffa), why not, one article would do. Prague had at times a mix of varying parts of Bohemian (Czech), German, and Jewish inhabitants. Now only the Czechs remain, but Prague is Prague, even if much of its cultural inner workings are gone and museal. If the Bedouin Dalaikas somehow got modern-type official Ottoman deeds to the territory they used for grazing and camping, sold some of it to the Baha'ullah and some to the Zionist companies, how do you connect them or their encampments and possibly villages to Moshavat Kinneret? You don't, except by mentioning the land purchase procedures, and try to create an article about the Dalaika tribe, or a group of tribes with common traits. Once they do settle, you connect the tribe info to the new village. See Shibli or Rahat, Bedouin towns in the North and the South. But half the tribe might be still nomadic, or in Jordan. In general: if there's a strong connection, combine. But a two-track approach can be the best. Whenever possible, "follow the people", not just the history of the site. If most of the refugees from Majdal/Ashkelon are in Gaza, this should be mentioned. The Khan el-Achmar article should, in my opinion, put a much greater emphasis on the Jahalin tribe, not the place they were pushed to with its history, which has almost no connection to the Jahalins. In Akka/Akko the Arab population is made up of descendants of refugees from the surrounding villages, while the local Arab families became refugees in 48. On the Jewish side, for the early Zionist days, take a look at Umm Juni/Degania: one group started off, another one took over and settled, at least the first one lived in half of the houses of an Arab hamlet - Zero found sources connecting it with Manshiya across the river, I think - whose inhabitants lived next to the Jews for a while and then left. I don't know if the Arab felaheen had been there for long, or had come onto Dalaika-owned or Baha'ullah's land, nor where they moved to. Then Degania also moved. Not like the type of history I grew up with in Romania, but if you go back a few centuries, it's not that different either, with Romanian shepherds settling north and south of the Danube, arriving from places hundreds of miles away, beyond the Carpathians. Just stay open-minded and don't press everything into one formula. But that's a commonplace :) Cheers and enjoy the weekend, Arminden (talk) 11:16, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

How is Jacotin reliable if he places Arsouf 10 km to the north? He went with a fast marching expeditionary corps and asked locals through translators while "on the go". He did an amazing job, considering the circumstances. But considering the circumstances. Second, names travel in time. Third, a tribe settles among the ruins or next to the mosque, tills plots of land among the ruins or elsewhere (see the artist's rendition of Crusader Arsur: full of large cultivation areas among clusters of houses; not a great density of urban dwellings, so "among the ruins" can be - a plot of land devoid of any ruins), then they're forced to move. Or they've always had an "al fouqa" place elsewhere in the hill country, or property next to Bir Saba. What I'm saying is: el-Haram of C19 and C20 is one village. About the rest, I don't know. Arsuf died in 1265, never to be revived again. If there was an episode of settlement among the ruins or even three or seven of those, make sure they're properly located in space & time, but they're not more than that. Maybe they were the families who started Haram, or Sarafand, or... whatever. There are traces of habitation from the tell at Jericho from the Late Bronze Age, but not of a proper town or well-defined settlement: it's considered a settlement gap. Nobody argues with that. Names persist, Arsuf officially regained its Semitic name after about a thousand (!) years of being called Greek names. And there are several such examples. So the name sticks around forever and covers a certain area around the (visible or invisible) ruins. If you know for a fact that in 1596 or in Jacotin's time there was a village between the ruined city walls of 1265 Arsuf, go ahead and put in the information. But not based on a name dropped somewhere. Jacotin placed that Arsouf 10 km up the coast because - a local told him so. "Zibb al-Far'un" in Petra is what a Westerner got from a Bedouin who had had enough of the cartographer's questions. It means "the Paraoh's dick", and local guides laugh and say their great-great-grandpa made it up to escape the annoying Faranji. But now it's on every map. It's not Europe, that's my point. Arminden (talk) 11:47, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

To editor Arminden: You are arguing against sources and you know that is not what we are supposed to do. Karmon is our expert on Jacotin's map and he said that Jacotin called this location (that this article is about) "Village". So that is what we should write, without giving an opinion on it. The fact that Karmon's judgement matches the map to perfection should make us comfortable about it. That Jacotin (and others) thought the ancient ruin of Arsouf lay somewhere else is also something we could add, though it is less interesting and happens even with modern identifications. Zero^talk 12:12, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

To editor Zero0000: I think it was Huldra who argued against Karmon and "village" :))) ("it does appear that Karmon made a mistake(?) I cannot find a "village" mentioned on Jacotin's map"). Anyway, this thing blew out of all proportion, and I'm to blame. Too much time on my hands. None of it is such a big deal. It's my frustration with the gap between intention and result, between knowledge and collecting & archiving data, between what's objective and deep understanding of reality, vs. subjective interpretation and support for just certain aspects of it. But Wikipedia is hardly the place to fight it out, it's a very, VERY short tail to wag the dog by. Take care, Arminden (talk) 17:20, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

@Zero0000 and Arminden:: yeah, Zero is correct, my bad! If you know what you are looking for, it is easy to see: look at the water-inlet: Jacotin places the ruins north of it, which it definitely is not. So Karmon was correct, after all. And generally Jacotin is pretty correct when it comes to the coast-line (as he travelled there himself): it is the "inlands" which tend to be shaky, as there he relied on second-hand info. As to "ruins travelling around": that happened a lot in the pre-20th century! Think about all the places they placed Capernaum through the ages (I think the Crusaders placed by the Med -while other placed it at Khirbat al-Minya) Huldra (talk) 23:08, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

@Zero0000 and Huldra: Just finished this edit. This is the kind of approach that suits the region best. Could very well be that here, in the case of Arsuf it doesn't, or that in some cases such theories are necessarily sounding too speculative, especially if archaeological proof is lacking, but that's for sure the right mindset. It takes into consideration the cultural settlement patterns and the historical changes, and usually such theories get accepted in the end. Arminden (talk) 20:57, 2 October 2020 (UTC)

@Arminden:, well, my 2 cents: that is wayyyyyy to much stuff about what is, basically a theory for "the specially interested". Seriously, ever heard about WP:UNDUE? (Also: User:Nishidani: interested in the Susia-bit?) al-Karmil is -supposedly- an article about a Palestinian village -all the "history-theories" should probably go into an article dedicated to that, Huldra (talk) 21:29, 2 October 2020 (UTC)

@Huldra: Carmel was the richest village in the region in C6-7 (say the Nessana papyri) and nobody knows where it was. Nobody knows what the Jewish village at Kh. es-Susiyeh was called, but it looks like one of the largest of the time. Carmel is a biblical site with several mentions. That's for the begenning of Jewish Kh. Susiya. About its end: The change of population and the (overlapping? successive?) use of the synagogue is fascinating to anyone who wants to understand transition periods, which are by far the most interesting ones. It can be connected to the double use (church & Muslim prayer space) of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (Omar in the courtyard or narthex), Nativity Church (S aisle), Kathisma (S area), Shivta & maybe other cities of the Negev; to the fundamental questions: who are the forefathers of the Palestinian Arabs? Did Jews, Christians, move or convert after the Muslim conquest? (Both must be correct, to different degrees and at different moments in history.) And so on. I have seldom seen such a historically fascinating area like Karmil & Susiya. New article? On what? Special interest? What's special? Why are endless repetitions of census figures from this & that century more eye-opening than attempting to understand what those figures represent? Where do the sudden 5-10-20 individuals of a different ethnoreligious background suddenly pop up from and disappear? That's history. The rest is bookkeeping and, sometimes, collecting ammunition for propaganda charges. Too much? Probably for the common user whos' looking for travel info, but not for an encyclopedia; is all that journalistic prose (prose? or lyrical outpourings?) about contrasting living standards between settlers and Bedouin ("goldfish ponds vs. beaten earth behind the barbed wire fence") OK for what pretends to be an encyclopedia? I didn't touch that, I guess it has its consumers. So does this, I guess. We can't all dumb down to a lowest denominator. I grew up with some huge old encyclopaedias filling up metres of shelf, and I understood whole eras & their mentality by reading through them. Wiki won't be that, but it can be more than a Reader's Digest. Sorry, got carried away again. Cheers, and stay away from Trump & successeurs, the virus is nasty :)) Not that you'd go near them. Arminden (talk) 22:48, 2 October 2020 (UTC)

PS: I never thought the articles would be balanced in the way they combine present & past. If the "pro-Palestinian faction", whatever that means, decided that by default it must always be the "Palestinian village" (w.t.m.) article that contains the entire history, from Stone Age to King Hussein, OK, fine, but then live with it. Arminden (talk) 22:53, 2 October 2020 (UTC)

in the Middle East, the transition of communities between nomadic, seminomadic and sedentary life style is very fluent. Maps as immovable proof is a European approach in a place where the tribe or its subset, the wider family (hamūla), gives one's identity, rather than a fix location. If a hamūla stays in a place for a couple of decades and moves on, and we can't be sure where exactly they've lived, it's arguable how much they belong here or there, but it should be mentioned in connection to that site as what it was.

Wikipedia becomes an activist for what's perceived to be a recuperation of a certain "Palestinian" history. I'm dying to know the demographic and settlement history of Palestine, but the real one, resulting from an approach informed by the realities of the place. That's my issue here and elsewhere

This will be WP:TLDR, so no need to reply. But your remarks can be read as offensively offensive, which I'm sure wasn't the intent of your humour. From time to time you fuss that ideology is getting the better of editing in the I/P area, and insist on factuality. I think the long term editors here would concur. For myself, though, your understanding of what is 'ideological' is naïve. You're surely familiar with Goethe's maxim:Das Höchste wäre, zu begreifen, daß alles Faktische schon Theorie ist, where 'theory' is what in modern times we tend to call 'ideology'. The conversation above illustrates this. The testimony of maps is disputed as errant at times because they are 'European' (and reflect Said's Orientalism). That is a half-truth, I myself once outlined in one of our conversations, but needs a corrective gloss: Zionism is a European ideology, and its approach to the land is nowhere more evident than in the premise that the ancient Jewish naming of built towns or villages is to be privileged over the Arabic naming, which is topologically 'fluid'. Arabs shift round, as is typical of a (semi-)nomadic culture, whereas Jews in antiquity lived within the solid, defined confines of settlements. But Arabic naming, I said years ago, and my frail assertion was buttressed by Zero above, is cadastrally linked to hamula holdings, i.e. land as defined by village economic or ownership rights' interests. Therefore to note a certain fluidity in topological usage on the basis of established ruins and a meandering 'village' name to thresh out the pristine Jewish historic 'reality' from the shifting imprecisions of Arab habitation in proximity to the 'Jewish ruin', and edit to separate the two is to play into the hands of modern Israeli ideological and practical settlement interests. This trend is complicated by the fact that much otherwise excellent Israeli scholarship mirrors this approach, and overwhelming our sourcing comes from that perspective, bordering WP:SYSTEMIC BIAS. The mess at Susya and Carmal all of the hived off sub-articles was caused by the interventions of a sock Settleman/Ashtul who was probably a puppet for Regavim. Given the damage he did ('unique' transhumant settlements etc.) the article should have been reverted back to the state it was in before his meddling. His effort was to desperately affirm that in these areas, transhumancy meant that the resident Palestinian hamula/villagers couldn't be mentioned in connection to the ancient Jewish settlements, because they had transient presence in or near them. The ruins of Susya where the synagogue was uncovered, were settled and used by Palestinians, but, now that they have been jackbooted by the IDF out of them, we need a differential naming for the shamble of huts nearby. This, so that the 'non-ideological' eye, diligently reading up on the synagogue, can visit the area without being reminded that for a thousand or so years it had a Palestinian history and residence. Ultimately your interest as outlined above is identical to those of others participating above: establishing precise identifications of places, with a difference that you think of places as built (a 'Western' view) whereas places in that region's usage have (kilo-)metrical slippage as often as not. But encyclopedic matter is not not made of the kind of quintessential factual gradgrindism you espouse above - which ineludibly, unwittingly gels with the master Israeli/Zionist narrative,- topping off the plea with that remarkable:

is all that journalistic prose (prose? or lyrical outpourings?) about contrasting living standards between settlers and Bedouin ("goldfish ponds vs. beaten earth behind the barbed wire fence") OK for what pretends to be an encyclopedia?

Gibbon wasn't a journalist when he wrote that acute Hobbsian definition of history as:' little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind'. History is two-sided, and in this area can't avoid mentioning that the wonderful comfortable wealth and assets of the dominant ethnos of a successful state have foundations anchored in good part in the formative complacency of having vastly profited from the sacked and pillaged wealth i.e. 90% of the country's infrastructural, agricultural endowment in 1948, in typical European predator fashion. Those left to foot it are 'Bedouin', as you put it, pathetic hardscrabble nobodies not worth any mention in the master narrative. >There's no intent to imitate the 'lachrymose version of Jewish history' , so amply underscored in a thousand articles here. What you will get is a corrective to the other side of the coin, ethnical triumphalism blinkered of any desire to glimpse the anomaly in its midst. What we do here follows Marc Bloch's heuristic maxim:'Le bon historien, lui, ressemble à l'ogre de la légende. Là où il flaire la chair humaine, il sait que là est son gibier,' where 'good' historians, obviously, does not mean sifting the records to prioritize stuff with a preachy moralizing effect, - as you take it above- but a sharp eye for what really happened. Nishidani (talk) 10:08, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

My 2-cents: Israeli scholarship seem to be in absolute love with the ...bedouin. I noticed it years ago, when so many of the Arab Palestinian places in Israel were named to be "Bedouin" places, look at the history of Taibe, Galilee, Tamra, Jezreel Valley, Sandala, Israel; all established quite recently (according to Hebrew Wikipedia), and all having a history actually dating back centuries, if not millenia. The Frantzman phD thesis was very illuminating; according to him, Lajjun was just a place settled in the late 19th century. There are a zillion articles etc published about the bedouin by various Israeli institutions, but I have yet to see a single scholarly article about, say Hittin, Ijzim or Kafr Saba. Why is that, one can wonder? If scholarship is supposed to be neutral?

I call it "Bedafilia", and Armiden seem to have caught quite a severe case of it. Of course, if they were all "Bedouin", ie "no settled abode", then they could all move/be moved out of the "Land of Israel", couldn't they? So inconvenient with all those "endless repetitions of census figures", isn't it?

I think I will propose "Huldra's law" wrt Israeli scholarship: "The less importance a village had in Palestinian history, the greater the chance that it has been been studied by Israeli scholars", Huldra (talk) 21:58, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, but you'r not talking to me. Diesen Schuh ziehe ich mir nicht an. I've learned about the fluid shift between settled and the seminomadic lifestyle in the desert fringe areas from those studying the settlement patterns of the Madaba Plains in Jordan, who are doing an excellent job in close cooperation with the Jordanian Department of Antiquities (check out Madaba Plains Project). Any fact can be used ideologically, but the confirmed ones are no less true. The Susiyah example, btw, is actually undermining your interpretation of what I'm at: a very much Jewish village that possibly/probably moved, and not in one go, but -according to A. Negev- over some 150 years. Nishi, Huldra, you got me thoroughly wrong. There is no intrinsic connection between looking deeper into Middle Eastern realities, and becoming a Zionist or Religious Zionist apologist. I'm superficially informed about the history of three countries, and all of them have a past of migration and sometimes transhumance. Romanians are having a hard time countering Hungarian claims that their forefathers did inhabit Transylvania throughout much of the Middle Ages, as pastoral transhumance is closely related to the Wallachian ancestral lifestyle, and wooden architecture doesn't leave long-lasting traces. The German "Drang nach Osten", which is but one of the later Germanic migrations, brought them to Transylvania, Silesia and many other regions of Eastern Europe, which had a huge impact on modern European history, because presence creates legitimate claims. In Israel/Palestine it's even more visible because the semi-arid climate invites to fluctuation, a good FAZ correspondent, Jürgen Bremer, has defined I/P as Brückenland, bridge-country: a place of transit between three continents, where autonomous (not even independent) states can only take shape if the usually more powerful neighbours to the E (Mesopotamia, Iran, Asia Minor - whoever their rulers might be) and W (Egypt) happen to go through a period of crisis. All of humanity probably passed through here, if the 'out of Africa' theory is correct (see the Sahara pump fact, not theory). The incredibly "pacifist" Chalcolithic Tell el-Ghassul civilisation seems like a visitor from Mars in this war-prone region, with little ties to what came before or after. The Bronze Age "Canaanites" were quite a hodgepodge of ethnic groups. The two new arrivals of the C12 BCE, the Philistines with roots in the Aegean and the "spontaneous generation" of hundreds of mountain and Jordan Valley settlements which are associated with the Israelites, whether having only Canaanite roots or being a mix including Bedouin from further afield, they all came, flourished, and waned, partially or totally. The Arab conquest was just another perfect example: a tribal union coming from Arabia and taking over, with less military confrontation than both them and their enemies tried to make it look like, a huge territory, which they acculturated rather slowly but thoroughly over many centuries without having too many own settlers available to send in. The first Turks tried, but only added an element to the wider Arab-Muslim mix. The Catholic Europeans tried as well, but failed, leaving just a few al-Faranji toponyms and genes behind. The Bedouin -yes, them, and they weren't invented by Israeli historiography; read and check the facts- kept on moving in and out in the Badiya-lands between what we call now Sinai, Negev, NW Arabia, and Syria, which they've done ever since the dawn of humanity. (Unless times were more condusive of settled lifestyle, when they quickly became agriculturalists, merchants, soldiers... whatever). And "in and out" is actually wrong, since there are no instrinsic borders in the Badiya, a fact that peoples like the Nabataean tribal confederation has put to excellent use. Those who tried to set roots were more likely to be crushed, and the "post-exilic Jews", the "new Israelites" coming back with concepts adopted from a very different civilisation in Babylon, by far more inflexible and fanatic, led to a long chain of lost struggles ending in total dislocation. The Samaritans even more so, by being even more ethnocentric than the Jews, and that brought them from being numerous, wealthy and representing a regional power, to all but disappearing. What are the "Palestinians"? The result of all these myriads of ethnic groups who have come and gone. What are the Jews? Another hodgepodge, that combines an unusually long diaspora history with a deep tribal ethos, with the logical result of both traits of continuity and transformation by admixture in every regard, and becoming widely different and divergent depending on where they have been historically living. The problem with Zionism? It came too late. Kosovo is the only place after WWII where the Western or westernised world has admitted a change of borders through conflict. Every European nation state has come to be or reached its accepted borders no earlier than the 19th century, with most only after WWI or WWII. It always brought about tragedy and bloodshed of epic, traumatic and national PTSD-creating proportions. Arab Palestinians developed a national identity on a larger scale only late, quite far into the 20th century, which is perfectly normal for the region to which the concept is an imported one. What was the intention and leading thought of the Zionists of the first few generations? Refuge first and foremost, and national development à la européenne a close second. Not colonial displacement and takeover. In legal terms, the Palestinians might stand a better chance pleading national manslaughter rather than murder, if you want. Which is not covering how it further developed, because it did take a turn to the worse, as it always does. Sometimes sooner in the process, sometimes later. But there are stark moral and legal differences between periods, and between the concepts of refuge, acting under duress (Mundraub is such a good word in itself, even if it doesn't directly apply), and self-defense on the one hand, and ideological hardline maximalism on the other. If one cannot differentiate between the two, there is little to discuss. To paraphrase Churchill, the nation state is sooo 1918 (and murderous), but nobody has come up with a better idea yet. How far one can go in order to establish and preserve one, that's an ongoing discussion. And it costs lives, which always is the currency of major topics. When it's you who's affected, it's unbearable and immoral; if it's your adversary, you blame it on "c'est la vie/guerre". If you're not part of it, you might either ignore, help, or kibitz or semonise from the stands.

Some historical facts are - facts. Not mere interpretations or attempted spins. But any act in the Middle Eastern realm ends up by being ideologised and politicised. This place is not a patient; it's a sick bed. There is no way to seriously disagree with the fact that this territory has got its fair share of population fluctuation. Fact, not ideological ammunition. And there is no escaping from the fact that now it sees a struggle which Europe has seen a century (or several centuries) earlier. It's again one of those cases where Western rules and historical lessons are applied in places which are historically, not just geographically, elsewhere. It leads to self-righteous preaching and yet another form of "we know it better" arrogance. History is far from at its end even in the EU. Think Alsacia until less than a century ago, and think Belgium of today: one historical step away from Kosovo or Nagorny Karabach. Which makes a huge difference, but it's the result of a long bloody process. An Iranian friend once explained to me very convincingly that Iran has to catch up with the French Revolution, the 1948 revolution, the national and religious wars Europe has already fought, so that only after that it can come to a European-style peace and mindset. I was hoping he'd be wrong by accepting a deterministic, one-fits-all kind of historical view, but he seems to have been onto something. Am I happy about it? Do I feel good by reaching this stage in my views? Not the least, it's horrible and painful. I'm noticing it and not managing to accept it. But at least I'm not keeping my head in anyone's ideological sandpit. It's quite paralysing, other than an outburst here or there, because you can't make many friends by thinking this way. But I'm being honest with myself, or at least attempting to. Which means: everyone will keep on finding nasty agendas in my edits (if I don't manage to let go of this really bad Wiki-editing habit I've developed), pigeonholing me this or that way, or trying to and being confused by my "inconsistency". I'm an excessively curious person, want to understand things in the deepest way possible, and what I perceive as obstinate agenda-pushing makes me furious when it's shallow, or disappointed when it's coming in a more erudite or sophisticated shape. I'm still learning to "agree to disagree" (did the Americans come up with the expression?), which seems a pragmatic way to avoid head- and heartache. And it helps with making friends across real or perceived divides. But it doesn't solve any simmering problem. Arminden (talk) 14:33, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

No, Armiden, I don't find your editing "agenda-driven", and that the I/P area is indeed a "Brückenland"; I have no problem with that. However, what I am saying is that we are all influenced by what we read, even if we are not very conscious about it. Reading US media talks a lot about Palestinians — just without Palestinians, Pens and Swords and Impact of Media Bias on Coverage of Catastrophic Events:Case Study from The New York Times' Coverage of the Palestine/Israel Conflict is illuminating. I am not denying the importance of the bedouin, but when I see that virtually every Palestinian village/city in what is today Israel being called "bedouin", then I start to question: why? As for Transylvania /Hungary/Romania; I am afraid I know next to nothing about their history. Me, I live in a country which has not changed its population much since the Migration Period; (that is: except lately due to immigration: our country has changed its population more these last 20 years, than the 1500 years before: but that is a completely different story...), Huldra (talk) 22:08, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

everyone will keep on finding nasty agendas in my edits

Didn'r bookmark the page, and didn't ex.pect a reply. Thanks indeed for the excursus, most of which I agree with. I can't speak for others, but from day 1 I have never found your editing to be agenda-driven. That is, we are ineludibly all embedded in a crosshatch matrix of agendas (Foucault). That is only problematical if we find the given bed, and its quilted biases, warm and comfortable. Part of my expatriatism is hygienic, a diaspora life has a sufficient mixture of curiosity and discomfort, detachment and nostalgia all in yoked tension to enable a more fruitful engagement with disenchantment. Be well, A, and keep up the good work.Nishidani (talk) 17:27, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Arsuf=Appolonia

We have (but should replace): "The identity of Arsuf with ancient Apollonia was first noted by Clermont-Ganneau in 1876." Actually Van de Velde and Guérin both did that earlier. In VdV's memoir published 1858 he wrote (p286): "Apollonia ..., now Arsûf, a site of ruin's on the N. side and near the village el-Hàram Ibn 'Aly Aleim." In Samarie II, p375ff Guérin inspected the ruins of Arsouf 10 minutes north of Sidi A'ly Ebn-Aleim. On p378 he says that the Arabs call the ruins Kharbet Arsouf and that Arsouf was perhaps the ancient name the place had before it was called Apollonia. It also shows as "Kharbet Arsouf (Apollonia)" on his map. Zero^talk 12:37, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

I found one even earlier, but slightly confused. W. F. Lynch, in Narrative, 1849 ca. 456. The group split into one party on land and another, including Lynch, going by boat. Traveling south to north. Lynch wrote that the land party "passed the ruins of Apollonia, and, a short distance beyond, the village El Haram, with a mosque and minaret." It is the wrong way around, but may be just careless writing. Zero^talk 13:10, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

Identification of Resheph with Apollo

Originally I intended to propose changing "was assumed" in the second sentence of #1. Names to "is assumed" but looking at the paragraph I feel it needs more changes. Currently the 2nd-4th sentences are as follows: "In a long-standing suggestion, first proposed by Clermont-Ganneau in 1876, it was assumed that the Greek name was given due to the interpretatio graeca of the Canaanite deity Resheph (ršp) as Apollo (as god of the plague), suggesting that the settlement would originally have been a "Phoenician" foundation. The Semitic name ršp would then have been "restored" in the medieval Arabic toponym of Arsūf." and "Izre'el (1999) upholds this identification, suggesting that the Semitic name might have been preserved by the Aramaic-speaking Samaritan community. The Samaritan chronicle of Abu l-Fath (14th century, written in Arabic) records a toponym rʿšfyn (with ayin). Izre'el (1999) considers the possibility of identifying this toponym with the Arabic Arsūf, assuming that the ayin may derive from a mater lectionis used in Samaritan Aramaic orthography.".

On the identification the Hebrew article has "האוכלוסייה הנוכרית בעלת הנטיות ההלניות ... הביאה לשינוי שם האתר מ"אַרְסוּף" (שם שמי) ל"אַפּוֹלוֹנְיָה" (שם יווני). שני האלים רשף ואפולו היו מזוהים זה עם זה." translated by Google as "The Hellenic-leaning foreign population ... changed the site name from "Arsuf" ( my name is) to "Apollonia" ( Greek name ). The two gods Reshef and Apollo were identified with each other.".

Perhaps the paragraph should be changed to "It is assumed, following a suggestion first proposed by Clermont-Ganneau in 1876 and upheld by Izre'el (1999), that the Greek name was given due to the interpretatio graeca of the Canaanite deity Resheph (ršp) as Apollo ... The Semitic name ršp would then have been "restored" in the medieval Arabic toponym of Arsūf. Izre'el (1999) considers the possibility of identifying this toponym with the Arabic Arsūf, assuming that the ayin may derive from a mater lectionis used in Samaritan Aramaic orthography, suggesting that the Semitic name might have been preserved by the Aramaic-speaking Samaritan community. The Samaritan chronicle of Abu l-Fath (14th century, written in Arabic) records a toponym rʿšfyn (with ayin)."

Since #2.1 Antiquity includes "there is no evidence that there was a settlement prior to the Persian period (ca. 500 BCE)" the phrase "There is no archaeological evidence for a settlement prior to the Persian period" doesn't appear necessary in #1. Mcljlm (talk) 14:32, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

References