(April 6, 2013 at 11:46 am)Minimalist Wrote: Archaeological surveys of Judah in the 10th century confirm only a handful of small villages/hamlets - on the order of a dozen or so - and an economy which was based on herding. The estimate for the total population of Judah is on the order of 20,000. One might reasonably speculate that the primary reason the area was not overrun by some conqueror is that it was poor and of no value to anyone. People like to claim it was "strategically located" but this is really not true. It is inland, well away from the coast, and the most vital stretch of real estate went through Philistia towards Megiddo where the trade routes were located. Judah wasn't worth shit until it began to build up....and then it became a rather hapless target.
Philistia and Judah are bible places. They did not exist.
I have no idea why you would speculate the region was not ruled by some known city-state. The New Kingdom of Egypt ruled the eastern Med up to the Euphrates and there is some evidence of an Egyptian garrison at Jerusalem. The major land trade route in this region was from the Red Sea to the Euphrates dominated by the Naboteans of Petra fame. This ran east of the Jordan.
The Red Sea was the important sea trade route for Egypt before the Med got civilized enough to be worth trading. They built a fair bit of a canal connecting it with the Nile. It was their gateway to Yemen and on to India. Our "the world began with Greece" view is far from accurate. The original civilized world was India, Iran, Mesopotamia and Egypt. Civilization in the Med doesn't really begin until Mycenae but then later the Greeks are still attributing everything they do to the Egyptians.
Anyway back to Jerusalem the pre-Hadrian renovation had pyramids and sphinxes as the common decorative motif. The Maccabean revolt was in favor of Egyptian rule even if Ptolemaic Greek. And getting back to some obvious things Amun and Yahweh share enough obvious characteristics that they are clearly the same god. And there are still Jews around the world that wear forelocks in imitation of the curly horns of Amun's ram head.
As to estimating population the near insurmountable problem is defining the borders of the region back then. And for the hill country knowing what the regions might have been or what they were called. The political organization in those days was city-state. It had to be a real city as villages by definition would not have had specialized armies and such. All of which gets us back to village/city and population being an important consideration.
A settlement has to have a relatively large population and defensive walls and food and water storage to survive a siege. Of course a settlement might have been enough to be called a city-state but if we don't have the evidence there is nothing to talk about.
Quote:Anything is possible but Herodotus was at best a very small child while Xerxes' army was marching into Greece and we have to assume that his history dates from a later period when the Persians had been defeated and expelled. Therefore, wherever the number came from, Herodotus' use of it sounds more like Greek propaganda ( Look what WE did!) than anything else.
Herodotus from long before Alexander. He claims to have visited and looks like he did. His style is that of the kind of person you want as a dinner guest. He clearly mixes observed facts with amusing tales he learned while traveling. The kind of tales one hopes a dinner guest will tell. Thucydides didn't like the dinner guest style and did a version of history much more like our own. Perhaps Herodotus should be considered the first anthologist instead of first historian. Anyway hardly important to the digression.
As to the importance of the hill country, you recount a hinterland, more hillbilly than civilized. As to my issue of the origin of the OT stories we can jump ahead to Alexander. His conquests are well chronicled from two sources. He did not conquer Jerusalem.
That means it was ruled by some city he did conquer. This was so "embarrassing" to Judean claims of being an ancient people that Josephus invented a tale of Alexander visiting Jerusalem and praising it ruling priests and their wisdom and they donate a few hundred chariots to his campaign. Amusing but desperate.
This leaves us with a Jerusalem far different from religious tradition. No surprise there. It also raises issues of how things worked in those days. Although Persian rule is viewed as despotic and Alexander's success partly attributed to local support of him as liberator as happened in Egypt he had to conquer most of the cities on the eastern Med. They were apparently resisting for themselves separate from getting rid of the Persians. Yet from way earlier we find Herodotus naming them and the their three regions, Syria, Palestine and Cyprus, as a tributary unit. I forget his term but sort of like the three were a single province for tax purposes.
As to Jerusalem, as there is nothing significant found in bibleland from even the Greek period including inscriptions the idea it was a other than agricultural is untenable. In all the region only a city called Samaria and assumed to be that of Omri shows any signs of local wealth and that from being a trade center.
