Authors: Eric H. Cline
ISBN-13: 9780472031207, ISBN-10: 0472031201
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Date Published: November 2005
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Eric H. Cline is Associate Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology in the Department of Classical and Semitic Languages and Literatures at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on the ancient world, including The Battles of Armageddon (University of Michigan Press, 2000). He has participated in seventeen seasons of excavations and surveys in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus, Greece, Crete, and the United States, and is currently a Senior Staff Archaeologist at the ongoing excavations of Megiddo. A former Fulbright scholar, Dr. Cline has advanced degrees from Dartmouth College, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
A sweeping history of four thousand years of struggle for control of one city
Cline, an associate professor of ancient history and archeology at George Washington University, begins his history of Jerusalem with mythical, biblical and archeological clues to its past, and the Roman histories of Josephus. Cline's narrative thread is the battles over control of a dusty village that took on increasing emotional content as it became a contested religious site. Cline claims "assimilation, annihilation and acculturation" through 10 empires and occupancies have left no one in the area today with "a legitimate pedigree definitively extending back to any of the original inhabitants." Of the alleged 118 conflicts over Jerusalem, few lacked a religious basis. Until 1917, Cline shows, Westerners controlled Jerusalem for less than a century. Beyond the Solomonic years, Jews have controlled the old city only since 1967. Perhaps no fragment of global real estate has been so volatile over so long a history. Despite sanguinary, even horrific detail from past memoirs and narratives, Cline's retelling is flat and repetitious, and the numerous references to Saddam Hussein, physically absent from this history, overreach in attempting immediate relevance. While a useful, well-annotated, textbookish guide to Jerusalem's violent past and present, it will not replace Karen Armstrong's stylish Jerusalem. One City, Three Faiths (1996). 10 color photos not seen by PW, 24 maps. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Introduction : a lonely ship on a hostile sea : Jerusalem under siege | 1 | |
Ch. 1 | A rock and a high place : David and the Jebusites, 1000 BCE | 11 |
Ch. 2 | The end of the beginning : Nebuchadnezzar and the neo-Babylonians, 586 BCE | 36 |
Ch. 3 | Oil upon troubled waters : the Maccabean rebellion, 165 BCE | 68 |
Ch. 4 | In blood and fire : the First and Second Jewish Revolts, 70 and 135 CE | 96 |
Ch. 5 | The "holy house" : the arrival of Islam, 638 CE | 136 |
Ch. 6 | For God, gold, and glory : the crusaders and Saladin, 1099 and 1187 CE | 164 |
Ch. 7 | The sultan and the city : Selim I and the Ottomans, 1516 CE | 201 |
Ch. 8 | Peace to their ashes, honor to their memory : Allenby and the Allied Forces, 1917 CE | 235 |
Ch. 9 | Jerusalem of gold : the Arab-Israeli wars, 1948 and 1967 CE | 267 |
Ch. 10 | Speak tenderly to Jerusalem : the Intifadas and beyond | 299 |