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Tayma Painted Ware and the Hejaz Iron Age Ceramic Tradition

1988; Routledge; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1179/lev.1988.20.1.197

1756-3801

Garth Bawden, Christopher Edens,

Ancient Egypt and Archaeology

Tayma long ranked among the important cities of pre-Islamic Arabia, not least for its brief tenure as the royal residence of the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus in the mid-6th century B.C. Together with Dedan (al'Ula), Tayma formed an important staging point in the western Arabian overland trade of the 1st millennium B.C., a geographical and economic reality which goes far toward accounting for the importance of both centers to the northern participants of that trade. Despite the apparent importance of Tayma to the history of both Syro-Palestine and Mesopotamia of the 1st millennium B.C., comparatively little reliable information about the city appears in scholarly literature. Until very recently, published knowledge of Tayma came from accounts of travellers and antiquarian explorers, the latter establishing the invaluable corpus of pre-Islamic inscriptions of the Hejaz. Beyond recalling the fundamental works of Huber and Euting in the last quarter of the 19th century, ofjaussen and Savignac in the first decades of the present century, and of Phil by more recently, the history of these explorations or the interpretation of their findings need not be reviewed here, as this task has been accomplished in numerous places (see e.g. Grohmann 1963). More recent scholarly undertakings at Tayma have largely been an extension of the previous pattern, with focus largely on epigraphical finds, a result both of professional inclination and of constraints in time and access on more ambitious projects (e.g. the Winnett and Reed explorations and the R. Stiehl visits of the 1960's). One project of a somewhat different nature, and of greater significance to the present inquiry, was S. A. Rashid's visit to Tayma and concomitant work on museum collections in the late 1960's and early 1970's, about which he published several papers, including one dealing with the painted pottery of the site (Rashid 1980). This myopic approach was changed, if only in a preliminary way, by the 1979 Tayma project, sponsored by the Saudi Arabian Department of Antiquities, which attempted to construct a culture historical framework for the city by a field program of extensive site survey combined with intensive examination of selected architectural units. The results of this field study are presented as a preliminary report in the Saudi journal Atial (Bawden et al. Ig80). Since that time several further discussions of these results have appeared (Bawden 1g8 I