The "Stelenreihen" at Assur, Tell Halaf, and Maṣṣēbôt

Abstract

In 1912 Macalister published the 100-foot long line of enormous, rough uninscribed standing stones at Gezer in Palestine. The next year, Andrae published the strange, double row of stelae, some rough, some uninscribed, mostly very large, which he had found at Assur. The similarity between the two installations was immediately noted and for over sixty years the Stelenreihen at Assur have been cited in the many discussions of the maṣṣēbôt of Palestine. The singular importance of the Assur stelae lies in the fact that some of them were inscribed, whereas the Palestinian stones were not. The Assur inscriptions tell us that the stones represented people, and Eduard Meyer and others believed that the Gezer stones probably had the same meaning. Obviously, in order to project the meaning of the Assur stelae on the Gezer stones, one assumption had to be made: that the people in the two areas were practising identical customs. Curiously enough, this basic assumption has yet to be proved. In fact, many later scholars have taken the Assur stones to be merely one example of a wide-spread custom of setting up plain stones. The Assur stelae have been lumped together with the ever increasing number of plain stones, those found singly as well as those discovered in clusters, with Biblical evidence for maṣṣēbôt, with Punic stelae, and even with Greek hero cults. Far from considering the Assur inscriptions as the determining factor in interpreting uninscribed stones elsewhere, meanings drawn from this wide body of comparative material have been imposed on the Stelenreihen.

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