That, in a nutshell, is the Obama administration’s “Fast and Furious” program, whose development, bloody results, and ongoing cover–up are comprehensively documented and presented by investigative journalist Katie Pavlich in her new book, Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and its Shameless Cover–Up (Regnery, 2012). In the book’s ten chapters and 222 pages (of which nearly sixty are appendices and meticulously cited endnotes), Pavlich makes the case that the Obama administration’s “gunwalking” operation “wasn’t a ‘botched’ program, [but] a calculated and lethal decision” by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, with the full knowledge and assent of the Departments of Justice and of Homeland Security, “to purposely place thousands of guns into the hands of ruthless criminals” (p. 162).

The plan was simple – and both clearly and blatantly stupid (Pavlich quotes ATF agent Peter Forcelli as saying, “I can’t think of a single, logical strategy as to why [Fast and Furious] would have worked” [p. 47]). ATF agents like Hope MacAllister, the lead case agent for Fast and Furious, approached Phoenix–area gun stores and “requested” their cooperation with a program that would allow for the monitoring, tracking, and (ostensibly) prosecuting of gun buyers for deadly Mexican drug cartels (pp. 46–47; as the ATF has the ability to pull gun shops’ licenses, this was far more of an involuntary deputization than a simple request for assistance). Cameras were installed in the cooperating gun shops, and ATF agents watched as “straw purchasers,” or cartel gun mules, made massive firearms purchases in cash.

From this point, the ATF (and its DOJ masters) planned to track the purchased guns to their end users, thereby gaining insight into the cartels and gaining the ability to do far more damage to these violent organizations than they would have been able to simply by arresting each “straw purchaser” they caught. Unfortunately, the Mexican government was intentionally kept in the dark, and none of the decision–makers at DOJ or ATF evidently considered the consequences or repercussions that would result from allowing thousands of weapons, from 9mm pistols to massive 50-caliber BMG longrifles, “walk” across America’s southern border and directly into the hands of some of the deadliest people in the western hemisphere.

THOUGH U.S. ATTORNEY Dennis Burke and Assistant U.S. Attorney Emory Hurley – both employees of Obama-appointed Attorney General Eric Holder, who has had an antagonistic relationship with the truth regarding Fast and Furious (pp. 129, 132–3, 150, 154, etc.) – ensured that cartel purchases from involuntarily deputized Phoenix gun shops remained monitored, they actively prevented agents from “interdicting weapons” that were en route to Mexico, and the relevant criminal cases were dropped as soon as the suspects and their newly–acquired weapons crossed the border (p. 42).

As dealers began voicing concern to the ATF over the guns the agency had tasked them with selling to cartel-related buyers, they were reassured that “guns weren’t being sent over the border and into Mexico” (pp. 56-58), and the DOJ publicly claimed that ATF “has never knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to suspected gunrunners” (p. 81). In one case, a cartel buyer requested five times the number of 9mm firearms that a gun store had in stock. When the dealer reached out to the ATF to request guidance, he was told to order the additional guns and make the sale.

Fast and Furious weapons began to turn up at murder scenes throughout Mexico and in the southern U.S., as anybody but the ATF and DOJ decision-makers could have predicted (a map is provided in image 4, between pp. 104–105; these include the murder of Agent Brian Terry and of the brother of a Mexican Attorney General). The Mexican government had purposely been kept in the dark abot the program, and though the revelation of its existence and its scope caused an outrage, Obama’s State Department staunched Mexico’s outcry by threatening to cut off $500 million in U.S. anti-cartel aid if criticism of Fast and Furious did not cease (pp. 110–111). At the same time, DOJ was issuing gag orders regarding the program (p. 101) and leaders within ATF were doing their best to intimidate and ostracize whistleblowers (pp. 115–121). Further, instead of focusing on cartel buyers and drug–related gun violence, the DOJ railed against American gun shops, accusing them of serving as “the gun locker of the Mexican drug cartels” (p. 43) and declaring that “Mexican Drug Lords go shopping for war weapons in Arizona” (p. 71) – without, as Pavlich notes, “mention[ing] that the gun shops that had sold these guns would not have done so had it not been on orders from the ATF” (ibid).

In addition to demonstrating the intentional nature of ATF’s gunwalking program, and the lunacy of those involved in planning and executing it, Pavlich also records the descent of that agency from enforcement of the law to bureaucratic nonsensicality (a theme begun in the introduction, written by ATF Special Agent Jay Dobyns [pp. 1–8]). For example, on page 43, she conveys Peter Forcelli’s recounting of a 2010 case concerning a suspect who was “believed…to be sending grenades out of the [U.S.], trafficking parts for grenades into Mexico, and then building the explosives for the cartels.” Emory Hurley’s directive to the agents: “[D]o not let [the suspect] leave the country, but if you catch him leaving the country, we won’t prosecute him.” The suspect, Jean Baptiste Kingery, was eventually caught attempting to cross the U.S.–Mexico border “with grenade parts and components packed in his tires,” but after offering “a full–blown confesion…that he had been making grenades for the cartels and smuggling explosives over an international border,” Hurley and Dennis Burke “dismissed the case and Kingery went free” (ibid).

THE PROSE IS slightly clunky at times, and the book’s organization could be improved. The latter is most apparent with regard to the proximity between the presentation of evidence about Fast and Furious, and the author’s efforts to draw a direct line from the operation to purported efforts by President Obama and Attorney General Holder to severely curtail gun rights in America. This is not to say that the subject isn’t relevant to the overall narrative; in fact, it is very important to consider the evidence Pavlich presents in support of her assertion that, “Under Eric Holder, the ATF was deputized to change the nation’s gun laws by putting in place a shadowy operation designed to prove a falsehood: that weapons sold by U.S. gun shops, especially ‘assault weapons,’ are the cause of Mexico’s drug violence. By creating public outrage, President Obama, Eric Holder, and other administration officials, all with longstanding records of hostility against the Second Amendment, hoped to reinstate the assault weapons ban, which had been one of their early, but failed, political goals” (p. 154). However, while Pavlich demonstrates the existence of these efforts, the overall narrative might have been better served by relegating commentary on them to a chapter or two at the end of the book.

Additionally, the book’s presentation as a largely continuous narrative actually masks some of its most outrageous revelations about Fast and Furious and its cover–up. The author occasionally drops bombshells in the middle of pages and paragraphs, but continues on with the narrative without allowing the reader a moment to fully absorb their impact. For example, on page 55, Pavlich notes in passing that “On June 10, 2010, as complaints from ATF agents in Mexico escalated, Hope MacAllister asked the National Tracing Center to hold off on tracing gun that were being recovered in Mexico. The [NTC] waited for instructions on when to resume tracing the guns. They never received such orders. It appeared the Phoenix office did not want the Mexican government or ATF agents in Mexico to know that so many of the guns were traceable to gun shops cooperating with Fast and Furious.” Given the fact that the entire program was based on tracing the firearms that had been sold by forcibly–deputized gun shops and allowed by the ATF to walk over the Mexican border, the revelation that MacAllister ordered an indefinite halt to the tracing of these guns is a major bombshell, and was almost certainly worthy of more attention in the text than it received (the narrative continues immediately after that paragraph with a shift to David Voth’s claims of the “great progress” being made by the operation).

However, these minor shortcomings do not do much to take away from the book’s purpose or its overall impact, which should be to open the general public’s eyes to the enormity of this scandal, and to force media to acknowledge it despite their best efforts not to since it became public knowledge nearly two years ago. The book closes with another bombshell (this time in summation). Pavlich writes, “There are still 1,400 Fast and Furious guns missing, and ATF agents are not actively trying to track them down. Ten thousand rounds of ammunition were sold to cartel–linked straw buyers under the watch of the ATF. Eight hundred of the original 2,500 weapons sold through Fast and Furious have already been linked to criminal activity. We can be certain this is only the beginning” (p. 154).

The media have largely been silent on Fast and Furious since the public became aware of the operation in the wake of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder in December 2010. The eye–opening case presented in this book should not only force the media to do their jobs and pay attention, but it should also serve as an instrument of information for the voting public as a whole during this campaign season, as the executive who is ultimately responsible for this scandal and those who implemented it (and covered it up) is actively seeking an electoral mandate for a second term in office.

Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and its Shameless Cover–Up, by Katie Pavlich (ISBN 978-1-59698-321-2; 222 pages; $27.95), is published by Regnery.

Comprehensiveness “within reason” is, of course, a subjective matter, and there will certainly be students and scholars of ancient Anatolia who find that their specific area of interest has been given short shrift.  A clear example of this is the Achaemenid period, which lacks its own chapter; another, from the point of view of the present reviewer, is the unfortunately brief (though expertly summarized) treatment of the dynamic Late Bronze Age in Western Anatolia (pp. 363-375).

However, none of this is meant to suggest that this is not a rich, useful, or incredibly informative work.  It is each of those in spades, with top scholars in various facets of Anatolian studies offering valuable summaries of the subtopics they were tasked with treating, and offering perhaps even more valuable bibliographies of each topic, which can be utilized by the scholar seeking to conduct further reading and research.  Some notes on the volume follow, though, like the book being addressed here, this review will necessarily reflect only a hopefully representative selection of its overall contents due to space constraints.

The volume is presented in five parts: The Archaeology of Anatolia: Background and Definitions; Chronology and Geography; Philological and Historical Topics; Thematic and Specific Topics; and Key Sites.  Part 1 serves as an introduction to the volume, addressing Anatolia through the writings of ancient (foreign) observers and reviewing both the archaeology of the peninsula and the chronology and terminology relied on for the study of the region.

Part 2, “Chronology and Geography,” presents Anatolia’s history in five chronological parts (Prehistory, the Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Ages, and the Iron Age), each of which deals with multiple geographic regions.  Each chapter begins with a formulaic statement of its geographic and chronological boundaries, a very helpful preface for those who may not be as familiar with the nuances of Anatolian geography as the authors.  Though many of the chapters in this section contain maps (e.g. 7, 10, 11, and 17), nearly all would be improved by them, as aids to those geographically unfamiliar readers’ effort to identify those boundaries articulated by Part 1’s authors.

In Part 3, “Philology and Historical Topics,” Richard Beal’s “Hittite Anatolia: A Political History” (pp. 579–603) stands out as a wonderfully organized chronological synopsis of Hittite history, with a particular emphasis on the Old and New (“Empire”) Hittite Periods of the Late Bronze Age.  Arranged in linear fashion by ruler, this chapter may be as effective a brief history of LBA Hatti as can be found, particularly with regard to the deeds of the kings of Ḫatti and the palace intrigue that frequently beset them.  However, this chapter also contains some surprising – though not critical – assumptions and inaccuracies.  Among these are Beal’s pronouncement that the location of the Mycenaean-related polity known as Aḫḫiyawa – a hotly-debated subject among scholars – was Miletos (p. 593; see Bryce, pp. 368-72 of this volume, for a more measured treatment of this topic); and Beal’s decision to rename the ‘Sea Peoples’ who plagued the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age according to toponyms with which there is no clear evidence of their association (e.g., Sherden as Sardinians, Shekelesh as Sicilians, Teresh as Etruscans, etc., pp. 594–5; on the latter, cf. Beckman, p. 522 of this volume).  A similar assumption is made in Ilya Yakubovich’s otherwise excellent chapter on “Luwian and the Luwians” (pp. 534-547), with the author’s treatment of J. David Hawkins’s re-reading of the Luwian toponym “Wadasatani” as “Palastin” as definitive, and with his connection of this broad Iron Age Syrian kingdom with the Philistines of the southern coastal plain of Canaan, despite a severe paucity of evidence (p. 538; Hawkins, “Cilicia, the Amuq, and Aleppo,” NEA 72.4 (2009): 164-73).

Other chapters in this section deal very well with linguistic and philological issues. Renowned Hittite scholar Gary Beckman provides a concise overview of the Hittite language and its basic grammar (pp. 517-533), and Yakubovich’s aforementioned chapter on Luwian is an excellent introduction to that language and script and its history.  As Urartian (Paul Zimansky, pp. 548-59) and Phrygian (Lynn Roller, pp. 560-78) are also dealt with in this section, it is somewhat puzzling why H. Craig Melchert’s chapter on Indo-European, which is clearly relevant to Anatolian philology, was included in Part 4 (“Thematic and Specific Topics”), instead of being addressed in Part 3.  A fuller treatment of Hattic, the non-Indo-European precursor to Hittite, would also have been helpful, as this language and its people receive only the most oblique treatment within the volume.  The most noteworthy references to Hattic and the Hattian people are made in conjunction with discussions of Kültepe–Kaneš, but are unfortunately little more than passing mentions.

Part 4, “Thematic and Specific Topics,” is subdivided into two sections: “Intersecting Cultures, Migrations, Invasions, and Travelers,” and “From Pastoralists to Empires: Critical Issues.”  Included in these are a chapter by Peter Jablonka on Troy’s role in regional and international commerce (pp. 717-733), a chapter by James Muhly on metallurgy and the use of metals (pp. 858-876), and two chapters on the Hittite empire – one by Claudia Glatz dealing with archaeological evidence (pp. 877-899), and one by Theo van den Hout dealing with the textual evidence (pp. 900-916).  Both of these chapters serve as excellent complements to Beal’s aforementioned chapter on the political history of Hittite Anatolia.

Part 5, “Key Sites,” addresses in greater detail a number of sites that were also treated, in varying detail, elsewhere in the volume.  The history of research, current state of knowledge, archaeological evidence, and other information about each of these sites is systematically laid out in this section’s eleven chapters.  Just what sites qualify as “key” in as expansive a geographic and temporal range as that covered by this volume is, of course, a matter of debate, and the editors acknowledge it as “one of the most difficult choices we faced” (p. 5).  In the end, McMahon and Steadman write, “We settled on a set of criteria to guide our choices: long-term, established, and ongoing projects (e.g., Gordion, Çatal Höyük, Sardis, [and] Kültepe–Kaneš); shorter-term, completed, and carefully-excavated sites (e.g., Titriş Höyük and Ilıpınar); and projects begun in the past decade or two that are subjects of continued research (e.g., Göbekli Tepe, Arslantepe, Ayanis, and Kaman–Kalehöyük)” (ibid).  Additionally, Dirk Paul Mieleke contributes a chapter to this section on five “Key Sites of the Hittite Empire” (pp. 1031-1044).  Though necessarily brief, this chapter touches on Boğazköy–Ḫattuša, Ortaköy–Šapinuwa, Alaca Höyük, Kuşaklı–Šarišša, and Maşat Höyük–Tapıkka in enough detail to be valuable to those seeking a primer on the current state of research and knowledge on these sites.

Many of these sites are dealt with elsewhere in the volume – in the case of Kültepe–Kaneš and Boğazköy–Ḫattuša, for example, many times – but the overlap is far less problematic than the lack of cross-references, which are only sometimes included in mentions of topics treated elsewhere in the volume.  One example of such an omission is in Mieleke’s section on Alaca Höyük, which references the Sphinx Gate and provides a line drawing of this impressive entranceway (p. 1040), but which does not draw the reader’s attention to the inclusion of a photograph of this fixture in Jürgen Seeher’s chapter on “The Plateau: The Hittites” earlier in the volume (p. 380).  The book’s index is helpful, but in the specific case of the Sphinx Gate illustration, only Seeher’s figure is listed as such, while Mieleke’s written mention of the Gate – but not his illustration – is included in the index.

Fikri Kulakoğlu’s chapter on the indisputably important site of Kültepe–Kaneš, “A Second Millennium B.C.E. Trading Center on the Central Plateau” (pp. 1012-1030) provides a detailed complement to Cécile Michel’s excellent overview of “The Kārum Period on the Plateau” (pp. 313-336), though his nearly word-for-word description of the Lower City of Kaneš as “encircl[ing] Kültepe mound from the north, east, and south in the shape of a crescent,” and “the west of the mound [as] marshland” on both pages 1014 and 1020 suggests a slight editing oversight.

It is important to note that these critiques are not meant to suggest that this volume is neither well-presented nor useful.  The chapters are generally of very high quality, and the information presented in them will be valuable to students and scholars alike who wish to engage with topics of Anatolian history, archaeology, and prehistory for the first time or as a part of ongoing research, or who wish to catch up on the present state of the field.  It is because this volume is destined to be so heavily used by students and scholars (and because its price tag will largely limit its distribution to libraries) that the relatively low-quality cover and binding are a concern.  The reviewer’s copy began to tear slightly along the spine simply from the normal wear and tear of one person’s reading and shelving – a fact which suggests that copies of this book in University libraries will have difficulty surviving the wear and tear put on them by hundreds of students and by the passage of time.  However, though the quality of the book’s cover is not commensurate with its price, the contents of the volume will make The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia a valuable addition to any scholarly collection.

The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia, edited by Sharon R. Steadman and Gregory McMahon (ISBN 978–0–19–537614–2; 1174 pages; $175) is published by Oxford University Press.

As the title suggests, this paper deals primarily with the Sherden.   However, because this group is probably best known for their participation in the ‘Sea Peoples’ raids on Egypt in the late 13th and early 12th centuries, I believe that it is necessary to take a step back and address some fundamental issues with ‘Sea Peoples’ studies as a whole before addressing the Sherden in isolation.

The incursions of the ‘Sea Peoples’ are not a new topic. The best-known member of these heterogeneous and shifting coalitions of foreigners is, of course, the Peleset.  This is due in part to their identification with the biblical Philistines, the chief antagonist of the early Israelites and one of the most vilified peoples of the Old Testament; and it is due in part to the bright light that archaeology has been able to shine on their culture.  Extensive excavation at several of the Philistines’ major cities on the southern coastal plain of Canaan has resulted in the reconstruction of a Philistine material culture “package,” or “template,” which has allowed scholars to trace the arrival, acculturation, and eventual assimilation this ‘Sea Peoples’ group into Iron Age Canaan.

Unfortunately, such clear identification of a single “Sea People’s” material culture, when made in the absence of similar discoveries for the other groups who fall under this banner, has been a double-edged sword for the study of the ‘Sea Peoples’ as a whole, and for the study of these groups as individuals.

The clear association of Mycenaean IIIC:1 pottery with the Philistines, for example, and their other clear ties to the Aegean, have led in many cases to the assumption that Mycenaean IIIC:1 pottery and other Aegean traits would serve as the “X marking the spot” where other ‘Sea Peoples’ groups lived or settled.  This problem was excellently illustrated by Ayelet Gilboa in her timely paper on “Fragmenting the Sea Peoples,” in which she described the search for evidence of Sikil (or Tjeker) culture at Tel Dor:

“Bets were laid. What would the Sikil material culture look like? Jokingly someone said that Sikil pottery would be something akin to that of Philistia – but painted in purple and yellow. This was the sort of expectation, to find something analogous to Philistia, but slightly different, as befits another Sea People. It seems that this is still what some scholars expect to be uncovered along the southern Levantine coast north of Philistia, something similar, but with a different ethnic tinge.”

This is an excellent illustration of the downside of the fantastically complete picture that literature and archaeology alike have painted for us of the Philistines.  Because we lack an even remotely comparable level of information about their fellow ‘Sea Peoples,’ the Cypro-Aegean template of Mycenaean IIIC:1 pottery, cylindrical loomweights, intramural infant burials, cultic figurines, urban imposition, and other attributes of intrusive Philistine civilization has necessarily been extended to their fellow invaders, despite there being little clear reason to associate these traits with other ‘Sea Peoples.’

Exhibit A of this problem with regard to the Sherden is Akko, on the northern coast of Israel.  The Onomasticon of Amenope, which names the Sherden, Sikils, and Peleset, as well as Ashkelon, Ashdod, and Gaza, has been used in concert with the Report of Wen-Amon to place the Philistines in the southern coastal plain of Canaan, the Sikils at Tel Dor, and the Sherden at Akko.  However, this cryptic text does not offer a single, clearly directional reading.  Though almost certainly not the case, it could just as easily be assigning the Sherden to Ashkelon, the Sikils to Ashdod, and the Philistines to Gaza as anything else.  In fact, given the absence of Akko and Dor from Amenope’s list of toponyms, such a reading may even be more likely than the traditional interpretation of this text – though I should once again be clear that I am not advocating any such re-reading!

At Akko, the presumed relationship between Aegean culture and the non-Philistine ‘Sea Peoples’ led the great Israeli archaeologist Moshe Dothan to find support for a Sherden presence in a change in inhabitation at the end of the Late Bronze IIb, and in the discovery of a small amount of locally-produced Aegean-style pottery at the site.  However, further analysis of the Akko material, to be published soon by Aaron Brody and Michal Artzy, has found insufficient evidence for an intrusive presence at the site in the Early Iron Age to support this.

It is at this point, I think, that we should take a step back and reassess our way of thinking about the ‘Sea Peoples,’ both as a coalition and as individual groups.  Why, for example, should we expect Aegean-style material culture at a Sherden settlement?  The Philistine material culture is undeniably associated with Cyprus and the Aegean – but does this fact, and our deep knowledge of this single group of ‘Sea People,’ necessitate our forcing a Philistine Paradigm on the Sherden, Sikils, Denyen, Shekelesh, Ekwesh, Weshesh, and Lukka?

I would suggest that it does not.  This suggestion, though, requires a difficult admission: that no effective material culture template has been established for the Sherden, in large part, because we simply don’t know with any real degree of accuracy where they settled, particularly outside of Egypt, and because we wouldn’t know what to look for if we did.  As nature abhors a vacuum, and as scholarship abhors an absence of evidence and answers, the Cypro-Aegean Philistine Paradigm has largely – and naturally – filled this void to date.

This isn’t to say that there have not been some creative attempts made to deal with this problem.  Included among these are the attempt by Jonathan Tubb to connect the Sherden to the Jordan Valley, based not on pottery, but on double-pithos burials and evidence for metalworking, and the attempt by Adam Zertal, based on the perceived structure of a “city wall,” to place Sherden soldiers of the Pharaoh in a Sardinian-style proto-nuraghe in central Israel.  I refer to these efforts as “flawed” because each clearly requires the assumption of a number of facts not in evidence in order to be accepted; but I consider them very worthy because they represent rare attempts to break at least one group of ‘Sea Peoples’ free of what we may call – without too much hyperbole – the Tyranny of the Philistine Paradigm.

Having reached this point, I feel that it is important to note that even speaking of these “groups” as such carries with it its own inherent problem: namely, the connotation that a group like the Sherden participated in its entirety in the events with which they are associated, and that its members moved and settled as a single unit, in a single location or area.  Now, nobody would agree with that statement on its face, or consciously assume it as fact; but, discussions of the Sherden as having settled at Akko, on Sardinia, or anywhere else have a tendency to carry that implicit message.

In light of this fact, it bears reiterating that the only secure evidence we possess for Sherden inhabitation from the 12th century B.C. onward places them not in Canaan or the Central Mediterranean, but in Egypt.  Textual and iconographic evidence paints a clear picture of their martial affinities – perhaps at the expense of other important but currently unknown characteristics – and of at least some of their involvement and participation in the battles of Ramesses II and III.  These “Sherden of the Strongholds” or “Sherden of the Great Fortresses,” as those who fought for the Pharaoh are frequently referred to, appear in depictions of the battle of Qadesh (and perhaps of the storming of Dapour), and can be seen throughout Ramesses III’s mortuary temple at Medinet Habu.

There is no question that the Sherden who joined the Egyptian army were only a small part of the foreign whole.  This fact is reinforced by multiple pharaohs’ claims to have defeated, captured, and conscripted members of this group, and it is also reinforced by the epithet “Sherden of the Sea,” which is used exclusively to refer to those Sherden who remained outside of Egyptian control.  The only captioned image of a Sherden in the Ramesside corpus, a captured prince portrayed at Medinet Habu, bears this moniker, as did those warriors who fought against Ramesses II and Merneptah in the 13th century.  This people’s endurance as a foe of Egypt is also supported by the need to claim them as a conquest in Ramesses III’s posthumous res gestae, the Papyrus Harris I, despite their omission from the inscriptions at Medinet Habu.

The makeup of a prospective expeditionary force in the Papyrus Anastasi I – 60 percent of which is foreigners, nearly 20 percent of whom are Sherden – suggests that, following Qadesh, the role of Sherden warriors in the Egyptian army evolved from a small, elite Pharaonic guard to a standard expeditionary component.  While this may mean that more Sherden had been captured in battle and pressed into the service of the Pharaoh, or that more soldiers of fortune had migrated to Egypt in search of martial opportunity, it may also mean that the number of Sherden in the pharaoh’s service had grown as a result of permanent migration, intermarriage, and reproduction by those who had previously arrived in Egypt – though it should be noted that no clear evidence exists for their participation in the “Great Migrations” depicted at Medinet Habu.

Papyrus Harris I and Papyrus Wilbour provide evidence for the aforementioned permanent migration and reproduction at a slightly later date, with their references to Sherden “towns,” “wives,” and “children,” and to the allotment of land, in the Faiyum region and southward, to 109 Sherden, “standard–bearers of the Sherden,” and “retainers of the Sherden,” all of whom at this point bear what Sir Alan Gardiner called “good Egyptian names.”  Likewise, Papyrus Amiens mentions estates established for the Sherden in Upper Egypt’s tenth nome about this time.

Notably, Papyrus Wilbour references Sherden-owned land being handed down across multiple generations – or, at least, to land belonging to deceased individuals that is being “cultivated by the hand of [their] children.” This not only shows multigenerational residency, but it demonstrates that at least some Sherden settling in Middle Egypt came into possession of territory through hereditary tenure – a counterpoint to the suggestion that land was provided in exchange for ongoing military service.

Additionally, this text makes a clear distinction between land ownership and indentured servitude, as the references to individuals – including Sherden – living on and cultivating land belonging to others are clearly distinguished from references to the landowners themselves.  These distinctions are significant because they provide evidence for different social statuses, and perhaps different levels of integration, enjoyed by Sherden individuals within Egyptian society, as some were either forced or allowed to work land belonging to non–Sherden owners, while others among them not only owned land, but were evidently able to pass it along to their children.  It is worth noting that the lone first millennium mention of the Sherden, a dedicatory stela from Tell Minia el-Shorafa near Herakleopolis, refers to “fields of the Sherden.”  This may denote either longer-term occupation or ownership of that land, or an association with those who had inhabited it during the later years of the New Kingdom.

The Adoption Papyrus, which dates to the reign of Ramesses XI, adds to the picture of the Sherden as a people on its way to becoming fully assimilated and integrated members of Egyptian society.  Though the legal action described in this document is local and essentially private in nature, the presence of two Sherden among the witnesses demonstrates their legal and social ability to act in that capacity, while the inclusion one’s wife reinforces the theme begun in Papyrus Harris I and continued in Wilbour of Sherden marrying and settling in Egypt, though the ethnicity or ethnicities of their spouses are never explicitly stated.

The most important remaining reference to the Sherden comes from one of two dedicatory stelae from the Temple of Heryshef at Herakleopolis.  Dated in Petrie’s publication to the late 22nd Dynasty, but by others to the 20th, the first of these is dedicated “to Ptah…for the ka of the fanbearer, royal scribe, general…of the fortress of the Sherden,” while the second states that it is the dedication of “Padjesef…Sherden soldier of the great fortress.”  While both of these inscriptions reinforce the Ramesside theme of Sherden in Egypt being associated with fortresses or “strongholds,” the latter is noteworthy for the image above its text, which shows Padjesef himself bringing offerings to Heryshef and Hathor.   The ethnographic value of this stela derives from its status as the only known self–identification and self–representation of a Sherden individual, and from the fact that the scene it presents is entirely Egyptian, including the portrayal of Padjesef himself.  While Egyptian representations may define the Sherden by their distinctive helmets and weaponry, which served partly as visual shorthand for their foreign-ness, this remarkable stela demonstrates that there were Sherden in Egypt who came to define themselves, at least in part, by their Egyptian-ness.

Though several later Ramesside attest to the ongoing integration of Sherden individuals into Egyptian society, the use of the term itself continued into the Third Intermediate Period, as shown by the Helwan stela.  How this identification was made and maintained is not clear.  If Sherden and their offspring intermarried with Egyptians, thereby increasing their “Egyptian-ness” generation after generation, then the continuation of the term seems to demonstrate the permanence of the labels applied to families and individuals alike based on ancestral ethnicity.

Given the proliferation of Egyptian names borne by Sherden in Ramesside records, this seems more likely than the alternative, which would have Sherden remaining in relatively uniform enclaves within Egypt and maintaining as much cultural continuity and ethnic purity as possible.  Whichever may be the case, though, the evidence shows that, despite maintaining their ethnic designation as “Sherden” throughout their recorded history, the people to whom that title applied were “Egyptianized” to such a degree that, by the end of the Ramesside period, they could not only own land and serve as witnesses in legal proceedings, but that they evidently chose to represent themselves not as foreigners, but as fully settled and integrated members of Egyptian society.

* Figures have been omitted from this edition of the paper due to copyright restrictions.
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When Hitler Took Austria shines a bright light on the events of the late 1930s in Austria from a very particular point of view: that of a chancellor’s son who came of age during the events he is recounting.  As may be expected, a significant portion of this memoir focuses on the author’s father, Kurt von Schuschnigg the elder, both as Chancellor of Austria prior to the German invasion (1934–1938) and as a prisoner of Hitler’s government.  The recollections in the book as a whole, and in the pre-Anschluss portion in particular, are made up of a precise intertwining of history and personal memory, and the result is a narrative that is as intellectually informative as it is personally engaging.  Von Schuschnigg sets his own youthful exploits and learning experiences against the backdrop of serious situations and events that his father and his country faced in the run-up to WWII, from Austria’s long and painful climb back from the economic knockout punch delivered it after the first world war to the desperate attempts by the chancellor to keep his nation independent and secure in the face of the growing Nazi threat across the German border and at home.

The picture of Chancellor von Schuschnigg drawn by the author is the same as the man whom Marquess Falcone Lucifero, chancellor of the Italian royal household, referred to late in the war as “the herald to Europe and the world” about the threat Hitler posed.  Unfortunately, as Lucifero went on to lament, ”because of our own preoccupations, this continent turned a deaf ear…until it was too late. That [von Schuschnigg] was left standing alone is our collective shame” (p. 297).  In fact, Schuschnigg the elder was left standing alone in more ways than one, having lost his wife in a car accident (which may have been the result of a Nazi plot [pp. 48, 52]) before being arrested by the invading Germans and shipped off to Gestapo headquarters in Vienna, where he was kept in solitary confinement and subjected to horrific treatment (p. 107), after which he was transferred to Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camp along with his second wife Vera (whom he had married by proxy while imprisoned) and their young daughter.

THE LION’S SHARE of the text after this is concerned solely with the exploits of the younger von Schuschnigg – and they are fascinating exploits indeed, seemingly recounted as vividly in print as they appear within the author’s memory.  From being educated in Germany at the only school that didn’t refuse to turn him away because of his name, to the ever-increasing military and civilian workload borne by adolescents due to the long war’s human cost, the author’s teenage years seem to have lacked dull moments altogether.  After receiving his “wartime diploma” (the term for the automatic graduation of all 17-year-old students in preparation for their conscription [p. 158]), von Schuschnigg avoided army duty by attending the Naval Academy and being stationed aboard a naval vessel in service of the very government that had annexed his homeland and was keeping his father, step-mother, and half-sister in a concentration camp.

Following a tour of duty on the cruiser Prinz Eugen that saw him gravely wounded in an engine room explosion, von Schuschnigg deserted from the German military.  The remainder of the text is primarily focused on his constant effort to stay one step ahead of the Gestapo while making it back first to Austria, and then safely out of Axis territory.  Each scene is vividly presented, and the dialogue recalled from decades ago for this memoir is as sharp and noteworthy as the sights, sounds, and feelings the author describes.  Further, the book’s subtitle, A Memoir of Heroic Faith, could very easily have been replaced by “A memoir of the man with the most over-worked guardian angel alive,” as the remarkability of von Schuschnigg’s own exploits is only matched by the amazing number of times that he avoids death and capture where others repeatedly fail, and by the number of people with whom his path crosses who are amazingly willing to lend assistance at great personal risk to themselves.

THE AUTHOR’S RECOUNTING of the horrors witnessed at the concentration camp where his family was interned – which they were not subjected to due to their status, but which took place in plain view from the unshuttered windows of their small cabin at the camp’s edge – is but one example of this memoir’s deeply personal look at the horrors of Hitler’s Reich and the reign of terror he, his enablers, and his allies unleashed on Europe.  As with all works that touch on this subject, most readers will likely search the text for some further assistance in understanding how peoples and nations went so mad as to allow and assist Adolf Hitler’s incomprehensibly evil acts.

While its author cannot completely answer that question (and while portions of the book make that maddeningly distant answer seem farther away that ever), When Hitler Took Austria includes characters and dialogue that shed representative light on some mindsets of the time.  For example, the reader meets several German officers who claim to think very little of Hitler, his plans, and his cult of personality, but who have taken up arms to serve the fatherland all the same.   Additionally, a particularly illuminating conversation between von Schuschnigg and a school friend’s father is recounted, in which the author attempts several times to tell the Hitler supporter “the true state of affairs” at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (of whose existence it was illegal to speak) and in Hitler’s Reich.  The latter doggedly refuses to believe that “the führer would…do anything that was unjust,” and instead insist that the concentration camps house only those who need protection or who make up “a hard-core criminal element that the National Socialist Party refused to  put up with any longer” (pp. 146–47), and that Jews are only being held until they can be transported to countries which had offered them asylum.  With the benefit of decades of hindsight, such naivete is too remarkable for words.

A FAST-PACED, ENGAGING memoir that clearly communicates the author’s strength and suffering (both physical and mental) at Hitler’s tyrannical hands, When Hitler Took Austria outclasses a great number of its peers within the genre.  The book is well-written, thanks in no small part to the narrator’s wife (and titular co-author) Janet,* who took on the large task of writing down her husband’s recollections, and whose first-person writing in the preface and acknowledgments should not be confused with the first-person narrative of the book itself.  Further, its unique point of view and informative personal anecdotes make it a must-read for those interested in run-up to the war in Europe, as does its focus on events in Austria, a country whose story rarely receives the attention it deserves, perhaps due to the Austro-Hungarian role in WWI.  Whatever the reason, When Hitler Took Austria makes up for a deficit of information and recognition on two fronts.  The first is the story of Austria in the years before WWII, which has received precious little attention from the general public.  The second, of a far less ephemeral nature, is the recognition this book provides for overworked and underappreciated guardian angels everywhere, without whom neither the author nor his family would have survived a fraction of the encounters recounted in this excellent book.

When Hitler Took Austria: A Memoir of Heroic Faith by the Chancellor’s Son by Kurt and Janet von Schuschnigg (ISBN 9781586177096; 329 pages, 24 photographs; $24.95) is published by Ignatius Press.

*Janet von Schuschnigg née Cook is also my lovely wife’s aunt.

First, and perhaps most importantly, it’s critical to note that what the New York Times has called a recent “cascade of missteps and offenses” by the coalition (from the “Kill Team,” to the urinating Marines, to the inadvertent Qu’ran burning, to last weekend’s inexcusable slaughter of sleeping civilians by one rogue and evidently drunk soldier) should not obscure the indisputable fact that moral high ground still exists in this struggle, and that the coalition is firmly in occupation of it.  Taliban spokespersons, among others, can condemn coalition actions as loudly as they wish (and, in such cases as this weekend’s massacre, condemnations are correct); however, while those acts ruin lives and tarnish the coalition image, they do not propel us from the high ground.  Further, those condemnations do not change the fact that those who wage war on civilians daily, killing indiscriminately, throwing acid in the faces of young girls who dare attend school, opening fire on those attending a memorial for this weekend’s slain civilians, and carrying out all other manners of true atrocities.

However, simply fighting those who carry out such atrocities is not a reason to spend ten years, billions of dollars, or thousands of lives halfway across the world — and while breaking the Taliban’s despotic hold on Afghanistan’s government and its people was an added bonus to the initial combat operations in that country, the atrocities committed by that government against its own people was not our initial impetus for war (had it been, we would of course have acted militarily against the Taliban government well before the end of 2001).

As obvious as it is to say, the impetus for war was, of course, the 9/11 attacks, carried out by an al Qaeda that had found safe haven in that Taliban-led country — and now, in the midst of that “cascade of missteps” by soldiers on the ground, those higher up the chain are attempting negotiate an end to the war effort that will almost certainly include some sort of power-sharing role for the Taliban in post-war Afghanistan.

Given this state of affairs, and the flagging support at home for what had been termed the “real war on terror” by those opposed to the Iraq war, it’s clear that the effort in Afghanistan needs to be reconsidered.  Despite a refocusing of national attention on Afghanistan in 2008-2009 ( a topic dealt with in more detail below), everal questions appear to have gone unanswered at that time, as well as both before and since.  The most important of these questions seems the simplest on the surface: what is our goal there?  However, after ten years of fighting, that question is both inexcusably and overwhelmingly difficult to answer — and that and several other questions need to be considered both quickly and completely, and the answers should factor heavily into the U.S.’s decision about our next move(s) in Afghanistan.

Several of the questions below will be corollaries to the original question about our goal in Afghanistan, but the lingering silence in response to this most basic inquiry has swollen to 800-lb gorilla proportions.  Some of the questions below may also seem simplistic or pedantic; however, I’m trying to start from square one here, and these are some basic inquiries that need to be made.  10 1/2 years have gone by since ODA 555 became the first coalition boots on the ground in Afghanistan.  Soldiers have been sent there and to Iraq so many times that many are using both hands to count their total number of combat deployments.  As I noted Sunday (in a rare case of agreement with what Stephen Walt has since written on the topic) these ten years of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan haven’t been conventional in nature; rather, they have required constant vigilance due to the human terrain involved being an often unrecognizable blend of friendly, neutral, and enemy — not to mention the constant threat of IEDs (given this fact, it’s frankly more surprising to me that incidents like this weekend’s atrocity haven’t happened more frequently, not that such a massacre was carried out at all).

As Dan Drezner has noted, “it’s tough to sound hawkish on a conflict where your rationale for being there has evaporated.”  That apparent “evaporation” is reflected in the maddening unanswerability of the simple question posed above.

Here are a few other questions to consider while we chew on that one:

1. What is the desired end state in Afghanistan? Certainly (hopefully) it isn’t a unified country that operates as a western-style (and pro-western) democracy, because that dish simply isn’t on the menu at the Reality Diner.  Afghanistan is and will continue to be far more splintered than that, with tribes and networks holding power and operating in different regions Are we willing to accept Taliban power sharing?  Based on the ongoing efforts to engage the Taliban in negotiations, it seems safe to assume that we are (this will also be addressed below).  What other components of a post-U.S. Afghanistan do we have in place or in motion, and what do we still hope to put in place before 2014, which is not only when we are scheduled to leave, but when President Karzai reaches his term limit?  As this is considered, it is important to remember that the closer we come to the announced 2014 date of security handover and withdrawal, the less influence we will have over the situation there, both strategically and politically.

2. What was our initial goal and desired end state in Afghanistan (ca. 2001) and how does the current state of affairs measure up?  It’s an inarguable truth that the best laid plans don’t survive first contact.  However, despite media prematurely spewing the term “quagmire” all over the airwaves in October 2001, the lightning-fast initial phase of combat operations went exceptionally well.  Northern Alliance were trained and mobilized, al Qaeda disrupted, and Kabul taken from the Taliban all in a matter of weeks.  Following that initial success, we stood up the Karzai government and began a decade of rotating conventional and SOF troops in and out of the AO, making modest gains in improving quality of life, access to education and health care, and infrastructure, while playing counter-network whack-a-mole and dealing with a growing insurgency fueled by domestic and cross-border sources (stop me when this starts to sound like Iraq ca. 2003-2006, but longer).  What was our initial goal at the time? What was our desired end state? At what point did we come close to achieving it, and how have our actions of the last ten years moved us closer top achieving it? This plays into the next question:

3. What goals have the last ten years of operations in Afghanistan been in pursuit of?  This may seem simple — undermining and disrupting al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and other organizations opposed to coalition efforts in Afghanistan; improving infrastructure and quality of life; and ensuring that we left Afghanistan with a functioning government and a national security force that was sufficiently trained to be able to protect that government and the nation’s people.  However, while laudable goals, which of these have been achieved, and which are achievable?

4. How did we get from the goals and mission scope of 2001 to those of 2012? At what point, if at all, did we shift the goal posts, changing our original strategy and desired end state and? If we didn’t, should we have? There can be no question that focusing on Iraq, particularly from 2003-2008, caused Afghanistan to play a distant second fiddle, particularly when it came to media attention and the allocation of finite military resources like special operations units.  This reduced our macro-level effort in Afghanistan to the strategic equivalent of treading water, trading some lives and some more money for what amounted to little more than a continuation of the status quo.  Once Iraq was hauled back from the brink in 2007-2008, the outgoing Bush and incoming Obama administrations focused more resources and attention on Afghanistan, but to what end? How were the goals put in place in 2008-2009 different from those forecast in 2001, and why?

Believe it or not, this essay isn’t meant as a personal indictment of President Obama, whose rhetoric on Afghanistan during the 2008 election was backed by almost no knowledge of the situation there whatsoever (despite being  chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Europe, which has jurisdiction over NATO — and, therefore, the operations in Afghanistan — Obama never once held a hearing).  Upon taking office, though, Obama was brought up to speed on coalition efforts there, and his decision to largely continue the strategy laid out at the end of the Bush administration demonstrated both the emptiness of his campaign rhetoric, and the apparent prudence of the Bush/Gates direction based on ground truth in-theater.

However, though the Afghanistan ‘surge’ put in motion by Bush and Gates, and implemented by Obama, put more boots on the ground in-country, thus allowing for more counterinsurgency and stability operations to be conducted, there was no clear communication of just what the goal there was, how it could be achieved, and how or why it differed from our original reason for invading.

Joshua Foust writes:

In a speech outlining his strategy for the war, President Obama boiled it down to three goals: Deny al-Qaida safe haven; prevent the Taliban from overthrowing the government; and build up the Afghan security forces so they can take over as U.S. troops leave. It is a remarkable framework, defined as much by absence as by accomplishment, and in terms so vague as to be impossible to achieve definitively. But it is also a fundamentally political strategic framework, focused on the Afghan government as the defining characteristic of any future Afghan state.

Ten years of military operations, including efforts at counterinsurgency and the use of all tiers of special operations forces to conduct high-value and time-sensitive target hits, are not carried out for no reason or in pursuit of no goal.  However, at some point did (or have) such operations become self-serving, conducted simply for their own sake, and toward no larger end?  Last August’s loss of 31 American service members in a single helicopter shoot-down (including twenty Tier One operators) that took place in the midst of an operation to catch a man who was functionally middle management within the Afghan Taliban seems to be a microcosm of just this issue.  At what point — and how — did the Afghan strategy change so radically that middle-of-the-food-chain Taliban personalities were valued so highly that the tip of America’s uniformed spear was deployed against them? And, if we are in fact negotiating with the Taliban on post-withdrawal power sharing, how can we justify continuing to risk such personnel in action against a group we are actively working to bring to and keep at the negotiating table?  Which takes us to question 5:

5. Was removing the Taliban from any form of political power (or eliminating it altogether) an original goal of the U.S.’s efforts in Afghanistan?  It seems clear that, absent a sudden spontaneous combustion of every Taliban sympathizer in Afghanistan (and across the border in Pakistan), there will be some sort of arrangement that allows the Afghan Taliban to remain not only viable, but in a position of some power following the coalition withdrawal.  If removing the Taliban from power and destroying their ability to regenerate and regain some level of political influence in Afghanistan was an original goal of the coalition effort there, then is there any measure by which we can say we haven’t failed?  The role of the Taliban and their threat to the U.S. and its interests should neither be over- nor understated.  Their greatest offense for us was their creation of a safe harbor for al Qaeda, which allowed the latter to plan and carry out international terror acts.  Now, al Qaeda’s presence is reduced (though it appears to be growing in scope worldwide, if the many claims of “franchises” are to be believed), while the Taliban continues to regenerate.

Further, with their withdrawal from negotiations in the wake of last weekend’s massacre, and what appears to be unity among Afghans (for once) on a position — that of the coalition needing to leave as quickly as possible — it seems even more likely that the fragmented Afghanistan we leave behind will have at its titular helm a virtual corruptocracy, and among its power brokers groups like the Taliban.

6. What are the Afghan National Security Forces capable of? Besides killing coalition troops, of course.  Will the ANSF (ANA and ANP) crumble as soon as their coalition trainers and partners leave? Or are we getting enough quality recruits, and training them quickly and thoroughly enough, that they will be able to provide a measure of security for residents of at least some portions of Afghanistan? If violence picks up again upon the coalition’s departure from the country, how long will the ANSF last before death and desertion decimate its ranks?

These are only a few questions, primarily asked from the 30,000 foot level or higher.  As I noted above, many may seem simplistic, particularly to any readers who have an in-depth knowledge of our Afghan strategy and events on that front.  However, they need to be asked — a fact which itself suggests they haven’t been given their due consideration to date.

At the bottom line, we have this fact: the Afghan people largely have better lives and more rights than they did under Taliban control in 2001 and before.  However, altruism alone doesn’t justify ten years of blood and treasure.  America needs to figure out what it’s doing in Afghanistan besides treading water and waiting for 2014, and it needs to decide which options have the best chance of ensuring the best possible outcome for the security and benefit of America and her interests — because, while altruistic achievement may be a nice bonus, when it comes to a decade-long war it’s the strategic benefit and safeguarded security of the participant that matter most.  Given this, if we aren’t on track to significantly improve our strategic outlook and the security of our homeland and our interests by remaining in Afghanistan any longer than we absolutely must, and we should begin plans to draw down forces even more quickly than previously planned.

George Orwell once famously said that sport is nothing more than “war minus the shooting.” Combat and competition have been connected as long as history and myth have been written, and even now much of our terminology for sports is couched in the words of war – a quarterback has a “cannon” of an arm or is a “gunslinger,” a base runner is “dead” at home plate, and a football play or ball carrier is “blown up.”  From Herakles’ slaying of the Nemean lion, which is portrayed in a fashion similar to wrestling on Attic vases (Figure 1),* to literary passages like that in Aethiopika where an athletic event is substituted for single combat, to the presence of Ares and Agōn side by side on the ivory and gold table at Olympia where the victors’ wreaths were kept, to Pindar’s comparisons of athletic victory to military heroism, the relationship and tension between sport and combat in Greek myth and culture in particular is incredibly strong.

Of course, this does not necessarily mean that the origination of athletic competition in ancient Greece was martial – nor does it mean that the relationship between the two remained static across the centuries.  To refer to Greek athletics as “war games” would be to significantly stretch the available evidence about the events practiced and their application to warfare.  Even among those competitive events which had clear martial connotations, many involved tactics belonging to much earlier periods, before the highly structured phalanx of the late Archaic and Classical periods, or to the anachronistic world of epic and myth.  As the growing prevalence of hoplite warfare reduced the opportunity for warriors to earn kleos aphthitōn on the battlefield, athletic competitions became a partial replacement for those lost chances at eternal glory.  Further, as the archaic period gave way to the classical, particularly in Athens (whence our greatest body of physical evidence for Greek athletics comes), the practicality of competitive athletic events and of the methods employed by those training for them was supplanted by the rise of a “gymnasion culture” which valued physical beauty, pure athleticism, and homosexual courtship over skills and abilities that specifically translated to soldiery and warfare.

The study of myth, epic, etiology, and other genres of storytelling is important in no small part because the stories (both true and fictional) that a society tells about itself are as key to understanding them as the truth itself is.  In this vein, it is important to note that, regardless of whether the origin of Greek athletics was truly based in martial affairs, a great many ancient authors and observers clearly believed athletics and combat to be inextricably linked.  Philostratos, for example, declared the Battle of Marathon and the stand at Thermopylae to be proof that wrestling and pankration “were devised for war,” and he followed other ancient commentators in noting that the Athenian style of fighting at Marathon appeared nearly like wrestling, and that the Spartans at Thermopylae wreaked havoc with their bare hands once their swords and spears had been broken.  Plato agreed with this premise, remarking that wrestling was “of all motions by far the most nearly allied to military fighting,” and pronouncing that wrestling should be practiced by the citizen soldiery for the sake of future military success.

Philostratos also wrote that late 6^th century champions like Glaukos, who used the “plough touch” to win the boxing championship in 520 BC, and Damaretos, who was reputed to have won the first running of the hoplitodromos in the same year, themselves “regarded war as training for gymnastics, and gymnastics as training for war.”  Is Philostratos’ assertion an accurate representation of the purpose and benefit of Greek athletics, at least in their earlier years? Or did they only later become associated with the martial pursuits of a bygone age, in an attempt by elites to regain a lost form of individually–oriented combat and to replace the opportunities for personal honor and kleos which had been lost with the introduction of the relatively faceless hoplite phalanx? As with any review of Hellenic sports, we must begin by consulting Homer.

The funeral games for Patroklos in the Iliad and the passing reference in Odyssey to the funerals of heroes as being a time when “young men gird themselves and make ready to contend for prizes on the death of some great chieftain.” may tell us that organized funerary sport was common – at least among elites – by the Late Geometric period.  The existence of funeral contests in the 8^th century is also supported by Hesiod, who speaks in Works and Days of attending “the funeral games of warlike Amphidamas” in Khalkis, where “there were many games and prizes arranged in advance by the sons” of the deceased, and where he “won a contest in song and…carried off as a victory prize a tripod with handles on it.”  The existence of these types of events is attested archaeologically from the 7th century, particularly in Thebes, Athens, and Delphi, where several bronze vessels similar to that mentioned by Hesiod have been found at sanctuaries and cemeteries alike, engraved with dedicatory inscriptions (typically ἐπἱ + dative) identifying them as prizes for funeral contests.

Though the evidence supports Homer’s portrayal of agonistic contests being held in conjunction with the deaths of heroes, Plutarch viewed the poet’s manner of discussing athletic competitions as evidence that the martial applications of the events held at them were understood.  In his ‘Symposaic Questions,’ Plutarch entertains an inquiry from one of his guests about why it is that “Homer always arranges a series of athletic sports with boxing first, then wrestling, and last racing.”  While not entirely accurate – see for example the Phæacians’ order of events in the Odyssey – sports are generally presented in that order when spoken of or participated in by Homeric characters.  Plutarch explains this pattern as a verbal representation in athletic terms of the natural flow of combat, saying:

“These sports mimic warfare and training for battle.  The first task of a fighter is to strike out and to defend themselves.  And their next task, when they are now met in hand to hand conflict, is to strain body against body and overthrow each other.  (By this especially it is reported the Spartans at Leuctra were overpowered by our men who were practiced wrestlers).  And finally the soldier’s third task is to run away when beaten and to pursue when wining.  It is reasonable, therefore, for boxing to lead off the list, for wrestling to have second place, and for racing the last.”

Though this explanation provides still more support for the ancients’ perception of the strong relationship between athletics and warfare, the view expressed by Plutarch was neither universal nor accepted without qualification.  Even the Homeric epics make clear that sporting prowess does not always go hand–in–hand with courage and competency in war, as can be seen in the boxer Epeios’ challenge to his peers at the funeral games for Patroklos.  “Is it not enough that I should fall short of you in actual fighting?” he asks.  “No man can be good at everything.  I tell you plainly, and it shall come true; if any man will box with me I will bruise his body and break his bones; therefore let his friends stay here in a body and be at hand to take him away when I have done with him.”  This lack of an unqualified correlation between athletic and martial prowess is further reinforced by the mid–7^th century Spartan poet Tyrtaios, who removed the romantic veneer from discussions of warfare by pointing out the very clear and visceral difference between combat and sport:

“I take no account of a man for his prowess at running or wrestling…No man is good in war unless he can take the sight of bodily slaughter and is able, at close quarters, to lunge at the enemy.  This is excellence, this is the supreme prize for mortals, and the best a young man can aspire to win.  It brings benefit to the state and all citizens, when a man does not fail to hold his ground while fighting in the foremost ranks – heedless of the harsh combat, risking his life, displaying a steady spirit and muttering encouragement meanwhile to the men at his side.”

While certainly present, the natural difference between warfare and organized athletics does not necessarily preclude individual sporting events from being simulations of, or relevant to, activities engaged in during war.  A prime example of a contest which had clear martial implications, particularly in its earliest manifestation, is the hoplitodromos, or the race in armor.  This event was traditionally held to have first been conducted at the 65^th Olympiad in 520 BC, when it was won by the aforementioned Damaretos of Heraea, though an amphora from 540 suggests its existence prior to this date (Figure 2).  The Olympic hoplite race was one lap in the stadion, or the same distance as the diaulos, and participants wore a helmet and greaves – but evidently not a cuirass – and carried a shield.

While it did not necessarily replicate a specific combat action, the value of being able to move well in armor is self–evident; further, in keeping with the ancient perception of such events as having clear military connotations, both Pausanias and Philostratos contend that the hoplite race was established for martial purposes.  Though Nancy Reed has likened the hoplitodromos to being training for the ancient version of “running with a full pack,” the utility of this event is greater than her comparison. Whereas the modern rucksack is used to transport equipment, and can be incredibly heavy – up to 90 lbs. in some operational cases – the armor worn by hoplites was not extraneous to their persons in the way that a modern pack would be, but had to be treated as a part of each soldier’s body. A better modern parallel would be a soldier engaging in physical training while wearing fully–loaded body armor or flak vest and a helmet – a total weight of up to 50 lbs. in the modern operational environment. Victor Davis Hanson, among others, has estimated the hoplite soldier’s load at 70 lbs., including weapon.

The practical applications of this event are particularly interesting to consider in light of Herodotos’ account of the advancing Hellenic army at the battle of Marathon in 490 BC, which he claims covered the final eight stades (one mile) between its line and that of the Persians at a double time before engaging the enemy – something that he claims had never been done before.  Many have argued against the historicity of this account on the grounds that a force of 10,000 hoplites would have been unable to run such a distance in formation, though others maintain that Herodotos’ narrative should be considered “unimpeachable” due to the combination of his interviews with eyewitnesses and the likelihood that some who participated in Marathon would come into contact with his account of the battle, and would be “fierce and accurate critics” of it.

In 1973, Walter Donlan and James Thompson carried out an experiment at Penn State in which ten undergraduate PhysEd majors were laden with 15 lbs.  each and told to carry a 9–pound shield in combat position on the left arm while jogging 1600 meters, or one mile, in formation at a military double–time.  The results were sobering; not one student was able to keep his shield chest high past 75 yards, and the formation disintegrated after 300 yds.  Only one of the subjects – a varsity long distance runner – was even able to complete the run.  The same experiment was attempted in 1974; this time, the formation collapsed after 250 yards  and no students finished the run.  In a similar experiment, run inside the university’s Human Performance Laboratory, eight men were asked to individually run one mile in 8 ½ minutes while wearing 15 lbs. of weight and carrying a nine pound “shield” chest high.  Of the six who successfully completed this task, only one – a member of the varsity track team – was found to have the remaining stamina to have participated in hand to hand combat after such a task.  The conclusion drawn by those running these experiments was that their results constituted “conclusive proof that…Greek hoplites, of varying ages, and carrying a heavier load [than those participating in the experiment], could not have charged at a run for eight stades, keeping the phalanx formation, and then engaged effectively in close combat.”

This experiment and its conclusions were fraught with assumptions, the most basic being the idea that American university students should be physically comparable – if not superior – to ancient soldier–citizens for whom physical activity and effort was a constant reality.  If the physical possibility of Herodotos’ account is to be thoroughly and accurately tested, the Penn State experiments should be repeated with elements from more comparable segments of the population, such as military infantry or special operations professionals and physical laborers, serving as test subjects.  While it is of course possible that the soldiers at Marathon did not cover a full mile at a double–time – something which is not necessarily a physical impossibility, despite the results of the Penn State experiment – it is not only possible but likely that they covered the final stade or more at a run in order to minimize their vulnerability to the Persians’ archers, which would have been the greatest threat to their formation during the approach to the battle line.

In addition to the standard two–stade hoplite race held at the various stephanitic and chrematitic games, a much longer and more extreme version of this event took place at the Eleutheria at Plataea according to Philostratos and Pausanias.  Competitors clad in full head–to–toe panoply – helmet, cuirass, and greaves – and carrying large Boeotian shields raced over uneven terrain for a distance of anywhere between a double–diaulos and fifteen stades, depending on one’s reading of the source material.  The fact that the latter distance is nearly twice that claimed by Herodotos for the charge at Marathon further underscores the importance of properly understanding and interpreting these ancient sources’ claims.

In the first half of the 5th century, a series of alterations to the hoplite race was begun which can be seen as a microcosm of the changes in Greek athletic culture as a whole during this period.  The first was the replacement of the Corinthian helmet seen in earlier vase paintings of hoplite runners with the lighter, less burdensome Chalcidian helmet (Figure 3).  By the 4^th century, the helmet had again changed, this time to the still lighter Attic form, and the greaves appear to have been discarded (Figures 4-6).  These do not seem to have been the last of the changes; writing in the 2^nd century AD, Pausanias referred three times to the hoplitodromos simply as the “race with shields,” and marveled that the victory statue of Damaretos showed him not only carrying the shield that modern competitors bore, but also wearing a helmet and greaves.  This suggests that the helmet had also been done away with altogether at some point after the 4^th century BC, thus reducing the hoplite race to a naked diaulos carrying a shield.

Alongside the stripping–down of hoplite runners, we see evidence for the rise of the gymnasion culture, which shifted the emphasis of sport and competition away from functional physical activities that were useful in war and defense, replacing it instead with an insulated environment laced with eroticism, which focused on physical appearance and pure athleticism far more than martially–oriented physical ability (contrast, for example, the representations of athletes in Figures 7-9 and 10-12).  Philostratos accurately criticizes this shift in focus and practicality, writing that the generations after Glaukos and Demaretos became “men without military service, who became inactive instead of active, and soft instead of hard; the Sicilian style of dainty living gained force; the sinews of the athletic fields were cut and all the more so since the vogue of coddling was introduced into gymnastics.” While this tendency to look at the past as better than the present is nothing new, as Hesiod’s archaic Ages of Man amply demonstrate, it does seem clear that the ties between sport and warfare, and between sport and preparedness for war, such as they may have been previously, were slackened over time.

During his war against Pompey, Caesar is said to have remarked that his opponent’s army had in its ranks Greeks “recruited from the gymnasia – spiritless students of wrestling, scarcely able to carry their weapons.”  The reduced correlation of competitive events with martial skills, and the growth of the gymnasion culture, further pushed athletics to the margins of military relevance to the point at which their only value was probably the strength and endurance they provided, which is applicable not only to the battlefield but to every phase of life.  Further, by the Hellenistic period both the funeral and military aspects of athletic etiology had likely long since fallen out of practical application.  Certainly neither funerary rites nor direct martial training were the inspiration for the several poleis, like Magnesia, which established stephanitic games in the later Hellenistic period in an effort to secure the recognition and safeguarding of their borders and land.

In Autolycus, the 5^th century playwright Euripides criticized the lionization of athletes, and the practice of celebrating them with expensive victory feasts, on the grounds that such treatment was entirely disproportionate to the benefit they provided society, and that the activities they engaged in were not applicable to warfare.  “For what civic reward is there in one man who comes home with a crown for slippery wrestling?,” he wrote, “or in someone with nimble feet, or who can lob a discus, or break through a barrage of shields and scatter an enemy with their fists alone? What fool thinks of sport, when plunged into the thick of battle?” Autolycus is, of course, a satyr play, and Euripides goes on to declare that laurels and other honors should instead be given to politicians – a remark which makes us hope the entire statement was intended as satire!

This concept, though, is further expressed in Plutarch’s ‘On the Fame of the Athenians,’ when a Spartan visitor to Athens during the Dionysia remarks that “the Athenians were making a great mistake in wasting their energies on amusements, that is to say, in lavishing on the theatre what would pay for great fleets and would support armies in the field.”

Though viewing such extravagance through a martial paradigm strikes us as being characteristically Spartan, this observer’s point was well–made, if slightly exaggerated, as he went on to note that, “if we reckon up the cost of each tragedy, the Athenian people will be seen to have spent more [to produce tragedies] than they spent in fighting for their supremacy and for their liberty against the barbarians.” He continued with an accurate observation of the disparity in the treatment of festival competitors and soldiers in the field, saying that, “the generals often ordered their men to bring along uncooked rations when they led them forth to battle; and the commanders, I can swear, after providing barley–meal and a relish of onions and cheese for the rowers, would embark them on the triremes.  But the men who paid for the choruses gave the choristers eels and tender lettuces, roast beef and marrow, and pampered them for a long time while they were training their voices and living in luxury.”

The incompatibility of the soldier’s life with that of the gymnasion–bred athlete was perhaps best recounted by Plutarch in his biography of “the last of the Greeks,” Philopœmen.  An aspiring military leader who was also a skilled wrestler, Philopœmen responded to his friends’ encouragement that he take up the latter as a formal pursuit by asking what effect that would have on his military training.  They accurately responded that:

“the habit of body and mode of life for athlete and soldier were totally different, and particularly that their diet and training were not the same, since the one required much sleep, continuous surfeit of food, and fixed periods of activity and repose, in order to preserve or improve their condition, which the slightest influence or the least departure from routine is apt to change for the worse; whereas the soldier ought to be conversant with all sorts of irregularity and all sorts of inequality, and above all should accustom himself to endure lack of food easily, and as easily lack of sleep.”

On hearing this, Plutarch wrote, “Philopœmen not only shunned athletics himself and derided them, but also in later times as a commander banished from the army all forms of them, with every possible mark of reproach and dishonor, on the ground that they rendered useless for the inevitable struggle of battle men who would otherwise be most serviceable.”

The increasing importance of the gymnasion in the lives of citizens-to-be, and the strictly controlled and highly regimented life of the athlete that went along with it, did not entirely eliminate the martial benefits of athletic training and competition; after all, the superior condition that regular physical activity provided was a benefit in itself, as Socrates explains in Xenophon’s Memorabilia.  However, the emphasis on beauty and physical perfection for their own sake, as opposed to martially-oriented, functional strength and athleticism, seems to represent a severing of whatever direct link may once have existed between Hellenic athletics as a whole and martial pursuits (although some events, such as the trireme race at the Panathenaia, still had clear military connotations).

The focus on physical perfection can be seen in the statuary associated with stephanitic victors, though the practical value of physical aesthetics is far from a given, as Alexander the Great once noted when passing through Miletus.  When he saw statues of Olympic and Pythian victors in the remains of the city, which had been surrounded and sacked by a Persian army in 494 BC, Alexander reportedly asked, “Where were the men with bodies like these when the barbarians were besieging your city?” Socrates probably would have retorted that their condition allowed them to flee the battlefield with lives intact.  “The fit are healthy and strong,” he said according to Xenophon, “and many, as a consequence, save themselves decorously on the battlefield and escape all the dangers of war”.  While fitness is itself a benefit, the rise of a Classical culture built around physical beauty, youth, and eroticism effectively supplanted its predecessor, which was believed by many ancient writers to have been grounded in the direct martial applications of athletic training and competition, even if the reality may in fact have been somewhat different.

* Figures have been omitted from this edition of the paper due to copyright restrictions.
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Given this state of affairs, Silvia Ferrara, a research fellow at the University of La Sapienza in Rome, has decided that a new approach to the study of the Cypro–Minoan script is needed.  Rather than joining those in the field who have given in to what the author calls “the frequent, and at times obstinate, urge to decipher” Cypro–Minoan, Ferrara’s contribution ”focuses on ways of understanding an undeciphered script, without attempting to decipher it” (p. 1).  This “holistic approach” to understanding an unreadable script in every way but that which may be most obvious – by reading it – includes considering “its historical, archaeological, epigraphical, and paleographical” context (preface, p. i).

Though such an approach may seem counterintuitive on the surface (after all, what point is there to studying writing if gaining an ability to read it is neither possible nor a goal?), a study of this type is actually long overdue. Writing in 1989, Thomas Palaima, an expert in Aegean scripts and prehistory, called for “a unified and standardized corpus of Cypro–Minoan inscriptions that will allow us to see the whole script and its various clases of inscriptions…in a clear historical context,” saying that “until this is done, [scholars studying Cypro–Minoan] shall continue to be plagued by piecemeal readings, guesses, and speculation.”* Ferrara’s study, a revision and initial publication of her doctoral dissertation (University College London, 2005), is an attempt to provide just that context.

CYPRO–MINOAN INSCRIPTIONS is broken up into three parts, which are subdivided into six total chapters, with the one-chapter Part Three, “Beyond Decipherment” (pp. 267–274) serving as a summation and forward-looking conclusion.  Part one, “Function, Object, and Context” (pp. 7–148), deals with the subject of literacy in Late Bronze Age Cyprus (pp. 9–42) and writing in the LC I–III (pp. 43–148) from an archaeological perspective, with special emphasis on LC IIIA, the “floruit” of Cypro–Minoan writing (p. 90).  Though constrained by the aforementioned limitations of the corpus, Ferrara uses the most current information to “frame the emergence and development of Cypro–Minoan” and “assess the geographical distribution of the script” (p. 17) in an effort to reconstruct a proposed spatial and temporal diffusion of literacy and writing on Cyprus.

While inscriptions have been found at all of the island’s key coastal cities, as well as several inland sites, the greatest number have been recovered from Enkomi, Kition, Kalavassos–Ayios Dhimitrios, and Hala Sultan Tekke on the southern and eastern shores of Cyprus (p. 21, Fig. 1.1).  Of these, Enkomi stands head and shoulders above all other sites, with 133 of the 243 total inscriptions, or 55.2%, having been found there (p. 20, Table 1.2).  Of the 133 inscriptions found there, 84 are clay boules, which, Ferrara writes, “seem to be a literacy carrier peculiarly characteristic of Enkomi” (p. 21), and though she cautions against the use of this fact as reinforcement of the frequent assumption that Enkomi occupied the pinnacle of a hierarchy of Cypriot sites in the Late Bronze Age, the author does refer to Enkomi as “the earliest user and producer of writing,” a “status [which] bears direct implications for its role in the adaptation of the script and its significance as a political strategy” (p. 27).

The author’s classification of the artifacts bearing Cypro–Minoan inscriptions is a significant contribution to the field. The overwhelming majority of previous literature as focused almost entirely on the inscribed tablets found at Enkomi and at Ugarit, despite those tablets making up merely 4.2% of the corpus, while the inscribed boules which Ferrara dedicates a portion of her discussion to make up 40.8% (pp. 27, 30). Further, it is impossible to know whether, and in what numbers, inscriptions on perishable materials were made (cf. p. 148).  The appearance of painted signs on Aegean vases in funerary deposits at Enkomi, as well as an ostrakon, demonstrate that the script could in fact be painted at times (p. 173).

While on one hand the lacuna in our knowledge created by the absence of perishable texts from the corpus could stem from a practice of not writing on such materials, on the other hand it could easily lead to a significant misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the use and distribution of Cypro–Minoan writing.   To cite a relevant example, if the inscriptions found in the Nile floodplain – which is unsuitable for the preservation of papyri – were the only evidence we possessed for Egyptian writing, it would be only natural to assume that Egyptian hieroglyphic script was used almost exclusively on rock and other permanent materials (and that hieratic and demotic, two scripts intended for ink-on-papyrus use, were almost nonexistent in ancient Egyptian scribal culture).  While many extant Cypro–Minoan inscriptions may have been administrative in nature, the number that has survived are only a small fraction of the total number of records that would likely have been required in the administration of such an economically active island as Cyprus.  Ferrara compares the island’s economic and administrative records to the Linear B tablets of Mycenaean Greece, noting that, had Linear B tablets at Pylos not been baked in the fire that consume that palatial center, they likely would not have been preserved.  The author suggests that the Cypriot economy may have been administered similarly, with its records inscribed on perishable materials or otherwise not intended for long–term preservation (p. 148).

Part Two, “Inscription and Signary” (pp. 149–264), pairs an in–depth review of the epigraphic presentation of the extant inscriptions (pp. 149–213) with a critique of the paleography, or shift in sign–shapes over time, of the Cypro–Minoan script (p. 214–264).  Ferrara’s discussion of epigraphy addresses head–on the fragmentation that seems to be inherent in the studies of this script, to which she says, “somewhat paradoxically, the material looks graphically fragmented because it is assumed to be fragmented” (p. 270).   The result of the author’s attempt to address that fragmentation is a wholesale revision of the traditional tripartite classification of Cypro–Minoan, which had been thought to accurately depict “three different subsets of inter–related, but not identical, scripts” (p. 271), referred to as CM 1, 2, and 3.  Though she acknowledges that “there was never such a thing as a single [Cypriot writing] tradition, constant and uniform throughout” (p. 213), Ferrara states that her study “came to conclude that in all likelihood [the] dissolution [of the tripartite division] represents a compelling consequence deriving from a contextual study of the script and its inscriptions,” on “paleographical…, epigraphic, statistical, geographical, and typological grounds” (p. 271).

The paleographic discussion is similarly well–laid–out, if less challenging of scholarly convention.  As the author herself notes, “the paleography of the Cypro–Minoan script admittedly deserves a monograph of its own, because the script is inordinately rich in graphic variations, segmental minutiae, and diversions from what we would be keen to recognize as ‘normalized’ signs.”  However, this study addresses several relevant paleographic questions, such as the previously insufficiently explored question of the “diachronic variability of sign-shapes,” or whether alteration in the script’s signs is a natural and inevitable process or whether “graphic conservatism [is] imposed from above” (p. 270).  While she is unable to answer that question, Ferrara successfully lays the groundwork for its further consideration, as well as for the consideration of several other questions surrounding the script, its use, uniformity, and development, and the influence of other languages and writing systems (both Aegean and Near Eastern) upon its adoption and use, as well as what phonological carry–over there may have been from the Cypro–Minoan of the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age encoding of the Greek language in Cypriot script (pp. 272–273).

FERRARA’S STUDY BUILDS on the current momentum shift in Cypro–Minoan studies, which has moved efforts away from pure decipherment and toward the construction of ”the first fundamental grounds upon which to base…future study” (p. 1).  In doing so, the author appears to restrict her discussion to those inscriptions whose Cypro–Minoan provenience is secure, which has necessarily resulted in the omission of some potentially related inscription.  For example, no mention is made of the ostrakon and inscribed jar handles from Early Iron Age Ashkelon, which may demonstrate either the use or the appropriation of the Cypro–Minoan script by the city’s Philistine inhabitants.** However, this is not necessarily a negative; by omitting those instances which are not certain to reflect this specific script (and the still unknown language it represents),*** the author ensures that the scope of her study remains tightly focused, and that the foundation she is attempting to build for future study of the Cypro–Minoan script is solidly grounded in that which we do know for certain at the present.

While some recent academic texts have been released with what seems to be little regard on the part of the publisher for quality or durability, the quality of this volume’s printing is commensurate with its content – a plus in a volume whose price tag will likely limit the majority of its circulation to libraries, but whose utility will cause multiple students and scholars to make use of their libraries’ copies of the book.  While Cypro–Minoan Inscriptions is a resource of unquestionable value on its own, this work was designed to be used in tandem with a forthcoming second volume containing a comprehensive photographic presentation of the entire known corpus (Cypro–Minoan Inscriptions, Volume 2: Corpus, Oxford University Press).  Upon the second volume’s release, currently scheduled for November 2012, Ferrara’s comprehensive and groundbreaking study of the script will likely prove to have even greater value for students and scholars alike whose research involves either the island of Cyprus or the greater Eastern Mediterranean world as a whole in the Late Bronze Age.

Cypro–Minoan Inscriptions, Volume I: Analysis by Silvia Ferrara (ISBN 0199607575; 336 pages; $125) is published by Oxford University Press.

* T. G. Palaima, “Cypro–Minoan Scripts: Problems of Historical Context,” in Y. Duhoux, T. G. Palaima, and J. Bennett (eds.), Problems in Decipherment (Louvain–la–Neuve: Peeters, 1989), 162.
** F. M. Cross and L. E. Stager, “Cypro–Minoan Inscriptions found in Philistine Ashkelon,” Israel Exploration Journal 56:2, 129–159.
*** N. Hirschfeld, “Cypro–Minoan,” in E. H. Cline (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 379, for example, considers the evidence of the Ashkelon inscriptions in particular to be unconvincing at present.

The site in question is el–Ahwat, a 7.5–acre “city” near Nahal ‘Iron in northern Israel, and the archaeologist is the University of Haifa’s Adam Zertal.  A scholar whose previous accomplishments include the exhaustive two–volume, 1,400–page Manasseh Hill Country Survey publication (Brill, 2004, 2007), Zertal’s most recent work has the paradoxical status of being both long–awaited and almost entirely unheralded.  Since 2001, the author has written in various publications about his belief that el–Ahwat housed a community of Sherden, a ‘Sea Peoples’ group known primarily from 13th to 11th century Egyptian records (as well as from some 14th century Ugaritic texts) which are believed by some to have originated on the island of Sardinia in the central Mediterranean.

If correct, this interpretation of el–Ahwat would provide direct evidence for a number of firsts in LBA Mediterranean scholarship.  One example of many is el–Ahwat’s potential status as the first testament to direct contact between the central Mediterranean and the Levant during this period (based on current evidence, the exchange that did take place between eastern and central Mediterranean was likely facilitated by Cypriot or Mycenaean seafarers).  Another is el–Ahwat’s potential to serve as the only confirmed site of non-Philistine ‘Sea Peoples’ settlement in the Levant, while striking a blow against the prevailing scholarly views that the ‘Sea Peoples’ were largely Aegeo-Anatolian in culture and origin, and that they settled in coastal areas that allowed for access to the Mediterranean Sea.  However, Zertal’s theories about the site’s significance and its inhabitants’ origin have either been largely ignored, or viewed with a detached skepticism until the full results of the excavation were published.

With El–Ahwat: A Fortified Site from the Early Iron Age Near Nahal ‘Iron, Israel (Brill, 2011), the full results of the seven–season excavation are now available, and the site can be independently studied – as can Zertal’s theories about its inhabitants and its significance.  The methodically-organized, 27-chapter publication contains over 200 figures, and is comprised of four parts: Stratigraphy, Architecture, and Chronology; The Finds; Economy and Environment; and Conclusions.  Though each of the former three contains a valuable detailed review of finds and conclusions related to its subject matter, these portions of the work sometimes feel as though as though they are serving in large part to lay the defensive groundwork for Part Four, wherein Zertal uses the fully published site information to defend the conclusions about the site that he has been writing about for the last decade.

EL–AHWAT IS LOCATED on the flat shoulder of a ridge ¾ mi. south of the Nahal ‘Iron (Egyptian Arunah, the ancient route between Egypt and the heavily contested Jezreel Valley in northern Israel), where it overlooks the Sharon plain, the Carmel range, and the western Samarian hills.  Established on virgin soil, the view to the north, west, and south provided by el–Ahwat’s location may have provided a strategic benefit that outweighed poor resources like a lack of water sources and arable soil (pp. 25, 428).  The site has two strata, a late Roman and Byzantine period in which el–Ahwat was used as a farmstead (p. 41), and a brief (50 to 60 years in duration [p. 262]) second stratum which the excavator dates from the late 13th to the early 12th centuries based on pottery, seals and scarabs (Ch. 14; pp. 233–263, and an beautiful ivory ibex head (Ch. 16; pp. 288–294).  His terminus ante quem for the site’s inhabitation is a scarab bearing the royal title of the 20th Dynasty pharaoh Ramesses III (1183–1152 BC [p. 53]); the eight other scarabs found at the site date to the 19th Egyptian Dynasty (1298–1187 BC).  The chronology of the site will be dealt with in greater detail below.

The site yielded few restorable ceramic finds (Ch. 12), a fact which for which the excavator credits both the abandonment of el–Ahwat by its Stratum II inhabitants, and the leveling of that lower stratum for Roman-Byzantine  use (p. 181).  However, though lacking in volume, the site’s ceramic assemblage contained several forms, including bowls (open, straight-sided, and open carinated), kraters, jugs, cooking bowls and jugs, jars, beer jugs, collared-rim pithoi (which may have been used for storing water gathered from the nearest source 1/2 km. away[pp. 424, 428]), as well as chalices, one incense burner and one oil lamp.  All of the pottery at el-Ahwat has parallels in the Levant, though in Ch. 14, Baruch Brandl notes that el-Ahwat is only the third site in the Carmel Ridge where collared-rim jars have been found together with New Kingdom scarabs (p. 263).  The bell-shaped bowls (p. 186), a form associated with Late Helladic pottery and with the intrusive Philistine culture, were of the locally-made, northern Phoenician variety; likewise, the pierced loomweights found at the site (p. 200) follow in the standard Levantine tradition, rather than being of the rolled and unbaked style associated with the Cypro-Aegean Philistines and other ‘Sea Peoples’.

El–Ahwat is architecturally divided into four Areas, or “quarters,” A through E (A and B are portions of the same “quarter), with “quarter walls” running between each section.  Area A contained the city’s gate (a small, thin door mounted on a doorpost [p. 62]), a terrace with an administrative complex (Complex 100 [p. 79]), and a unique isosceles triangle-shaped “approach” to the city gate, which Zertal and chapter co-author Ron Be’eri reconstruct as having a  small opening to the outside at the base of the left leg, then allowing traffic to widen within the approach before funneling into the gated entrance at the triangle’s pinnacle (pp. 62-64).  Area C contained a 510 sq m residential complex (which chapter author Nivrit Lavie–Alon notes is “among the largest continuous quarters exposed by Israeli archaeology” [p. 124]), within which two oil presses were found in addition to valuable small finds, including several scarabs.  A furnace, possibly for iron forging (p. 383) was found in Area D, along with two free-standing corbeled-roof “huts” or silos, which chapter author Amit Romano suggests may indicate its status as “the center for an industrial craft or some sort of metal processing” (p. 157).  Due to a lack of material finds other than walls, chapter author Lavrie–Alon suggests that Area E was used as an enclosure for livestock (p. 161).

It is the architectural perimeter of the site that has most contributed to the excavator’s conclusions about its purpose and its inhabitants.  El–Ahwat is quite irregular in shape, with an “undulating” (p. 32), somewhat–ovular “city wall” encircling it in wavy fashion.  This wall contains several large rock mounds that the author refers to as “towers” despite their unclear function (p. 38) and the likelihood that few actually served as such (save perhaps T1 and T2, which sit outside the wall to the west, and T53, which is built into the eastern portion of Area D), and has built into its structure four of what Zertal identifies as “corridors” (p. 412).  In addition to these corridors, several “igloo-like stone huts” which the author identifies as “false-domed tholoi” are either free-standing constructions or are built into the wall itself (such as U409 in Tower 53 [Area D], which is entered by one of the “corridors” [p. 413]).  For Zertal, these corridors and tholoi combine with the outer wall to give el–Ahwat its greatest uniqueness and significance.

IF PARTS 1–3 OF this volume lay the groundwork for Zertal’s defense of his theories about the site, Part Four does not disappoint, as the author uses the majority of the final section to argue for Sardinian influence on, and Sherden inhabitation at, el–Ahwat.  To the author’s eye, “the plan of el–Ahwat differs from anything known elsewhere in the Levant.  Judging by its design and unique features, the architects of el–Ahwat seem to have planned the site according to a master plan based on earlier architectural traditions” (p. 28).  It is the location the author sees as being the origin of these “earlier architectural traditions,” and the conclusions he draws from it, that make el–Ahwat a controversial site, and this final report a controversial publication.

Zertal compares the site’s “undulating” wall, corridors, tholoi, inner dividing walls, and free-standing corbeled stone “huts” (U409 and U461), to the proto–nuraghe of Bronze Age Sardinia and the 13th century BC Toreenic Culture of neighboring Corsica (pp. 415–423), and suggests that this architectural style was brought to the Levant by immigrants from the central Mediterranean.  The corrid Though he has previously stipulated that a lack of other diagnostic finds, such as Sardinian pottery, means the journey was likely circuitous and time–consuming enough that it resulted in acculturation to some degree along the way, this remains an issue for Zertal’s conclusions, as the material culture of el–Ahwat is entirely Canaanite in nature (with Egyptian small finds included), blending hill country and lowland traditions in a site that, save for the meandering outer wall with its corridors, is largely typical of northern Canaan in the Iron I.  This stands in marked contrast to the Philistine material culture footprint (to date, the only known ‘Sea Peoples’ material culture), which consists not only of site architecture, but of intrusive ceramic, cultic, and domestic traditions that prove beyond doubt the presence of an intrusive culture at their major sites.

The wall itself is another question.  While it may be that Zertal is correct, and the site’s 600 m long, 6 m high, and 5 m thick wall may have served, along with its “towers,” as massive fortifications, he acknowledges that it appears to have been “built in ‘patches’ and ‘sections’” (p. 412), a possible indicator that this structure is neither as cohesive nor as temporally constrained as the author imagines it to be.  As the remains of the city wall rise above the entirety of the site’s second (Iron Age) stratum, it is possible that what appears now to be the remnant of a massive fortification was constructed as a retaining wall or terrace during the Roman-Byzantine occupation in Stratum I, and the awkward contouring of rooms to the wall lacks the appearance of planned construction.  This can particularly be seen on the western edge of Area C1, where a small unnamed and evidently unused gap appears north of W4313, and where L3328 appears to be a much larger gap between the area’s architecture and the wall.  In the western portion of Area D, “quarter wall” 3410 appears to intrude on the area’s architecture (cf. p. 47), and the unique “approach” in Area A2 seems too awkward – and too likely to have caused logjams between the outer and inner entrances – to have been a planned feature of the Iron Age city.  Further, Tel Aviv archaeologist Israel Finkelstein has pointed out that the “corridors” in the wall are comparable to well–known highland field towers used for storage and for habitation (IEJ 52: 189).

The issue of the Sherden is more theoretical in nature (their association with Sardinia is itself solely the result of linguistic resemblance), but Zertal dedicates a portion of Part Four to reviewing some of the evidence for their presence and activity in the Near East at this time.  Unfortunately, he provides an incomplete selection and a selective interpretation of that evidence, choosing to read it in the way that best supports his theory while ignoring those portions that detract from his point.  On p. 431 he references the Papyrus Harris I, which lists the Sherden among the invading ‘Sea Peoples’ defeated by Ramesses III and supposedly settled in Egyptian fortresses at home or in Canaan.  However, P. Harris I is a much later account of the Year 8 invasion, and the inscription at Ramesses III’s mortuary temple at Medinet Habu, which was written at least twenty years earlier (and only a few years after the event itself) contains no mention of the Sherden among the sea or land invaders.

On pp. 432–433, Zertal references the Onomasticon of Amenope, an 1100 BC list of peoples and places in the Near East that mentions three Philistine cities followed by three ‘Sea Peoples’ groups (Sherden, Sikil, and Philistines), as evidence that Ramesses III had settled the Sherden to the north of Philistia and of the port city of Dor, which the contemporary Tale of Wen–Amon refers to as the “Harbor of the Sikil.”  However, the Onomasticon is a cryptic text which is filled with lacunae, and which contains almost no context regarding the orientation or ordering of its toponyms and ethnika, thus making any attempt to use it as a map of ‘Sea Peoples’ settlements a risky endeavor at best.  Any effort to securely place non–Philistine ‘Sea Peoples’ anywhere in Canaan is difficult at best, as no material culture template is currently available for the other members of this seafaring coalition.  The Sherden are no different; the centuries of evidence for their presence in Egypt are complemented by an almost total lack of evidence for their presence in Canaan, aside from three possible mentions in letters from the 14th century.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF the site, as noted above, is also problematic – a fact Zertal et al address directly.  Though the authors of this volume put the ceramic and glyptic evidence from el–Ahwat firmly in the late 13th and early 12th centuries, recent radiocarbon analysis of olive pits from the site returned a date range of 1057–952 BC, suggesting that the dates of inhabitation should be lowered by two hundred years.  Even if the early date of 1057 is considered as the final year of the site’s inhabitation, the 50–60 year duration of the site’s inhabitation proposed by Zertal et al would put el–Ahwat’s founding in the final quarter of the 12th century – at least a half century short of the author’s proposed terminus ante quem for the site.

In Ch. 3, Zertal argues that the 14C dates should be ignored on the basis of what he sees as a close correlation between the material finds and corresponding Egyptian archaeology, as the latter is firmly enough known to be impervious to radiocarbon results from a small site in central Israel.  In doing so, he rejects the possibility that the Egyptian objects found at the site, which date to the 14th–12th centuries, were brought to el–Ahwat at a later date as amulets or objects of other perceived value (though even if the site was founded in the late 13th century, some of the Egyptian objects found there would already have been a century old or more at the time of their arrival).  Instead, he argues – on the basis of continue olive cultivation in the vicinity after inhabitation had ceased – that the olive pits selected for testing “could have been introduced there at any time after the site was abandoned in the 12th century BCE” (p. 53).

El–Ahwat’s potential Sardinian connection brings with it another chronological problem.  While the construction of hybrid, “Canaanized” proto–nuraghe could have been carried out by individuals who had traveled to Sardinia in the Late Bronze II and brought that “template” back with them to the Levant, Zertal argues that the small number of sites fitting el–Ahwat’s mold makes this unlikely, writing that “this…possibility is much less plausible for the simple reason that their presence is limited to only four or five sites in 13th–12th century Canaan.  Such limited influence is better explained by ‘colonies’ of immigrants, who brought with them some of their old traditions, rather than by influence derived through trade” (p. 423).  However, proto–nuraghe of the type that Zertal suggests el–Ahwat’s fortifications were patterned after date to the 18th–16th centuries BC; following this time, in the early–middle Nuragic period, there is little evidence on Sardinia of foreign contacts.  While communication with the wider Mediterranean, including the Aegean and Cyprus, grew rapidly in the LB II, Sardinians traveling abroad at this time who sought to build settlements similar to the nuraghe of their home island would likely have constructed the corbel–vaulted nuragic type dwellings which were being made in Sardinia at that time, rather than the “false–domed tholoi” Zertal suggests were built at el–Ahwat.

Interestingly absent from this volume is any discussion of Zertal’s theory that el–Ahwat was the biblical Harosheth Haggoyim, the base of the Canaanite King Jabin’s nine–hundred–strong chariotry under the command of Sisera in the biblical story of Deborah (Judges 4–5).  In a 2010 press release, Zertal championed the possible identification of a chariot linchpin fragment from Area A3 as “[proof] that chariots belonging to high-ranking individuals were found” at el–Ahwat, despite its remote, rugged location, and as evidence “that this was Sisera’s city of residence and that it was from there that the chariots set out on their way to the battle against the Israelite tribes.”

In this site report, by contrast, the only mentions of chariots in the entire volume (by my count) were made in Ch. 17, which deals with the possible linchpin fragment.  The bronze shard in the shape of a female head, which at 2 cm high, 1.6 cm wide, and only 3 mm thick is far thinner, if only slightly smaller in surface area, than the 10 mm thick chariot linchpins from 11th- and 10th-century Ekron and Ashdod that chapter author Oren Cohen uses as comparanda.  As a result of this fragment’s relative frailty, Cohen writes, “it is difficult to establish whether the linchpin…was used for a full-scale chariot or was part of a smaller, cultic feature” (p. 300).  In all, this volume deals with Zertal’s theories about el–Ahwat’s Sardinian connection in a much more measured fashion than some of his previous publications have.  Cohen’s sober analysis of the bronze fragment fits well with the tone of a final excavation report, but it stands in sharp contrast to Zertal’s previous statements about the site and about this particular artifact.

THE FINAL PUBLICATION of the el–Ahwat excavations is valuable for its straightforward presentation of the architecture and material culture of this short-lived site.  Though several passages in the volume can be read as defenses of Zertal’s conclusions about the site’s influences and chronology, the finds are allowed to speak for themselves to a sufficient degree that scholars will be able to draw their own conclusions about el–Ahwat from the material itself, rather than simply from the excavator’s assertions (as had previously been the case with this site).

Further, whether the site truly represents an architectural link with the central Mediterranean and the first material evidence of non–Philistine ‘Sea Peoples’ settlement in the Levant or not, el–Ahwat is a unique site in many ways, not least of which are its remote location (far from water, arable soil, and traveled roads [pp. 413, 435]) and its brief Iron Age duration, which allows it to serve as a rare single-stratum snapshot of settlement (or, in Zertal’s words, a “‘time capsule’…of the period” [p. 3]).  As such, though its legacy may be that of an outside-the-mainstream argument for ‘Sea Peoples’ settlement in the Levant, and though its steep price will confine its circulation almost exclusively to research libraries, this final publication of el–Ahwat will hold great value for those studying settlement, architecture, and change in the hill country culture of Iron Age Canaan.

El–Ahwat: A Fortified Site from the Early Iron Age Near Nahal ‘Iron, Israel, edited by Adam Zertal (ISBN 978–9004176454; 485 pages; $185), is published by Brill.

Add to that just how huge a figure Andrew Breitbart had become in the conservative movement, and you will begin to understand just how big a loss we all suffered last night, when we lost a giant.

Larry Solov announced Andrew’s passing at Big Journalism:

With a terrible feeling of pain and loss we announce the passing of Andrew Breitbart.

Andrew passed away unexpectedly from natural causes shortly after midnight this morning in Los Angeles.
We have lost a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a dear friend, a patriot and a happy warrior.

Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love.

Andrew recently wrote a new conclusion to his book, Righteous Indignation:

I love my job. I love fighting for what I believe in. I love having fun while doing it. I love reporting stories that the Complex refuses to report. I love fighting back, I love finding allies, and—famously—I enjoy making enemies.
Three years ago, I was mostly a behind-the-scenes guy who linked to stuff on a very popular website. I always wondered what it would be like to enter the public realm to fight for what I believe in. I’ve lost friends, perhaps dozens. But I’ve gained hundreds, thousands—who knows?—of allies. At the end of the day, I can look at myself in the mirror, and I sleep very well at night.

Andrew is at rest, yet the happy warrior lives on, in each of us.

Jim Geraghty confirmed that Andrew passed away last night at UCLA medical center.

Andrew was larger than life in many ways. A huge man with an even bigger personality (and a still bigger family), he was kind and generous to a fault, and had a level of dedication and tenacity that few of us will ever be able to understand.

Though he was viewed by many on the left as the reincarnation of the Prince of Darkness himself – a persona he worked very hard to maintain – Andrew was a kind man who cared as passionately about for his fellow man as he did for the conservative cause.

I consider myself lucky to have counted him as a personal friend. Whether it was a week we spent in Israel a few years ago or one of several telephone conversations that took place well after midnight (including once when he had run out of gas down the street from the Playboy mansion and was looking for someone to shoot the bull with while waiting on AAA to arrive), I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to know the man behind the persona – and I can say, without reservation, that Andrew Breitbart the man was fully deserving of every posthumous accolade he will receive today and in the future.

He also deserves a conservative movement that will carry on his work, with the same courage and dedication he brought to it every day, and with the same attitude he conveyed in his conclusion to Righteous Indignation:

I love my job. I love fighting for what I believe in. I love having fun while doing it. I love reporting stories that the Complex refuses to report. I love fighting back, I love finding allies, and—famously—I enjoy making enemies.

Rest in peace, Andrew.

Act of Valor
★★★★ (out of 5)
Directed by Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh
111 minutes

THERE IS NO question that Act of Valor is a unique film, for many reasons.  The most prominent among these is inarguably the combination of active duty Navy SEALs in starring roles, and the extent to which the film’s advertising and promotion have focused on that role – factors that made it a controversial film well before today’s release date arrived.  Was this simply a piece of slickly-produced military propaganda?  Who paid for the film, and how much influence did the Navy have over its contents and artistry? And was it safe to feature active duty Navy SEALs carrying out specialized operations on the big screen, where anybody could see both their identities and their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs)?

I had the opportunity to screen this film and to speak with its directors, Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, before its release, and our conversation touched on each of these topics, as well as Hollywood’s historic portrayal of the military in general, and special operators in particular. McCoy and Waugh knew very little about Navy SEALs and other military professionals prior to beginning this project, which was originally set to be a brief recruiting video. Once the project was under way, though, they realized that the John Rambo/Dale Hawkins image of special operators they were familiar with from previous films was so far from the truth as to be unrecognizable. They were surprised by the humility and the team-centered attitudes they encountered from team members, as well as the role that family played in each’s life. The morphing of the recruiting video project into Act of Valor, and the decision to feature real SEALs and their families in starring roles, is a story that has been told and retold in the run-up to the film’s February 24 release, but it is one which is both important and interesting nonetheless.

The biggest issue taken by serious critics of Act of Valor has been the possibility that it represents military spin or propaganda, as a result of both significant military involvement and the use of active duty operators in the telling of a fictional story. In the opinion of McCoy and Waugh, the propaganda value of the film is minimal for two chief reasons: the fact that the plot doesn’t incorporate a real-world foreign conflict, and the fact that, rather than simply being a slick Hollywood glamorization of Navy SEAL life, the risk and sacrifice borne by all of these military personnel is placed front and center within the story. While this answer won’t satisfy all critics, it is clearly the response that the film’s directors believe such a question deserves.

THOUGH ACTIVE DUTY military personnel and a significant amount of military equipment were used in Act of Valor, McCoy and Waugh maintain that they had complete creative control over the film, with the DoD simply having final input on the TTPs which could endanger operational security (OpSec) if shown on the big screen. Likewise, the SEALs shown in the film – every one of whom reportedly said “no” when first offered their roles – are pseudonymous, and do not appear in the credits, which instead list the Navy Special Warfare (NSW) professionals who have lost their lives in the line of duty since 9/11 (further, as “white” special operators – they are identified as being members of SEAL Team 7 – the SEALs identities and unit affiliation are not protected information).

The Department of Defense did not provide any funding for Act of Valor, but it did provide a remarkable level of access.  The film crew embedded with the Navy Special Warfare (NSW) unit on training exercises over the course of two-plus years, filming the action and integrating it into the film.  Interestingly, one of the biggest complaints by those professional reviewers who are actually attempting to review the film (rather than using their platform as film critics to review U.S. foreign policy as they see it) is that the combat scenes, tactics, and weapons don’t seem realistic. Leaving aside some obvious stretches – such as when one operator catches the body of a sentry after a seven-foot fall without budging an inch (0:42-0:52 here) – and some TTP scrubbing for necessary OpSec reasons, the missions and operations featured in Act of Valor were as authentic as Hollywood has ever made them.  NSW operators planned and executed each phase of the operations.  Some exercises were augmented (for example, a high-priced yacht was used in place of a standard target boat for an open-sea takedown), but all operational situations were planned and executed by the Navy professionals starring in the film. Additionally, the fact that several scenes were filmed during live fire training exercises was a further plus for realism.  Filmmakers can do virtually anything when blanks are being used, but when live ammunition is in play, every move made by those involved is critical, and additional realism is unavoidable.

While there are plenty of legitimate criticisms that can be leveled at any film, Act of Valor included, claims by professional movie-watchers that the action and  the TTPs in this film are less “realistic” than other war and military productions coming out of Hollywood ring exceptionally hollow, particularly given the nearly-identical CGI mashups modern action movies have largely become.  That brings up an other unique aspect of this film: unlike virtually every other action film made in the last decade-plus, Act of Valor boasts precisely zero CGI shots or effects.  Instead, all of the action takes place “in camera” (and, perhaps unsurprisingly in a film directed by former stuntmen, the SEALs perform their own stunts, as well).  In an age where CGI-based movie and video game action, violence, and death appears more ‘realistic’ than reality itself, it is unsurprising that those who have experience only with the former would criticize  the latter as unrealistic or unbelievable.  However, that does not make their critiques correct by any measure.

IN ADDITION TO the TTPs used in carrying out a personnel rescue or a raid on an enemy camp, an example of comprehensive realism in Act of Valor, and a component that is almost never seen on film, is the portrayal of the precise coordination between an amazing number of moving parts that go into pulling off a successful mission.  In one case, a mission begins with a HALO jump from a C-130 and overland movement to the objective; continues with the delivery of NSW Combatant Craft (which are slingloaded under MH-47s) into a riverine environment and the “hot extraction” of the SEALS by the combatant craft crews; and concludes with a recovery by the MH-47s, which fly the boats and personnel back out of the area of operations.  While many films have shown direct action raids (some more realistic than others), the necessary choreography of such an operation – with every piece in exactly the right place at exactly the right time – is rarely seen in film portrayals, and provides far better operational context than almost any film has shown to date.  Additionally, this segment provides some rare screen time for the Navy’s Special Warfare Combatant Craft Crewmembers, who get a chance to ‘roll’ into a hot extraction zone with guns blazing (and who look very cool while doing it). The pieces are different but the coordination is similar in another segment. When two team members deploy to Somalia to perform a strategic reconnaissance mission, they are dropped from a C-130 along with a zodiac They rendezvous with a nuclear submarine, which deposits the SEALs and their delivery vehicle just off the coast.

As a movie, Act of Valor is solid, if not outstanding, and is likely destined to become as much a favorite among military members, supporters, and veterans (if not among the remainder of the population) as films like Black Hawk Down. The focus is narrow – the SEALs take up as much as 90% of the total screen time – and the plot is fairly simple. A CIA agent is taken captive by a billionaire drug and weapons smuggler who is assisting a childhood friend, a Chechen Muslim, in a plot to strike America with a squad of suicide bombers. Upon rescuing the CIA agent, the greater plot is uncovered, and members of the featured SEAL platoon are dispatched to different parts of the globe to collect intelligence on and to prevent the terrorist plot.

It is impossible to watch the film without knowing that the stars are not professional actors (McCoy and Waugh appear in a clip before the opening credits and explain their decision to cast real SEALs in their roles). As a result, the somewhat wooden acting and dialogue aren’t too distracting or disappointing. For non-actors, they do very well (better than some professional actors, in fact). Though it’s easy to tell when a professional actor, such as the charismatic smuggler, is on the screen, some of the best give-and-take dialogue comes when the SEAL Team’s “senior chief,” an active duty intelligence professional, interrogates the smuggler (played by Alex Veadov) on his yacht (if only real-world interrogations were as smooth and productive as the one presented here!). “[Senior Chief] had just gotten back from Afghanistan,” Veadov told the New York Times. “At first it was OK. As it progressed a little, and he starts throwing things around, it kind of became a little tense. When he started speaking Croatian, though, it became freaky. I don’t speak Croatian, but he must have looked me up on the Internet. I had done a play with a Croatian company. So he did research on me as an actor. And I was little bit intimidated. After all, this is what this guy does for a living.”

The narrow scope of the film means that non-germane, macro-level issues of American foreign policy and war aren’t dealt with (much to the chagrin of some reviewers, who have roundly criticized that omission in an already-lengthy movie). Instead of dealing with outside issues at length, the film is very character- and operation-centric. Details and larger issues that don’t affect the individuals on the Team or the events within the plot aren’t raised at all – a fact which is, in this reviewer’s view, a net positive for the film and for those issues, as they would necessarily have been given short shrift if introduced into the film simply for the sake of mentioning them. What is given much-deserved attention is the level of risk encountered by these professionals each time they set foot “outside the wire,” as well as the incalculable weight carried by those family members and loved ones who are left behind, either to await an eventual return or to mourn the fact that no return will be forthcoming. The latter is portrayed in Act of Valor with the same heartfelt realism that the SEALs’ dedication to their mission, their ethos, and to each other is displayed, and each segment of this film serves as a send-up to one or more of those aspects of the warriors’ and the spouses’ every-day risks, concerns, and experiences.

THIS FILM IS not for every audience. While some will be adamantly opposed to its method of creation and its message, and others will remain skeptical or ambivalent, I expect it to resonate very effectively with its target audiences. Those who are naturally inclined to view overt support of the military in a positive light will appreciate that aspect of Act of Valor, while those who have experienced events, actions, and losses like those shown in this film will likely view this as a valuable but rare opportunity not only to connect with a film personally, but to have at least some of those impossible-to-express experiences and losses spoken about and demonstrated on their behalf to friends, family members, and countrymen who (through no fault of their own) could not otherwise hope to understand such things.

That last attribute, to me, represents Act of Valor‘s greatest value. A movie as narrowly-scoped and unabashedly pro-military as this is bound to be divisive, and the central role of the active duty Navy SEALs in the film and in its advertising campaigns only heightens the controversy surrounding it. That division can already be seen in the dichotomy between professional film critics’ response to the movie, and that of the public at large (at the time of this writing, the Rotten Tomatoes film review composites for Act of Valor are 8% positive from professional reviewers and almost 90% positive from the public). However, there is no question that the film’s directors would welcome that split with open arms. It is abundantly clear that the target audience of Act of Valor was not professional movie-watchers, but middle America – and, more specifically, those who have served, who are currently serving, or who will serve in the future, who wish to see a picture of the U.S. military as the military wants to be seen, rather than as Hollywood wishes to see it.  In this, Waugh and McCoy have certainly succeeded, as this audience will be most responsive to and appreciative of all aspects of Act of Valor, from its painstaking effort at realism to its honoring of military veterans through accuracy, attention to detail, and through putting some of America’s least known warriors and their families on camera both as warfighters and, more importantly, as people.