A friend of mine from seminary, Sam Boyd, who is completing a PhD in Ancient Near Eastern studies at University of Chicago just got his name published in the NY Times and Archeology Magazine for being part of a team that unearthed a 2,800 year old monument. Follow the links to find out about their dig and what they unearthed. Here’s a clipping from the Times piece;

In a mountainous kingdom in what is now southeastern Turkey, there lived in the eighth century B.C. a royal official, Kuttamuwa, who oversaw the completion of an inscribed stone monument, or stele, to be erected upon his death. The words instructed mourners to commemorate his life and afterlife with feasts “for my soul that is in this stele.”

University of Chicago archaeologists who made the discovery last summer in ruins of a walled city near the Syrian border said the stele provided the first written evidence that the people in this region held to the religious concept of the soul apart from the body. By contrast, Semitic contemporaries, including the Israelites, believed that the body and soul were inseparable, which for them made cremation unthinkable, as noted in the Bible.