Talk:Ubeidiya prehistoric site

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Wikidata mess

There is a problem with the relevant Wikidata entries. There are three items of interest:

1. Ubeidiya, the world-renowned prehistoric archaeological site.
2. Tell Ubeidiya, a tell some 400 m away from Ubeidiya.
3. Al-'Ubaydiyya, a depopulated former Palestinian village, that covered the tell.

Currently, the abandoned village of Al-'Ubaydiyya has the Wikidata entry Q4702134 (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4702134).

The tell, Tell Ubeidiya, as an archaeological site, has the Wikidata entry Q2660882 (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2660882).

Ubeidiya, the prehistoric archaeological site, wrongly shares the Wikidata entry with the tell, i.e. Q2660882.

The Wikidata entry Q2660882 is a mess, mixing disparate data about the tell, and the prehistoric site, which are clearly distinct.

So the problem is that somebody named the Wikidata entry for the prehistoric site of Ubeidiya, "Tell Ubeidiya", and mixed data from both onto that Wikidata page, which is totally WRONG. The tell (Tell Ubeidiya) is 400 m away from the site of Ubeidiya, and archaeologically speaking, isn't even excavated and is of relatively little interest, as it is one among many Bronze-Age-to-Persian-period tells in the region. Whereas Ubeidiya is the second-oldest site with traces of humans outside Africa. A difference of some 1,4 million years, 400 m, and a huge one in magnitude of scientific importance.

Right now, Tell Ubeidiya is only mentioned on Wikipedia as a sideline on the Ubeidiya page, and is there just because the confusion is so common and because the tell doesn't have a Wikipedia article of its own as an archaeological site.

We need to decouple/disconnect on Wikidata the tell from Ubeidiya. Theoretical solutions: either

• A) Q2660882 remains connected to Ubeidiya, after being cleaned of al reference to the unrelated tell (starting with the photo); or
• B) Ubeidiya gets a new Wikidata number and page, and Q2660882 is left only for the tell; or
• C) Q2660882 disappears altogether, and the tell information is transferred to the Al-'Ubaydiyya Wikidata entry.

B) The problem is that the WikiDATA page would remain orphaned until the tell gets its own WikiPEDIA article, which might never happen. Or is that common and not a problem? If that will be the case, Q2660882 must retain ONLY tell-related information.

C) Al-'Ubaydiyya already has its own Wikidata entry, and it is all about a village documented back to the 16th century CE and not more. However, the Bronze Age city on tell is probably going back another 3000 years or more, and has been tentatively connected to Yenoam, a city mentioned in inscriptions from the 15th to the 12th century BCE.

Wikidata is not my field, we have a big mess, maybe somebody who's more familiar with Wikidata can offer a solution. Thanks, Arminden (talk) 17:28, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Arminden, shall we try to fix the coordinates? They are wrong on this article, as they point to the tell. Is https://www.govmap.gov.il/?c=252458.28,732860.73&z=9&b=1 the correct location? Onceinawhile (talk) 21:09, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Onceinawhile, hi, I'm all for it. The only thing I believe to recognise on the satellite picture is the shed. There was some kind of a slanting roof over the main discovery site, I guess made of corrugated iron, and that one in the picture seems just right. Otherwise it's in the middle of nowhere, there's nothing else I can go by. I'd say I can be 80% sure. Good enough? Aaa, wait, the girl from BibleWalks uses GPS, she's totally trustworthy in this regard. Yep. She's got it all, including a drone pic: https://www.biblewalks.com/ubeidiya. So centre it on the white shed and it's perfect (her white square is at the margin of the excavated area). It's the only area at the foot (= east) of the slope not used for agriculture, that's another good way to define the outline and boundaries. Now we have it. Go ahead! Thank you, Arminden (talk) 21:38, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Lol, Arminden; just about everything on wikidata is a HUGE mess; I am trying to clean up some up in Lebanon...and it is taking ages. If you have what goes where here; I can make a try, unless Onceinawhile beats me to it; Huldra (talk) 23:45, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

@Arminden and Huldra: I am happy to sort this out (also some work is required at commons). First it would be good to tidy up the names. Some problems are:

• Al-'Ubaydiyya and al-Ubeidiya should not have different English orthography.
• The name "Ubeidiya" is most commonly used in articles about the prehistoric site, but it is not used solely to refer to the excavations. The articles frequently refer to the excavation happening "in [the wider areas of] Ubeidiya" or near "Tell Ubeidiya"

So to clear this up I would vote for the following:

• Ubeidiya redirects to Ubeidiya prehistoric site as the most common usage
• Ubeidiya (disambiguation) created
• Al-'Ubaydiyya -> Ubeidiya, Tiberias
• al-Ubeidiya -> Ubeidiya, West Bank

OK? Onceinawhile (talk) 21:39, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

Hi. The article cannot ignore what's out there already. Ubeidiya is widely published, so even the 'U at the beginning is an issue. The Palestinian village near Bethlehem is on a highway built to a large degree by USAID, so it might also have an established spelling, it must be checked. There is already a disamb. page for Al-Ubaid, listing 10 (!) valid and common spellings, to which I have added a sub-category "Places ⇒ Ubeidiya" for the 3 articles we're talking about, with an explanation (suffix -iya) in the lead. Arminden (talk) 04:38, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

@Arminden: agreed. See below:

• Ubeidiya prehistoric site => Sources with this usage include Zvi Garfunkel; Zvi Ben-Avraham; Elisa Kagan (3 July 2014). Dead Sea Transform Fault System: Reviews. Springer. p. 125. ISBN 978-94-017-8872-4. and ‘Ubeidiya, Hadashot Arkheologiyot, Excavations and Surveys in Israel, Volume 126 Year 2014, ISSN 1565 - 5334
• Ubeidiya, Tiberias => This is the correct spelling per File:Ubeidiya village boundaries and location of prehistoric site.png
• Ubeidiya, West Bank => This is the correct spelling per File:2018 OCHA OpT map Bethlehem.jpg

If we are agreed on this, then the only question is whether the apostrophe is appropriate in the name of all three articles. What do you think? FYI a related debate took place previously at Talk:Omar#Requested move 19 September 2020. Onceinawhile (talk) 11:31, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

You can never rely on this or that map. None of them is the authority in this matter. The UN map there for instance has the very imaginative spelling Duheisha. Everybody knows Deheisheh camp, sometimes spelled Dheisheh or (the ending -a is all the rage in anticolonial circles, it seems, who hate -eh for some hard to grasp reason), Dheisha. Lawrence despised so deeply any attempt at transliterating Arabic, that he consciously and intentionally used different spellings within the same book. Arrogant Oxford shit, the guy. You have to love him for this. In other words: I don't care terribly much. As a rule, I make redirects for all popular variants, and for the official title I usually check out on Google: I go to the last actual page of hits to see the real number; Wiki-related hits are excluded; mainly the academic sources count if the topic is science-related. Arminden (talk) 18:36, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Arminden. I have made these name changes; it is much cleaner now. Onceinawhile (talk) 12:06, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

Name

Onceinawhile, hi. I don't know where SWP got its etymology from, but it seems to me that they didn't fully hit it. 'Abd is slave, 'ubeid has an added diminutive it seems, so "little slave". Not my specialty and the 'ubeid page offers no source, but it sounds plausible and a source should be available somewhere out there, and I don't mean Rotem (BibleWalks) this time :) (She offers a "historical explanation" too, which sounds somewhat less plausible). Arminden (talk) 12:09, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

Hi Arminden, yes it was at Biblewalks that I first saw this. I have been searching for a verification of their suggestion that it has an African connection, but it seems that Biblewalks just made that up out of thin air. Today Abeed is considered the Arabic equivalent of the N-word, but looking at 19th century Arabic dictionaries like Arabic–English Lexicon (see [1]) there was no African connection then. Onceinawhile (talk) 12:54, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

@Onceinawhile: Rotem seems to have something like family friends and relatives who work in academia, but she accepts stories & popular etymologies as fact and includes them in her postings. I wasn't giving credit to the former slaves as settlers story, but the diminutive in 'ubeid is there. That's what I meant, that the name comes from 'ubeid, not from 'abd. I wouldn't exclude a connection to Obadiah, maybe the Naming Committee made it up, maybe there's more to it.

There are many black Palestinians in a quarter near Al-Aqsa, in port cities, in Jericho, I'm hearing that among Negev Bedouin too, but that I cannot confirm. The fellaheen brought by Ibrahim Pasha from Upper Egypt who settled Jisr es-Zarqa are also darker than "native" Arabs. So it's theoretically possible, but I don't think it's likely. Out of thin air it's not, she has it from somewhere and I wouldn't dismiss it as a possibility, but it's nowhere close to being a RS.

Now I see there's an incipient article on the topic, Afro-Palestinians, but it deals almost only with Jerusalem & environs. Arminden (talk) 14:46, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

1940s village boundaries map for 1.5 million years old lakeside site?

@Onceinawhile: I won't come back to this, it's a promise to myself, this has gotten far too much for me, but please ask yourself: What on earth does a map with village boundaries from the 1940s has to do with a 1.5 million years old lakeside site? Even the ground on which the findings were made is now tilted by 45 degrees, so not even the topography and geology of the site is the same. But you take the effort and highlight village boundaries. It's got nothing to do with Israelis, Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, Israelites, Canaanites, not even with Adam & Eve, mitochondrial/Y-chromosomal or otherwise; it predates all of those by many orders of magnitude. And you place it here, and not on the page of the depopulated village. It's not some fix idea of mine, but it's so in anyone's face! It's by now happening every time, by reflex, and there's not even necessarily intentional, it's not about you, X, Y, or Z: it's become the default way.

The map is

• not reflecting the situation 1.5 million years ago
• not reflecting the situation at the time of discovery and excavation
• not particularly helpful for today's visitor with finding the site

So, what is it good for? The answer is in the question and in the map itself.

As I have written before, he tell is only even mentioned here in the article because the confusion tell-prehistoric site keeps on popping up. And a little because it has no page of its own (yet). But it never was meant to be the focus of the page. And look now: detailed map of Palestinian village, picture of the tell - and nothing of the kind balancing things out and placing the focus on the actual topic. I know the SWP and Mandate maps are easy to grab, but they're not the only options available. And creating the totally wrong focus can easily be worse than having less or no images on an unconnected side topic. In honest. That's all I have to say, I've been here a dozen times too often. Arminden (talk) 20:26, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

Hi Arminden, the primary reason is that the site has been given an Arabic name of a village that no longer exists. The map illustrates the reason why the site acquired its name. The map has a secondary benefit as being the most detailed out-of-copyright map available for the surrounding area. Onceinawhile (talk) 21:08, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

As an aside, I was rather hoping you would be positively surprised by the fact that the caption did not include any reference to depopulation, destruction, Palestinian people, ethnic cleansing etc. I made a conscious effort to keep it sanitized of any negative history. On a related note, I read the comments you made five years ago at Talk:Al-Manshiyya, Tiberias – I am not sure what the right answer is but your comments don’t appear to have been addressed. Onceinawhile (talk) 21:19, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

The village was depopulated, maybe also destroyed (or maybe the houses collapsed with time, but I'd guess both). But that's all for that page, not this. I don't think anyone takes away the name information from the map rather than from the text (if it's not mentioned, it should be). The result now is a focus on the tell and the village. All well intended, no doubt, but with the same end result. There are good relevant site and area plans at Belmaker and others, which can be "paraphrased" if one wishes to draw a map for the area in Early Pleistocene. Mind that the very old dates for Yiron (2Mya) and Erk el-Ahmar (I think 1.7 or 1.8) have been thoroughly dismissed by Bar-Yosef in 2010, but the other sites are valid. The story here is: early move out of Africa, savanna type environment next to now gone lake, hominins mainly scavanging what carnivores left behind after hunting, with some hunting of their own. Unlike Dmanisi, no human skull found, just a couple of teeth (and "I2", no idea what that might be) in terms of human skeletal remains, but tools, butchered animal remains, fauna (hipo, bovids). The hominins kept on coming back, at different times, different species, making it an important site on the constantly revisited Levantine corridor, more than just a place where an isolated group crawled to die in an isolated foray with no evolutionary consequence like many others before and some after. Tectonic fault line (maimly: rift valley) and other factors caused the relevant layers to break and fold, which gives an idea of the time magnitude. That is the story and should be the focus. And it's quite a story. About Manshiyeh, if that's what you mean: I can't remember much. Zero had a couple of leads. Mind that there are at least two ruined mills on the right side of the floodplain of the Jordan, which used the waters of Wadi Fijjas, probably one each for 'Ub. and Mansh., but I don't know. Arminden (talk) 22:21, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

I'm sorry if it came out too harsh towards you personally. Just stop and think of it: we're talking Early Pleistocene, even the Earth's surface has changed since and h. sapiens was still far in the future. And you need to "make a conscious effort to keep it sanitized of any negative history". That's exactly, precisely, 100% what I mean. It's madness. If Lucy comes up, does anyone need to fight an urge of mentioning the 1880s or 1980s Ethiopian famines, or Mussolini, or anything but human evolution? When Dmanisi comes up, does it matter how far it is from the minefields left behind by the war with Russia? Does anyone associate Denisova Cave with the Russian Empire militarily and culturally crushing local tribes, or Stalin redrawing the population map of the region? No, nor should it. All topics with high merit, but in their own space and time. Arminden (talk) 23:12, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

Arminden, thanks for this. You named three sites:

• Two sites in very sparsely inhabited areas: the Denisova Cave and Hadar, Ethiopia. Both Lucy and Denisova have rather unusual naming stories, which are explained in their respective articles.
• The Dmanisi historic site, which combines the whole historical area in one place

This article is akin to Dmanisi, yet here we had expunged the known historical period. We can assume this was not intentional, but it is very common throughout Wikipedia’s Israeli location articles, and in real touristic areas in Israel, to ignore the period of habitation by anyone who lived there in the last 2000 years.

The fact that this prehistoric location is right next to, and named after, a site which was known to be inhabited for centuries if not millennia in historic times, is of clear relevance. It doesn’t matter who inhabited it, which is why we don’t mention that. But it should not be sensitive that this important prehistoric site was named after the Palestinian village land on which it was found.

Onceinawhile (talk) 00:11, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

There is no such thing as a place continuously inhabited for many centuries if not millennia in the Southern Levant. The chance of finding one is close to that of finding hidden worlds à la Jules Verne, 1970s movies or King Kong. Not Canaanite, Israelite, Philistine, Jewish, Samaritan, Arab or otherwise. Everyone who edits in this field should read enough dig reports and history books first until reaching this conclusion. The Philistines are gone, the Samaritans almost gone, and Armenians in I/P and Jordan are approaching that point. Eskimos have their many words for snow, (the region's?) Arabic has at least two for formerly inhabited sites, tell and khirba. Everybody in the region knows it, and everybody dealing with it should know it. Jerusalem and Jericho, so often mentioned as being among the oldest continuously inhabited places blabla, are not. They both had clear hiatuses. As did every other currently large or small village or town I've looked into. Climate, war, collapse of empires, all led to massive population losses and a move from settled to (semi)nomadic life among those who stayed and survived. Any other claim is for the "benefit" of gullible tourists or propaganda consumers. There are certain cultural continuums, as are founding myths beyond them. Both very powerful. And often dangerous dragons. Which don't need feeding from places flirting with being academically motivated. There's no serious scholar debating the emergence of Palestinian national conscience and nationhood beyond the mid-19th century, the main dispute being between the early and the mid-20th. The population had huge fluctuations, with heaps of ethnic groups moving in and others moving out, while those staying put flourishing at times or being decimated at other times. There is no large Jewish presence for many centuries. There is no Muslim majority until the end of the 12th century. The Byzantine period saw a peak in overall population, the vast majority of them Christian. The 19th century saw a low in overall population. This is the base. The rest are individual cases. Pushing national narratives where they don't belong might have a political or even moral merit, but none whatsoever in terms of rational science-based discourse. If there ever have been topics where such tendencies are out of place, then the early evolution of the human race at one end and global climate change at the other must be such. Everything happens locally, but not everything is connected to every local aspect. Rational approach begins where the scholastic or otherwise mythological "holistic" one stops. Arminden (talk) 05:49, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi Arminden, I agree with everything you just wrote. From the beginning to the end. More than that, the position you have set out is central and foundational to my perspective on this region. It underpins most of my editing interests in the history of the region. I have written similar things, on all the topics you covered, dozens of times on talk pages across this project.

It has made me wonder, if we are in such violent agreement on all the foundations, how can we possibly disagree on anything? Yet we have had disagreements similar to this one on so many pages.

It makes for an interesting case study that our friendly researcher @Sarabnas: might find enlightening.

Onceinawhile (talk) 11:17, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

I'll donate my body to science, starting with leaving my brain & specifically the centre for the temper to Sarabnas. Let him find out if it connects in any way to the sense of humour. Arminden (talk) 18:21, 1 August 2021 (UTC)