“Arid” Apocalypse

Members of the Group

Kate Cooper

Pamela Karimi

Melanie Le Touze

Bronwen Neil

Adam Stock

Tristan Sturm

Introduction: Thinking Apocalyptically about “Arid” Lands

The primary focus of this group is to investigate and analyze various literary works, books, and articles that explore themes related to the apocalypse, the Anthropocene, the end of the world, and the anxieties associated with these concepts, particularly in relation to space and spatial characteristics. Given the current research interests of most group members, which revolve around arid lands, the desert as a space plays a central role in our discussions. The majority of the selected readings originate from regions of the world that are experiencing desertification or where global warming has had the most significant impact, resulting in prolonged periods of drought. Our aim, at least initially, was to examine these desert landscapes, which are on the brink of depopulation and collapse, or in other words, facing the end or the apocalypse, from diverse perspectives.

Our readings refocused, however, around seeing how the desert environment has been defined, occupied, colonized and exploited historically, specifically how these desert spaces were represented as having undergone socio-environmental apocalypses to justify such western colonization. We want to explore how geographers, historians, architectural historians, and scholars in the fields of visual, literary, and material culture have approached the study of such environments. Additionally, we recognize the importance of incorporating insights from political science and religious studies to gain a more comprehensive understanding of our subject. Through a carefully curated set of readings, we hope to shed light on the implications of contemplating the apocalypse in desert landscapes, which have long been regarded as symbols of the end of life itself.

Our study encompasses both historical and contemporary perspectives on desert spaces, with the aim of identifying valuable lessons from past inhabitants of desert environments that can be applied to our current context. As mentioned, we are equally interested in examining how these areas are presently lived, experienced, and conceptualized within the work of scholars from various disciplines. By bringing together a diverse range of viewpoints and research methodologies, we seek to develop a nuanced and multifaceted understanding of the complex relationship between desert landscapes, the apocalypse, and the human experience in the face of environmental challenges.

Lastly, we want to explain the rationale behind the title of this reading session group. Throughout our readings, we observed that the desert has often been portrayed as a no man's land and a void to be occupied and exploited by others. Despite centuries of human and animal activity in the desert, colonial and pseudo-colonial agents in the modern period viewed it as a wasteland deserving of occupation and exploitation. This perspective led us to place the word "arid" in quotation marks, signifying that the perceived barrenness of the desert is a constructed notion, not what we collectively understood through our discussions and readings.

What is the Desert?

The desert is always a landscape, but landscape is not always a desert.  Represented from its high points and vistas, the desert landscape is usually a panoramic representation and, as such, a commanding, authoritative, and patriarchal positionality. In short, it is a way of seeing and, crucially, a way of owning that view.

We find within such representations of deserts the apocalyptic, defined here and borrowing from Lee Quinby’s (1995, 33) feminist Anti-Apocalypse, “a master narrative… [of] certain and total truth.” As apocalypse—at least in a biblical sense—is a master narrative, it is also a hierarchical and comanding one, “since apocalyptic order means masculinist rule” (Quinby 1999, 101). Like landscape’s post-renaissance single linear-cum-aerial perspective, apocalypse too is a hierarchical ideology often from a singular patriarchal perspective. The gaze from landscape is an absolute one, singular, total; to command the landscape is to command the truth of that landscape. This apocalyptic desert landscape analytically takes place across at least three temporal fantasies for which we borrow the conceptual language of Thomas Cole’s apocalyptic paintings, The Course of Empire (1833-36):

The Savage State (pre-colonial past): From a Western perspective, the desert is often perceived as the antithesis of nature. Nature is pristine, enclosed, complex, fecund, productive and the desert if void, unmade, empty. Perceptions of deserts past, without the civilizational influence and structure, are perceived as ruins or wastelands: a place left fallow and uncivilized. Such earthly wastelands and social savagery are the result of either the disciplinary hand of God or by human absence or neglect.  Colonial justifications here are based on a set of cartesian dualisms savage/civilized, death/life, brown/green, nomadic/cultivated.  This “savage” desert is imagined as terra nullius (territory without a master) and also vacuum domicilium (empty of inhabitants). Imagining such geographies as empty is necessary for the colonial/imperial “affliction,” in Said’s words.

The Consumption of Empire (colonial present): Desert-life can no longer be simply described by the structure and vestige of the “post-colonial,” but rather the “colonial present” to emphasize the active colonial taking and remaking of desert landscapes (Gregory’s 2005). The colonial presumption is that the nomadic or ”savage” society that the desert produces can be overcome via advanced colonial cultures. Imagined geographies of desert landscapes act as a theater for performative and representational fantasies of civilizational intervention to make the land fecund, productive, and/or “bloom,” and thus brought back from the desolate apocalyptic landscape categorization of “savage.” Such blooming desert landscape imaginations justify imperialism and its attendant consumptive fruits of war and extraction.

 Destruction and Desolation (colonial futures): The last apocalyptic temporality is the future which sits between two foreclosed imaginations: 1. The Post-Apocalyptic: a secular imagination of that which will be destroyed by the excesses of earthly and human violence of vampiric colonialism. 2. The Millennial: The Christian, Muslim, and/or Jewish deus ex machina where a messiah intervenes in Earthly affairs to bring about a righteous end and utopian beginning. 

Theme #1. Desert Landscapes

a) Desert Landscapes as Voids

In the bustling Bäckerei under the CAPAS office, Anouk Ehreiser, an astrobiologist, reminded our group that the Martian desert is not a monotonous landscape of the same, nor is it empty. European cultural vision is trained to see complexity in the built environment and human presence; indeed, a desert is often considered the antithesis of “nature,” which our perception holds in balance as both complexity and placidity. The western epistemology of desert as empty is one likely linked to the colonial encounter of the Middle East, both as a culture of seeing that preceded such violence and, for what will frame the rest of this entry, a method of owning the view.

It is this latter point that captures the power of the landscape. More than a colloquialism of all the parts of a situation, a milieu, or an aesthetics of seeing and a mediated space, landscape is a masculinist visual representation and as such an ideological subject position. That position is a privileged view from a single perspective or sovereign. From this on-high, usually panoramic, vantage point power is naturalized with a bare aesthetics of beauty. Mitchell (1995, 275) more eloquently frames this argument: “The empty landscape, the waste or wilderness or void, is an iconoclastic icon; it throws down the high places and smashes the traces of indigenous or aboriginal dwelling. The desert is, as Roland Barthes might put it, landscape degree zero.”  Here Barthes’ “zero degree” is not so much a neutral aesthetic beyond a dominant culture, but rather landscape acts as the bare foundation from which an imperial culture can build a story about itself.

Said argues in his chapter that imperial “culture”—meaning here nationalist mythologies about glorious, older past presence, origin stories etc—are mobilized to create a poetics of landscape. The dominant justification for Zionist occupation of Palestine was that of “emptiness,” that the land was either empty of people or empty of people with civilizational capacity. As Said (1995, 253) explains:

the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty went an equally basic motif, that of making the desert bloom, the inference being that Palestine was either empty ( as in the Zionist slogan, "a land without people for a people without land") or neglected by the nomads and peasants who facelessly lived on it. The main idea was to deny the Palestinians not just a historical presence as a collectivity but also to imply that they were not a people who had a long-standing peoplehood.

Said is describing a form of terra nullius or more precisely, vacuum domicilium, which borrows from roman law and is canonized by Locke to legally justify the occupation of empty land “discovered” through colonial expansion and settlement. However, I was struck by Mitchell’s (xi) use of the term “void” when he writes, “space were the negative void that rushes in when a place is vacated. It is the spectral absence that ‘fills’ a hollow shell or a clearing in the forest.” Whilst not developed in distinction to ‘empty,’ I think the double meaning of the word void, both ‘completely empty’ and ‘not valid or legally binding,’ which better captures development of this argument, might better replace empty to speak of the way narrative and law merge to justify desert dispossession.

Said assigns an intentionality to the building of a Zionist ethic of Palestinian dispossession—logics of terra nullius included—as an ‘invention.’ There is no doubt that Zionist nation building was planned at some level, but oddly, ‘culture’ which Said is at pains to argue drives imperialist desires in his book Imperialism and Culture, takes second seat to a more Marxist understanding of hierarchical power. Said does, however, open space to think about how culture, specifically historical cultures of Palestine and the 1948 Nakba, are under constant revision. Here, landscape is best understood as a verb, a process or doing. Scripting landscapes or ‘landscaping,’ despite giving the illusion of being simply static and inert objects, are processes. As Mitchell (1992, 1) writes, landscape is not an “object to be seen or a text to be read, but a process by which social and subjective identities are formed.” Landscape is then co-constitutional, through its performative (re)making, so too does it bolster and (re)form ideology.

As meaning is applied to landscapes through various cultural mediums, Zionists naturalized operations of power by simplifying them through the erasure of that which does not fit their imaginings: in this case the presence of Palestinians. Landscaping is therefore an organizing principle that sustains mystification and is re-constructed through performances. Landscape is not just iconographic or performative; it can produce a hegemonic experience.

b) Of Cultures, Canons, and terra nullius Spaces

Our second reading group session was devoted to selections from Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1994). In his introduction, Said locates the text as a follow on from Orientalism (1978), which tries “to expand the arguments… to describe a more general pattern or relationships between the modern metropolitan West and its overseas territories” (xi). Principally, though by no means solely through a focus on literary texts, Said outlines the conceptual architecture that legitimates the white gaze and the dominant position of the coloniser against the colonised in the cultures of the West. For Said the discursive precedes the material, so that “the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire”: intellectual preparations are needed before the act of building an empire through conquest, war, economic domination etc can be successful. These things, Said believes, cannot happen by chance or in a purely contingent manner and nor are they only the result of the impersonal forces which, in Marxist historiography, compel capitalist economies to find new markets and raw materials abroad, because economic relations do not give these ventures coherence. It is culture which both legitimates colonialism and imperialism, and also grants ‘the colonial’ and ‘the imperial’ coherence. To a certain extent, the ideas compel the action.

Readers have long noted the influence of Foucault on Said. The method outlined above demonstrates how far the influence runs. It is through cultural expressions that the imperial becomes a sort of ‘episteme,’ governing the limits of truth claims that can be made about the world within the metropolitan culture. Thus he writes of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in a long close-reading of the text that “Conrad scrupulously recorded the differences between the disgraces of Belgian and British colonial attitudes, but he could only imagine the world carved up into one or another Western sphere of dominion” (24). We felt that for Said, Conrad occupied a privileged position as a commentator on empire (originally) from the hinterlands of Europe in the east, both inside and outside the European system and an acute observer of the colonial life which he also took part in on behalf of European states. Conrad was also something of a typical choice for Said, who begins the book by examining a passage from T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: Conrad is a canonical author, and while there are occasions in this book where non-western writers are quoted, overall Said betrays the sensibilities of a scholar educated in the Princeton and Harvard English Departments in the 1950s and early 60s. Arab writers, for example, are often namechecked here, but it is rarer that they are quoted in detail (as, e.g. Darwish is (226)), and less frequent still they are given the sort of space accorded to the Irish anti-colonialist author (and canonical modernist) W. B. Yeats. In the selections we focused on, Said is more interested in reading “against the grain’ of canonical writers by re-framing their work than (for example) understanding precisely what Africans thought about imperialism through their own cultures of resistance, although he does at times turn to this.

As scholars interested in space and apocalypse our reading of Said was wide-ranging. We found the work enormously productive to think with, against and beyond. In the portions we focused on, Said engaged on several occasions with Frantz Fanon to work through the development of national consciousness. Yet the idea of “the nation” and its relation to literature is not one Said unpacks. By contrast, Said offers clear definitions of the colonial and the imperial, and discusses, in detail, the discursive mechanisms by which space is politicized into metropole and periphery. Hence, in relation to Heart of Darkness, Said argues that what Conrad wants readers to accept is that he’s creating the thing he is describing. Conrad also helps Said to make the point that how we imagine spaces governs what we think can happen in them (and we think in turn has a material affect on what does happen in them).

Finishing our discussion we turned to consider some of the things we might take away from Said with regards to deserts specifically, as well as territory, and nature. Our discussions had highlighted the way that deserts are treated in the Occidental imagination as both open and empty on the one hand, and ruined and desecrated on the other. They resist colonial representation except as open vistas and yet this very openness renders them also open for representation, albeit only as a surface onto which Western ideas, dreams, and visions can be projected. In future weeks we decided to pick up on landscape as a Western structuring concept and way of seeing. Interestingly, in a later point in Culture and Imperialism (225-7), Said discusses ecological imperialism. This is written relatively early in the history of ecocriticism in literary studies, and the appearance of this section opened up to us the question of whether further reading of Said would be helpful to consider his analysis of the ecological: how might Said’s work help us for example to understand the mechanisms by which the doctrine of terra nullius could become commonsensical to Western views of colonial spaces when it was plainly, materially obvious that many people did indeed live in such zones? How did indigenous people become read in legal doctrine as merely part of ‘the landscape’ rather than subject beings and ethical agents?

c) Geographies of Climate Envy

In The Climate of History, Dipesh Chakrabarty emphasizes the importance of interpreting historical texts through the lens of environmental issues. Inspired by this approach, we applied it to an influential text, Occidentosis: A Disease from the West, by Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-i Ahmad. We focused specifically on his references to the desert and its influence on perceptions and perspectives regarding the ‘self’ versus the ‘other.’

Jamal al Al-i came from a prominent Shia Muslim family in Iran, and grew up in reduced circumstances after his family were removed from power by the political change in Iran. The English translation by R. Campbell was made from the uncensored version released in 1978, nine years after his death in 1969.

Al-i was a fervent Marxist in his youth, leading him to move away from his Muslim faith, but he soon became disenchanted by the Soviet Union. He strongly disagreed with the Shi’ite persecution of Sunnis in Iran. He remained outspoken against Islamic theocracy in Iran, and published his series of tracts on the mental disease he believed was afflicting Iran in its orientation towards the West and its voluntary subordination to western industry and exploitation.

 In many of the themes visited in this work, it prefigures Edward Said’s more famous critique of western imperialism, Orientalism. Al-i rejected the ‘machine’ of mechanised industry, which he could see fast becoming a global trend, because the Western countries always remained owners of the machines, to the detriment of their eastern trading partners, who provided the primary goods being processed by secondary industry in the West. This power imbalance was reflected in economic disparity and perceived cultural inferiority of eastern (Muslim) nations like Iran.

Deserts vs Clouds and the Geography of Climate Envy

The final paragraph of chapter 2, entitled “Earliest Signs of the Illness,” refers to how ‘we,’ meaning the people of Iran “pretend to be free just like them. We sort the world into good and bad along the lines they late out. We dress like them. We write like them.” He refers to Western cities with reliable rainfall as a source of jealousy in the East.

On page 41 he writes about the geopolitics of imperialism, moving from western cold climates to southern seas and deserts:

Perhaps we have turned to the West because, in this parched plain, we have always expected Mediterranean clouds. The light rises in the east, but for us denizens of the Iranian plateau, the rain-bearing clouds have always come from the west. Thus we flee from the deserts of the south and the northeast in search of water and verdure, in a move opposite the northern Europeans’ flight from the cold and rain and ice of their homes to the warm southern seas.

Al-i Ahmad’s seminal text, which has had a profound impact on intellectual discourse in Iran and the broader Islamic world, has seldom been analyzed through the lens of its numerous references to environmental issues in Iran. Upon closer examination, it becomes strikingly apparent that Al-i often attributes the origins of westoxification, or occidentosis, to the lack of environmental resources, a form of "climate envy" that leads locals to perceive Western lands as having all the right answers, while Easterners are seen as consistently falling short. This realization opens up new avenues for understanding the significance of his work and invites a fresh perspective on the role of the environment in shaping human history.

The practice of revisiting and reinterpreting key texts, such as those by al Al-i and other influential thinkers, has the potential to uncover novel insights into the complex interplay between the environment and human agency. By engaging in this form of critical re-reading, we can begin to appreciate the ways in which environmental factors have shaped the course of human events and the development of societies.

To further explore this concept and situate it within a broader theoretical framework, we turned to Dipesh Chakrabarty's groundbreaking book, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chakrabarty's work provides a valuable foundation for reconsidering the notions of time and space on a geological and planetary scale, enabling us to contextualize the significance of environmental factors in the unfolding of human history.

By drawing upon Chakrabarty's insights, we can begin to develop a more nuanced understanding of how the environment has served as an active agent in shaping the trajectory of human societies, rather than merely serving as a passive backdrop against which human events unfold.

Theme # 2. Reading History as Environmental (Desert) and Apocalyptic History

a) Geological vs. Human History/Planetary vs Global History

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Climate of History is significant because it prompts us to consider the discipline of history from an environmental perspective. Traditionally, historical texts focus on human-centric developments and events, but Chakrabarty encourages us to shift our focus to the underlying themes that involve other species and the environment as active agents in history. In our group discussion, we delved into the introduction and selected parts of Chapter 1, titled "Four Theses," where Chakrabarty revisits ideas previously explored in an earlier article published in Critical Inquiry. Central to his argument is the notion that the planet should be regarded as a humanist category and that geological time should inform our reflections on historical times. These concepts fundamentally influence how we think about and discuss historical subjects:

In thinking historically about humans in an age when intensive capitalist globalization has given rise to the threat of global warming and mass extinction, we need to bring together conceptual categories that we have usually treated in the past as separate and virtually unconnected. We need to connect deep and recorded histories and put geological time and the biological time of evolution in conversation with the time of human history and experience. And this means telling the story of human empires—of colonial, racial, and gendered oppressions—in tandem with the larger story of how a particular biological species, Homo sapiens, its technosphere, and other species that coevolved with or were dependent on Homo sapiens came to dominate the biosphere, lithosphere, and the atmosphere of this planet. We have to do all this. (2017, 7)

 Chakrabarty suggests that recognizing the planet as a "humanist category" involves understanding it as a complex web of interconnected relationships in which humans are deeply entwined. He writes:

The more we acknowledge our emerging planetary agency, the clearer it is that we now have to think about aspects of the planet that humans normally just take for granted as they go about the business of their everyday lives. Take the case of the atmosphere and the share of oxygen in it. The atmosphere is as fundamental to our existence as the simple act of breathing. But what is the history of this atmosphere? Do we need to think about that history today in thinking about human futures? Yes, we do. (4-5)

 Chakrabarty draws upon the insights of various thinkers to explore the evolution of our understanding of the planet and our relationship to it. He does so by reinterpreting the works of authors who initially might appear to have overlooked planetary and biological issues. For instance, regarding Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, he highlights how Arendt’s distinction between labor, work, and action sheds light on the temporal dimensions of human existence. Labor sustains individual biological life, which is finite. Work, however, creates a world of enduring artifacts, institutions, and practices that transcend individual lifetimes, fostering inter-generational continuity. This world, though subject to decay, provides a dwelling for human action and speech. Political action, therefore, allows humans to establish a lasting home on earth beyond the present generation. He adds:

 To talk about the planetary and the Anthropocene is not to deny [social] problems but to render them layered in both figurative and real terms. The geological time of the Anthropocene and the time of our everyday lives in the shadow of global capital are intertwined. The geological runs through and exceeds human-historical time. (10)

In our group discussions, we found Chakrabarty's approach to re-reading historical texts through the lens of geographical and planetary issues particularly insightful, echoing our own re-interpretation of Al-i Ahmad's work. This method of reevaluating seemingly simple phenomena, such as how desert communities organize themselves, not only from a social science or humanistic perspective but also in terms of environmental factors and their long-term evolution, is a crucial aspect of our interventions within the discipline. By considering the complex web of factors in which humans are merely a part, and not necessarily the most significant actors or agents, we can develop arguments that transcend the binaries of post- and pre-industrial age, or post- and pre-Anthropocene. This approach opens up new avenues for understanding the intricate relationships between human societies and the natural world, allowing us to explore the ways in which these relationships have unfolded over extended periods, even predating human presence in certain environments. Ultimately, this perspective enables us to craft more nuanced and comprehensive narratives that better capture the complexity of the world we inhabit.

Chakrabarty also emphasizes the limitations inherent in the writings of the Humanities disciplines due to the confines of these fields themselves. He argues that our inability to differentiate between the planet and the globe cannot be attributed solely to humanities frameworks or political and ideological viewpoints. Instead, Chakrabarty urges us to acknowledge the crucial contributions of the scientific community. He suggests that traditional humanistic perspectives alone are insufficient to fully grasp the scale and significance of the planetary challenges we face. The insights provided by modern science are essential for developing a more comprehensive understanding of our place within the larger context of the planet in all its dimensions.

The study of the apocalypse, much like the study of the environment itself, compels us to think beyond our immediate historical time-frames and generations. Apocalyptic thinking—and by extension, contemplating the desert in terms of the apocalypse—encourages us to transcend our own temporal and spatial boundaries and consider those of other species and biological beings.

Theme # 3: Desert Spaces, Empires, and Apocalyptic Impulses

a) Arid Lands in the Shadow of Empire

In this session, we studied Natalie Koch's recently released book, Arid Empire. As a geographer, Koch explores the politics of space and territorial control, particularly in relation to the value of environmental resources found within these territories. While arid lands or deserts may appear to be barren environments with little to offer in terms of resources, this book, along with others like Diana Davis's Arid Lands, shows the significant role these spaces played in the colonization of the Middle East, North Africa, and the southwestern regions of the United States. Exploitation occurs through both the excavation of available resources and local know-how, as well as under the pretext of transforming these lands into lush, agriculturally productive areas. While colonial French authorities exploited the arid lands of Algeria and other North African regions during the colonial era, the United States capitalized on the resources available in the post-war Middle East and North Africa. Koch's book focuses on the latter, which is often portrayed in literature as technical assistance to underdeveloped regions of the third world following World War II.

In Arid Empire, Koch presents a nuanced exploration of the intricate and mutually influential relationship between the arid regions of the Middle East and the American Southwest, spanning from the 1800s to the present day. Drawing upon a rich body of historical records, including archival materials, press clippings, official reports, academic papers, and visual media, Koch weaves a compelling narrative that challenges conventional notions of unidirectional knowledge transfer and technical assistance.

The book's six chapters take the reader on a captivating journey, beginning with the intriguing story of a Syrian cameleer and his herd, recruited by the US military in 1856 to aid in their efforts to assert control over the Southwest and its Indigenous inhabitants. Though this camel corps ultimately failed, overshadowed by the Civil War, it marked the beginning of a lasting American fascination with the expertise and experimentation emerging from Middle Eastern deserts.

As the 20th century unfolded, the balance of power between these two arid regions began to shift. Koch highlights the Roosevelt administration's 1942 initiative to export agricultural practices from Arizona to Saudi Arabia and the Trucial States, ostensibly to enhance the well-being of Arab communities. However, she argues that this endeavor was accompanied by a profitable trade in machinery, infrastructure, and materials, revealing the United States' imperialistic aspirations in the region. Koch draws parallels between these tactics and those employed by European settlers to exploit Native American resources and lands. Koch asserts that American aid often proved unsustainable, citing the short-lived success of US-supported agricultural solutions to address food scarcity in Arabia during the 1970s oil crisis, which ultimately faltered due to water shortages. Similarly, desalination technologies, exported from Arizona's solar and environmental research institutions, failed to yield significant improvements in the Middle East by the end of the decade.

The author also explores the role of desert politics in shaping our perceptions of the future, as arid landscapes often serve as backdrops for dystopian visions of a warming Earth and impending struggles over essential resources. Through the lens of Biosphere 2, a research facility in Arizona, Koch illustrates how imperialistic ideologies permeated even seemingly progressive projects, perpetuating settler-colonial structures of exclusion and dispossession under the guise of environmental salvation.

The book concludes by examining the influence of science-based knowledge economies on the development strategies of contemporary Arab leaders. Projects like Masdar eco-city in Abu Dhabi, inspired by Biosphere 2 , have fallen short of their ambitious goals to combat climate change and achieve carbon neutrality.

Without resorting to orientalist tropes or overwhelming the reader by content related to post-colonial theory, Koch deftly employs meticulously researched case studies to expose the United States' often subtle and indirect pseudo-colonial aspirations. She reveals how, under the banner of scientific and technological progress, American policymakers and corporations, closely tied to academic institutions, secured access to and profited from desert resources while claiming to eschew traditional colonial attitudes, ultimately yielding similar outcomes.

Koch's book encouraged us to explore the concept of imperialism within material culture and broader theoretical contexts. Consequently, our aim was to analyse Said’s seminal work, Culture and Imperialism, aiming to explore Said's framing of the concept and examine various theoretical frameworks pertaining to the study of imperialism and desert life. As such, we also seek to broaden our conceptualization of these ideas, exploring key theoretical frameworks and modes of thought, and considering how we can apply them more effectively in our own scholarly pursuits related to the desert and apocalyptic impulses.

b) Dismantling the Desert

Samia Henni's introduction to her thought-provoking edited volume (The Deserts are Not Empty) explores how in the modern times the desert has been portrayed as empty and devoid of life, leading to its exploitation by colonial and capitalist powers for resource extraction, military testing, nuclear experiments, and waste dumping. Her writing adopts a manifesto tone that sets this work apart in academic literature. Henni urgently calls for an end to the exploitation of deserts worldwide, especially arid lands historically inhabited by indigenous people and nomadic tribes who have been marginalized through colonialization, militarization, and resource exploitation.

She not only exposes the dismantling of deserts based on misconceptions of their emptiness and worthlessness but also advocates for uncovering archives of these actions, often concealed from official institutions and the public. Central to her argument is the question of agency: who and what should take precedence in understanding, appreciating, and reevaluating desert landscapes in a post-colonial context?

These profound questions resonate throughout the book, engaging with fresh research in material culture, architecture, and planning. The volume shifts focus from the desert as a mere concept or source of imagination to its tangible existence as a physical entity rich in resources and cultural values. Overall, the collection offers compelling insights into exploring, studying, and writing about the desert in its entirety, emphasizing its materiality and diverse ecological and cultural dimensions.

Theme # 4. Desert Origin Stories

a) Deserts and the Cult of Yahweh among the Proto-Israelites

Why do some consider the desert an apocalyptic space? It depends on which desert you are talking about. In past weeks we have talked about the Palestinian deserts of the Negev and Sinai Peninsula, and the Arabian Peninsula and the deserts of Iran. We have also discussed soundscapes in the deserts of Yosemite National Park in North America as well as Indigenous and other visions of the Australian outback, which features in the film of Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream (Australia/Germany, 1984). Each of these has very different terrain, from arid to hyper-arid, that can vary greatly in its water content, flora, and fauna across seasons and across years, even centuries. Deserts are not static spaces and they are not often arid all year round.

In terms of the desert apocalyptic imaginary, we could say it is a formative setting with apocalyptic or eschatological (end-of-the-world or end of a particular world) expectations – one expects revelations to be received in such an environment. Humans, perhaps particularly non-Indigenous Europeans are exposed/threatened to the non-human. Europeans often associate drought with the end of the world, while people who live in drought like conditions do not necessarily think of it as a hostile environment. Guides with local knowledge of harsh climates and geographic conditions have been valuable to colonizers through the ages, as we see in Lawrence of Arabia, even though the guides themselves could get caught out. We see such an incident in the film version of T. E. Lawrence’s life (Lawrence of Arabia, 1962), when his young friend Daud died in quicksand while crossing the Sinai desert to Cairo on foot with Lawrence. The risk of encountering deadly animals or eating poisonous plants or drinking bad water is also high for the unprepared desert traveller. Avner (2021, para 41) remarks that for the Asiatic desert inhabitants in SW Sinai, “the desert was not hostile and their knowledge of its environment was most valuable.”

Deserts are spaces where humans can confront their own limitations, physically, mentally, or spiritually. This is perhaps an especially Western view. Making the Levantine desert an apocalyptic and dangerous place, like any other colonized place, is a colonial way of seeing a non-Western environment. So what happens when one tries to map current geopolitical concerns onto the ancient past with an apocalyptic mindset?

Avner on the Desert Origins of Yahweh

Uzi Avner, a research fellow of the Dead Sea and Arava Science Centre, Israel, in 2021 published an article concerning the proto-Israelite nation’s putative origin in the deserts of the Levantine, from Egypt to the Sinai Peninsula. The article, along with that of Juan Manuel Tebes, is part of a special issue of the volume Entangled Religions 12/2 (2021). The contested desert spaces around Jerusalem provide conditions where the/an end of the world (the Messiah or Mahdi) is still expected, even post-Enlightenment.

Many Zionist Christians, especially in Northern America, are joined in an expectation that Jerusalem will see the second coming of Christ at an unknown time in the future.

Avner discusses the scholarly debate over where the ancient Israelites came from—Canaan or the desert tribes south of Canaan—around the tenth century CE. He refutes the notion that the Hebrew scriptures’ account of these early years—in Genesis, Exodus and Judges—is a narrative or origin story invented by a nomadic people in search of a permanent homeland (Avner 2021, para 81). The tetragrammaton YHWH (the abbreviation of the sacred name Yahweh, the Jewish god) is evidenced in non-Nabatean inscriptions of the Nabatean era (the mid-3rd century BCE to 106 CE) around the Feiran Oasis in the Hejaz. The Nabatean or Arabic Bedouin lands stretched from the Hejaz in the south up to Damascus in the north, which they held for a short time.

The Midianite-Kenite Hypothesis for Israelite Origins

Avner generally accepts, with minor modifications, the ‘Midianite-Kenite’ hypothesis for the origins of Israel, “the idea that the pre-Israelite roots of Yahwism can be traced back to the areas south and southeast of Palestine,” an idea that has a long pedigree in (Christian) biblical scholarship. This idea, with its maps of the ancient kingdoms of Judah in the south and Israel in the north that uncannily resemble the extended borders of modern Israel after the war of 1967 and the agreement of 1994 (see map 1 and map 2).

Tebes critiques the first of two points that most adherents to the Midianite-Kenite thesis generally accept, as he describes it (2021, para 1):

1.     They accept that the influence of the southern cultic practices on Yahwism occurred during a restricted period, traditionally dated to the Early Iron Age (i.e. from around 1200 or 1150 BCE).

2.     They see the origins of the cult of Yahweh—Yahwism—through the lenses of diffusionist perspectives, and characterize this process as a movement or migration of one or a few determined groups to Canaan.

Archaeological and Philological Evidence

As Tebes observes, there are few adequate analyses of the archaeological evidence of the arid areas to the south of Palestine, and this is the knowledge gap that Tebes and Avner attempt to fill. Avner makes the claim that the spiritual necessity for one god who would protect the people (or nation, as he calls them) of Israel, came from their desert origins. He notes similarity of customs between the original Israelites and the Bedouin, including the importance of the tent, citing Yahweh’s refusal to be moved by David from a tent into a house or temple (1 Chron 17:1-6) (Avner 2021, paras 9-11 and Figure 1). Gradually, over the centuries after the Israelites moved north into the lands of Canaan, which had its own pre-existing cult of El (as in Isra-el, El being the god of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Noah), Avner suggest that Yahweh came to predominate over other Canaanite gods as the people of Israel increased their land holdings and settled down to manage flocks and agriculture in more or less fixed places. Their life was harsh, and dependent on the forces of nature, which he equates with gods (para 80). This led to an increase of religious creativity in their cult of Yahweh: they invented strict law codes and social hierarchies with a priestly caste who would look after his cult.

Apart from his Nabatean evidence, Avner draws on evidence of copper mines from the late Bronze age in SW Sinai (1200-1150 BCE), when he believes the proto-Israelites started to mine and smelt copper (Avner 2021, pars 75-76). He concludes that, “The deep desert roots in the culture of Israel cannot be fictive; they must reflect the people’s notions and a reality” (para 77), while noting at the beginning of the article that: “The reader should be aware that the term ‘Israel’ prior to the tenth century BCE does not addresses [sic] an organized people” (Avner 2021, note 1).

Desert Peoples among Mixed Multitude of Proto-Israelites

Tebes extends the area of focus and the time period further than Avner, to focus on the “history of the cultic practices in the Negev, southern Transjordan, and northern Hejaz during the entire Iron Age, and how this information is related to the religious practices known in Judah and Israel during the biblical period” (Tebes 2021, para 1). The Iron Age is generally accepted to have been from c.1200 or 1150 to 550 BCE. In order to refute assumption 1 above, Tebes evaluates the evidence for the cult of Yahweh “not as a single, exceptional event, but as a long-term process within the several-millennia history of cultic practices and beliefs of the local peoples” (Tebes 2021, para 1). Avner identifies this mixed multitude of ethnic groups as coming from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Cana‘an, Transjordan, Se‘ir, and Mediterranean Islands (Avner 2021, para 77). In this milieu of cultural competition, “the desert tribes, the Shasu, managed to gain the strongest influence in Israel’s social framework, on its law and most of all on its spiritual culture” (ibid.).

Mixed Methods of Modern Analysis

Both Avner and Tebes use geographical techniques of transposed cartography, and archaeological evidence such as epigraphy, as well as philological analysis of toponyms (place names), to place origins of the cult of Yahweh well south of modern Israel’s southern borders. Their arguments are engaging with the assumption that the modern state has some sort of legitimate claim to these territories as well, or at least an ancestral link with them, but they don’t make that explicit. Caution needs to be taken, given that the assumption of a legitimate claim is based on a kind of religious nationalism that seeks to bridge a chronological gap of some 3200 years, much as the eschatological idea of the Kwisatz Haderach, in Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy, can bridge the gap between space and time.

Theme #5. The Desert & Apocalyptic Ethics: The case of early Christianity

a)    The Household and the Desert  – Contrasting Spaces for Enacting Early Christian Ethics

One of the most interesting aspects of the desert as an apocalyptic space is how it is coded as a challenge to an organism (the human being) whose body is composed largely of water which must constantly be renewed. Just as ancient people put huge effort into moving water in order to create agricultural landscapes and sustain cities, so they worked to establish the household as a space where rest and access to the necessary resources of food and water were made as easily accessible as possible. For this reason, early Christian writers saw the household and the desert as being in opposition: the household was the space of ‘worldliness’ or commitment to the earthly processes of biological survival and reproduction, while the desert was coded as the ‘otherworldly’ space where individuals could come to terms with apocalyptic ethics.

It is worth stopping to define this phrase. The medievalist Marjorie Reeves in “The Development of Apocalyptic Thought” defined apocalyptic as “the disclosure of hidden divine purpose in history,” and ‘apocalyptic ethics’ is the idea that human life flourishes most completely when it is aligned to this hidden purpose (1984, 40).

In dealing with early Christian sources, it is important to distinguish between this unveiling of God’s hidden purpose, the Apocalypse or Revelation, and the end-time [Greek: eschaton].  (Reeves’s definition above draws on the literal meaning of the Greek word apokalypsis as ‘unveiling’; the word is derived from the combination of ‘apo’ [‘away’] with kalypsis [‘covering’]. Similarly, the English word ‘revelation’ has its root in the Latin velatio or veiling).

Already in the first century, the ideas of apocalypse and end-time became entwined. The first Christian writer, the Apostle Paul, argued that the end-time was coming, and that this was a sign from God that the faithful should organize their lives to find God’s hidden plan and try to follow it.

Yet those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that. I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning [...] For the present form of this world is passing away. I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord [...] but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided (Paul of Tarsus, 1 Corinthians 7:28-30, 32-34).

Elsewhere, in 1 Thessalonians, Paul talks about how the faithful have to be vigilant: ‘the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night’ (5:2).

A half-century later, probably under the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian (CE 81-96), the Book of Revelation was written by a prophet known only as ‘John’ (though some early sources identified him as the author of the Gospel of John, probably erroneously). It was this writer who gave Paul’s idea of the ethical importance of the end-time its most memorable connection to the idea of apocalypse, making it clear that his revelation is  specifically about the end-time (other apocalypses being written around the same time didn’t see a connection between God revealing his plans and the end of the world).

The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place [...] Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near (Revelation, prologue).

Curiously, despite the urgency of Paul’s sense of the coming end and John’s idea that this was why God was revealing his plan for humanity, the fact of the matter was that the end of the world kept not happening.

Many Christian preachers of the early centuries found themselves constantly trying to find ways to keep the faithful from fully investing in what they saw as ‘the cares of the world.’ Try as they might to rouse their listeners into a more vigilant sense of emotional involvement with the idea of God’s hidden plan, it was an uphill struggle. Some of the most memorable preaching invited listeners to see their own homes through new eyes, focusing on how similar spaces and objects had been the setting and props for the heroic stories lived by Jesus and the apostles. Imagining themselves as re-enacting those scenes, they should scour their surroundings for cues.

The historian Blake Leyerle (2023, 513) puts it this way:

To see the objects used by Paul was to recall his manner of using them. Remembering his lack of concern for the staples of life—for food, clothing, and sleep—they felt a twinge, perhaps even a stab of conscience, realizing that they were not so detached, that they were still bound up in the business of the here and now.

The fourth-century preacher John Chrysostom went even farther, suggesting that families should decorate their homes with signs of warning. Seizing on the image of a flying sickle in the prophet Zechariah, John proposed that the faithful should cultivate a fearful excitement at the idea that the sickle could be used against them as a weapon by an angry God.

But in order that the amendment may take place the more quickly, do this which I tell you. Inscribe upon the wall of your house, and upon the wall of your heart, that flying sickle; and think that it is flying forth on occasion of the curse, and constantly remember it (John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Statues, 9.11, cited in Leyerle 2023, 507).

If they could not hold it firmly in their imaginations, they could use the image to enliven  their homes with the frisson of fearful vigilance.

b)    What Did Christian Heroes and Heroines Look for in the Desert, and What Did they Find?

Emotional intensity was the hallmark of this literature. In keeping with this need to stimulate the imagination of the faithful, early Christian writers sought out stories of men and women who chose an extreme way of life in response to the call from God. For this purpose, the desert became an indispensable setting, and the lives of men and women who left the cities to live in the desert landscapes of Egypt and the Holy Land began to elicit great interest.

One of the best-known of the early saints’ lives tells the story of Antony, a young man whose parents died, and shortly afterward heard a saying of Jesus read out in church: ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me’ (Matthew 19:21). As a result, Antony went to live in the desert, alternating between living in community with like-minded ascetics, and living on his own as a hermit.

For Antony, the desert was by no means a place to ‘get away from it all’; rather, it was a place of testing. Antony was constantly attacked by demons, and this was a noisy business: “when it was nighttime [the demons] made such a crashing noise that that whole place seemed to be shaken by a quake […] and altogether the sounds of all the creatures that appeared were terrible, and their ragings were fierce” (Life of Antony 9).

The ancient historian Kim Haines-Eitzen has explored how the powerful sonic landscape of the desert could have heightened Antony’s experience of spiritual testing, an effect perhaps also conveyed to those who heard his story. In a blog post for the Association for Jewish Studies, Sensory History, Deep Listening, and Field Recording, she summarizes the key insight of her acoustic approach to the fourth-century Life of Antony: “Throughout this text demons make ‘obnoxious noises;’ they clap, hiss, crash, and shake Antony’s ascetic resolve.” Haines-Eitzen explains how her research gave insight into the immediacy of Antony’s experience and the urgency of his attempts to counteract the demonic powers:

The language here used to describe the sounds of demons—crashing like thunder, and shaking like earthquakes, hissing like snakes—are some of the most dynamic sounds one hears when recording in desert environments. The crashing of thunder is, indeed, a nearly surreal surround sound in a mountainous desert that reverberates all the more in a dark deserted wilderness. But there is a weapon one can use against the din of demons: Antony, in fact, partly becomes a monk by way of an acoustic exchange or, an acoustic ecology, if you will: he wards off the noisy demons who torment him with his own sounds of chanting and prayer. (Haines-Eitzen, “Sensory History”; a sample of other sound recordings can be found here: Israel: Negev and Judean Desert Sounds.)

In her book-length study, Sonorous Desert, Haines-Eitzen also describes the subtler influence of desert soundscapes. In a passage from the fifth-century Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Abba Arsenius discusses how an ascetic may be shaken from contemplation by even the smallest sound, that of a sparrow or of reeds rustling in the wind, can disturb the concentration of the monk in prayer.

One day Abba Arsenius came to a place where there were reeds moving in the wind. The old man said to the brothers, “What is this shaking?” They said, “Some reeds.” Then the old man said to them, “When one who is sitting in hesychia hears the voice of the sparrow, his heart no longer experiences the same hesychia. How much worse it is when you hear the movement of those reeds.” (Life of Abba Arsenius)

Analysing this passage, Haines-Eitzen stresses that it is not the ‘emptiness’ of the desert but its acoustic ‘crowdedness’ that poses a challenge for the ascetic:

On its simplest level, this saying reveals something about the desert soundscape: reeds, probably along the Nile river, moving in the wind and quaking with sounds; and then there is the particular sound of a bird, a sparrow. The passage speaks to the challenges of cultivating inner stillness in the midst of the surrounding noisy soundscape  (Haines-Etizen 2022, 68).

“Sound is relational,” Haines-Eitzen reminds us (“Sensory History”), but the relationship it tests most deeply is the relationship with the self.

c)     “Making women male” – The Desert as a Space for Gender Disruption

The contrast between the household and the desert becomes especially interesting when we introduce the dimension of gender to our analysis of apocalyptic ethics. Here we will briefly consider the lives of the provocative gender-disrupting saints, Perpetua of Carthage (third century), Pelagia of Antioch (fourth century) and Mary of Egypt (seventh century).

Early Christian writers were fascinated by women who dressed as men, or who ‘became’ men. For example, Perpetua of Carthage (d. 203 C.E.) was transformed physically in a dream. Others were ‘made into men’ spiritually, such as Mary Magdalene: in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (2^nd century) Jesus announces that he will ‘make Mary male’.

Renouncing stereotypical gender identity and woman’s roles in the household as bride and mother became a way for early Christian women to pledge allegiance to apocalyptic ethics rather than the ‘worldly’ commitments of daily life and for early Christian writers to celebrate this choice. Gender disruption became an important theme in the lives of the early female saints, from the second-century Acts of Thecla well into the medieval and Byzantine period. In these stories, a woman might typically hear a preacher sharing the Gospel message that God is calling on the faithful to prepare themselves to meet their maker, and this would prompt her to immediately transform her life.

Interestingly, while Antony was an independent man whose parents had died, stories of female saints almost always depict them as wives or daughters, people who have to tear themselves away from pre-existing family commitments in order to follow the call. Some of the most saintly women chose to disguise themselves as men in order to be able to leave their families and follow the rootless life of a wandering preacher. Others joined communities of unmarried virgins and widows, or went to live as hermits in the desert.

The idea shared by these early Christian texts is that while gender roles may have value in giving order to the daily lives of a society based on households of parents and children, ultimately, they are a distraction from what is really important.

A story which captures many of these elements is the seventh-century Life of Mary of Egypt. The story begins with a male ascetic, Zosimus, who joins a monastery on the banks of the River Jordan in Judaea. During the season of Lent, the monks of the monastery went out to wander in the desert across the river to spend forty days in the wilderness in preparation for the festival of Easter, praying and chanting psalms as was their custom, and as he prayed Zosimus saw something that surprised him.

While he was chanting psalms and looking up [...] he saw the shadowy illusion of a human body appear to the right of where he was standing and performing the prayers of the sixth hour. At first he was alarmed, suspecting that he was seeing a demonic phantom, and he shivered with fear. But after he had made the sign of the cross and shaken off his fear (for his prayer had ended), he looked again and saw that in fact someone was walking in a southward direction. What he saw was a naked figure whose body was black, as if tanned by the scorching of the sun. It had on its head hair white as wool, and even this was sparse as it did not reach below the neck of its body (Sophronius, Life of Mary of Egypt 10, translated by Kouri).

Zosimus and Mary begin a dialogue, and the story she tells is by no means what the monk would have expected. Mary tells a story of how she ran away from her parents and went to the great Egyptian city of Alexandria to make her living as a prostitute, and only later had a vision of the Virgin Mary which made her decide to renounce her way of life. As a result, she spent forty-seven years wandering in the desert, living on scraps of bread. Initially, eating normal food was impossible for her, even when it was available:

[F]or seventeen years I wandered in this desert struggling with those irrational desires, as if with wild beasts. Whenever I tried to take some food, I yearned for meat and fish that abound in Egypt. I longed to drink wine, which was [constantly] in my thoughts, for I used to drink a lot of wine when I was living in the world. But since I did not have even water to drink here, I was burning with terrible [thirst] and could not endure its deprivation (Life of Mary of Egypt 28).

Eventually, however, the life of constant prayer began to make a difference to Mary’s experience. When Zosimus asked her what she did for food and clothes, Mary told him that once the scraps of bread she had brought into the desert ran out, “‘during those seventeen years, I fed myself with wild plants and whatever else can be found in the desert’, but she had learned to live on spiritual food. ‘I receive as inexhaustible food the hope of my salvation, for I feed and cover myself with the word of God Who governs the universe. For “man shall not live by bread alone”’” [Matthew 4:4] (Life of Mary of Egypt 30).

The greater test was the harshness of the desert environment itself.

As for the cloak I wore when I crossed the Jordan, it was torn to pieces and wore out long ago. I have endured cold and again the flames of summer, scorching in the burning heat and freezing and shivering in the frost (Sophronius, Life of Mary of Egypt 30).

As a result of these practices, Mary’s body had changed, so that it could hardly be recognized as female, or even human.

After explaining her miraculous survival, Mary begged the monk to leave her, and to make sure not to tell the other monks of her existence, for she was wary of being sought out. Only in the depth of solitude could she continue her journey. Only after her death, the story of Zosimus’s encounter with the holy woman began to circulate as a model of holiness, first for the monks of his monastery, and then to a wider audience.

One of the most interesting aspects of these stories of gender disrupting women is how fiercely they seem to have been cherished by the male monks who copied them and handed them down across the Byzantine and medieval churches. Yet perhaps it is not too strange, for the disruption of gender was somehow parallel to the spatial transfer involved in imagining themselves as citizens of the desert. If monks could imagine that the monasteries where they lived were an extension of the early Christian desert, it was also possible that a woman – exactly the kind of person their monastic practice was asking them to stay away from – could be a particularly persuasive spokesperson for apocalyptic ethics.

Bibliography

al Al-i, Jalal. Occidentosis: A Plague from the West (1963, 2nd ed. 1978). Translated by R Campbell Berkeley, 36-44. Mizan Press, 1984.

Avner, Uzi. “The Desert’s Role in the Formation of Early Israel and the Origin of Yhwh.” Entangled Religions 12/2 (2021). https://doi.org/10.46586/er.12.2021.8889.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Haines-Eitzen, Kim. Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks and What It Can Teach Us. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022.

Henni, Samia. “Introduction: Against the Regimes of Emptiness.” In Deserts are Not Empty, edited by Samia Henni, 9-22. New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022.

Koch, Natalie. Arid Empire: The Entangled Histories of Arizona and Arabia. New York: Verso, 2023.

Leyerle, Blake. “Imagine the Table, the Bed, the Shoes! John Chrysostom on the Affective Power of Imagined Objects.” Studies in Late Antiquity 7 (2023): 499-515. https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2023.7.4.499.

Mitchell, WJT. “Introduction.” In Landscape and Power, edited by WJT Mitchell, 1-4. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995 [2002].

Mitchell, WJT “Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness.” In Landscape and Power, edited by WJT Mitchell, 261-290. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press., 1995 [2002].

Quinby, Lee. Anti-Apocalypse. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Quinby, Lee. Millennial Seduction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Reeves, Marjorie. "The Development of Apocalyptic Thought: Medieval Attitudes." In The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, edited by C. A. Patrides and J. Wittreich, 40-73. Ithaca, NY, 1984.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Said, Edward. “Invention Memory and Place.” In Landscape and Power, edited by WJT Mitchell, 241-260. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995 [2002].

Tebes, Juan Manuel. “The Archaeology of Cult of Ancient Israel’s Southern Neighbors and the Midianite-Kenite Hypothesis.” Special volume of Entangled Religions 12/2 (2021). 10.46586/er.12.2021.8847