Michael Avi-Yonah

Avi-Yonah was born in 1904 in Lemberg, Galicia, a Polish city then in Austria.[1] He grew up in a household with strong creative and intellectual interests. His father, a lawyer by profession, played the violin to orchestral standards, attended operas and concerts regularly, and helped found the local Jewish Society of Music.[1] His parents appreciated painting and sculpture and, when possible, commissioned pictures from young Jewish painters who visited their home.[1] Music and the visual arts were therefore prominent features of his early environment. Avi-Yonah left Lemberg for Palestine in 1921.[1]

Avi-Yonah entered institutional archaeology in 1931, when he joined the Palestine Department of Antiquities as Records Officer, a post he held until 1948.[1] That year he also began assisting L. A. Mayer with editing the department's Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine. From 1933 to 1950, Avi-Yonah served as its editor.[1] The journal's fourteen volumes appeared from 1932 to 1950.[3] During his editorship, he published studies of mosaic pavements, lead coffins, and the map of Roman Palestine.[1] His monograph Abbreviations in Greek Inscriptions: The Near East, 200 B.C.–A.D. 1100 was issued as a supplement to volume 9.[3]

Following the establishment of the State of Israel, Avi-Yonah served as scientific secretary of the Israel Department of Antiquities from 1948 to 1953.[1] In 1953 he was appointed professor of classical archaeology and the history of art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[1] A Hebrew encyclopedia staff listing associated him with the university and listed his fields as the historical geography of the Land of Israel and general and Land of Israel archaeology.[4] He later received a doctorate from the University of London in recognition of his scholarly contributions, although the biographical entry does not give the date of the degree.[1]

Avi-Yonah participated in excavations at Avdat, Beth-Shean, Nahariyyah, and Caesarea and took part in the Masada Survey of 1955.[1] At Beit She'an, he uncovered three mosaics from a sixth-century synagogue next to a Christian cemetery; the mosaics feature figures representing the months of the Greek calendar.[5] For many decades he also edited the Israel Exploration Journal, described by his biographical entry as a leading scholarly journal.[1]

The history and archaeology of Jerusalem held a particular fascination for Avi-Yonah. The Holy Land Model of Second-Temple-period Jerusalem was constructed under his supervision and later relocated to the grounds of the Israel Museum.[1] The National Library of Israel's archive listing reports that his small Hebrew-language collection contains preparatory notes for both the model and his book on Jerusalem.[6]

A historical survey of Jewish archaeology described Israeli archaeologists of the following half-century as mainly students of Eleazar L. Sukenik, his “fellow Jerusalemite” Avi-Yonah, and Sukenik's son Yigael Yadin.[2] It also says that this scholarly school generally assumed continuity between rabbinic texts and Jewish artifacts of the Talmudic period.[2]

Avi-Yonah's bibliography spans historical geography, classical art history, biblical cartography, and encyclopedic reference works. His Historical Geography of Palestine, covering the period from the Return to Zion to the beginning of the Arab conquest, was published in a revised and reorganized edition by the Bialik Institute in Jerusalem and included thirteen maps. Two detailed maps of northern and southern Palestine, at a scale of 1:350,000, cover the Second Temple, Mishnah, and Talmud periods.[7] An English version, The Holy Land: From the Persian to the Arab Conquests, 536 B.C. to A.D. 640, appeared in 1966.[1] Its contents address the Persian, Hellenistic, Hasmonaean, Herodian, Roman, and early Arab-conquest periods, along with city territories, the Roman road system, economic geography, and population.[8]

His The Madaba Mosaic Map appeared in 1954, and Oriental Art in Roman Palestine was published in 1961.[1] A History of the Holy Land, issued in 1969 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, presented the land's background and inhabitants in relation to the great powers of Mesopotamia and Egypt.[9] Gazetteer of Roman Palestine followed in 1976.[1] The Jews of Palestine: A Political History from the Bar Kokhba War to the Arab Conquest, published in Oxford by Basil Blackwell in 1976, appeared after his death and included his interpretation of Johanan ben Zakkai as a leader of an accommodationist minority wing of the Pharisees.[10][1]

Avi-Yonah collaborated with Yohanan Aharoni on The Macmillan Bible Atlas (1968) and with Israel Shatzman on the Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Classical World, which appeared shortly after Avi-Yonah's death.[11][1] He and Ephraim Stern edited volumes 2–4 of the four-volume Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (1975), a revised translation of a Hebrew encyclopedia.[12] He also contributed archaeological and historical-geographical entries to the Encyclopedia Hebraica, the Encyclopaedia Judaica, and the Atlas of Israel, and participated in editing Sefer Yerushalayim (volume 1, 1956).[1] Carta's Atlas of the Period of the Second Temple, the Mishna and the Talmud appeared in 1966.[1]

A 1987 volume of Eretz-Israel: Archaeological, Historical and Geographical Studies was dedicated as the Michael Avi-Yonah Memorial Volume.[13]

Avi-Yonah died in 1974.[1] His scholarship ranged across mosaic art, cartography, epigraphy, historical geography, field archaeology, and encyclopedic editing, reflecting the breadth for which his biographical entry remembers him.[1] Students of Avi-Yonah, Sukenik, and Yadin formed an influential part of the subsequent Israeli archaeological profession.[2] The Holy Land Model built under his supervision remains on the grounds of the Israel Museum as a public representation of Second-Temple-period Jerusalem.[1] Preparatory notes for the model and for his book on Jerusalem are preserved in his archival collection at the National Library of Israel.[6]