Abstract
This article discusses a rather marginal and hitherto little-studied type of Ottoman-period clay smoking pipe documented in Israel. Due to its morphology, we classified this kind of pipe “strainer-type pipe.” It includes two wheel-made variants which were probably locally manufactured and which are dated primarily to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries CE. Strainer-type pipes of related or different types were common in certain parts of Turkey and northern Iraq, as well as in the north-central Mediterranean (notably the Balkans, Italy, and southern France). We suggest that the initialization of the discussed southern Levantine strainer-type pipes was influenced by foreign prototypes, namely the Anatolian-Iraqi or European ones, which could have been brought to historical Palestine by merchants, officials, pilgrims, migrants, and/or soldiers in the Ottoman army.
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Data Availability
The data presented in this study is based partially on published materials referred to in the text, and partially on unpublished information and finds. These finds, as well as some of those already published in the past, are available in the Israel Antiquities Authority and in the Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology storehouses.
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Acknowledgments
We wish to thank the various IAA and Tel Aviv University researchers who allowed us to publish or mention the strainer-type pipes from their excavations, to Etan Ayalon and Eli Cohen-Sasson, former and present curators of Man and His Work Center at the Eretz Israel Museum (Muza), Tel Aviv, for their assistance in locating some of the pipes mentioned in this study, to Pavel Shrago Sasha Flit and Ada Perry (Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University), Dafna Gazit (IAA) and Eli Cohen-Sasson (Eretz Israel Museum), for photographing and drawing some of the pipes published in this study, and to Elena Delerzon and Marina Shuisky (IAA) for preparing the illustrations which accompany the article.
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Taxel, I., Sharvit, Y. Strainer-Type Smoking Pipes in Ottoman Palestine: An Updated Review of Their Typology, Function and Distribution. Int J Histor Archaeol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-023-00709-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-023-00709-3