Talk:Tell es-Sakan

This article is a current featured article candidate. A featured article should exemplify Wikipedia's best work, and is therefore expected to meet the criteria.
Please feel free to leave comments.
After one of the FAC coordinators promotes the article or archives the nomination, a bot will update the nomination page and article talk page. Do not manually update the {{Article history}} template when the FAC closes.

Tell es-Sakan has been listed as one of the History good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Review: May 6, 2025. (Reviewed version).

Ancient Egypt

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Ancient Egypt, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Egyptological subjects on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Ancient EgyptWikipedia:WikiProject Ancient EgyptTemplate:WikiProject Ancient EgyptAncient Egypt

???

This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

WikiProject Ancient Egypt to-do list:

Needed articles.

We should have an article on every pyramid and every nome in Ancient Egypt. I'm sure the rest of us can think of other articles we should have.

Cleanup.

To start with, most of the general history articles badly need attention. And I'm told that at least some of the dynasty articles need work. Any other candidates?

Standardize the Chronology.

A boring task, but the benefit of doing it is that you can set the dates !(e.g., why say Khufu lived 2589-2566? As long as you keep the length of his reign correct, or cite a respected source, you can date it 2590-2567 or 2585-2563)

Stub sorting

Anyone? I consider this probably the most unimportant of tasks on Wikipedia, but if you believe it needs to be done . . .

Data sorting.

This is a project I'd like to take on some day, & could be applied to more of Wikipedia than just Ancient Egypt. Take one of the standard authorities of history or culture -- Herotodus, the Elder Pliny, the writings of Breasted or Kenneth Kitchen, & see if you can't smoothly merge quotations or information into relevant articles. Probably a good exercise for someone who owns one of those impressive texts, yet can't get access to a research library.

Archaeology Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Archaeology, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Archaeology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ArchaeologyWikipedia:WikiProject ArchaeologyTemplate:WikiProject ArchaeologyArchaeology
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Palestine Low‑importance

	Palestine portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Palestine, a team effort dedicated to building and maintaining comprehensive, informative and balanced articles related to the geographic Palestine region, the Palestinian people and the State of Palestine on Wikipedia. Join us by visiting the project page, where you can add your name to the list of members where you can contribute to the discussions.PalestineWikipedia:WikiProject PalestineTemplate:WikiProject PalestinePalestine-related
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Phoenicia Low‑importance

	Phoenicia portal This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Phoenicia, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Phoenicia. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.PhoeniciaWikipedia:WikiProject PhoeniciaTemplate:WikiProject PhoeniciaPhoenicia
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Source

Interesting article on this site that someone may want to use as a source: http://www.archaeology.org/0905/abstracts/gaza.html. --Sjsilverman (talk) 02:25, 10 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Source for history paragraph - ?

Is the entire history paragraph sourced on the "Deir el-Balah" 2012 review from the Biblical Archaeology Society website? The paragraph is correctly split by archaeological periods into sub-paragraphs, and none except for the last one has any source mentioned; that last one cites the BAS website, but only it actually refers to Deir el-Balah, so the others might indeed be w/o an indicated source.

The "Bibliography" consists of the official dig publications (Miroschedji 2001-2015), but it's just a long list of titles not referenced anywhere inline (within the Wiki article). Not at all satisfactory. Arminden (talk) 15:00, 10 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Y-barton and Raven rs: hi. Y-barton, I see you introduced the Miroschedji bibliography. Did you read through it, was it you who placed the information in the article? Raven, maybe you know where the "earliest Egyptian walled town" story came from (see also next talk-page topic). Cheers, Arminden (talk) 19:08, 11 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Arminden: no, I did rearrange "earliest Egyptian walled town" from headline into the article as it is a claim. Using Egyptian city (cultural) and early bronze (age) is more correct. In this case, one should not a shift from egyptian to canaanite during the early bronze.--Raven rs (talk) 22:22, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Missing fundamental info; inaccurate headings

"History
The site (dated between 3500–2350 BCE) ... dates from a period prior to the Egyptian military domination of the Levant."

This seems to contradict the rest of the History paragraph, where everything is about it being an Egyptian outpost. Or a distinction is made between an Egyptian PRESENCE and Egyptian MILITARY DOMINATION, but then this must be explicitly stated. NO SOURCE one can look up!!!

"There were three consecutive building phases, correlating with three strata of occupation."

Which are...? The article has 3 sub-paragraphs, but the last one doesn't concern this tell at all, so that doesn't help. All three phases/strata within EBI & EBII, so what makes the strata distinct one from each other? Again: NO SOURCE!!!

"Egyptian city (EBI-II)"

"Egyptian city"? Lead says "Canaanite/Egyptian"! No source, no way to clarify. Arminden (talk) 15:32, 10 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

"Geomorphological dynamics of the estuary caused settlement trans-location or abandonment."

When? The Egyptians left for historical reasons it seems, and left the entire region! The Canaanites resettled much later, and abandoned it at the end of the Early Bronze Age, when pretty much all of Palestine returned to a nomadic lifestyle. I guess somebody just improvised, tried to connect some dots which don't belong to the same line. No source indicated - I removed the text. Arminden (talk) 00:35, 12 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

missing refs

The source for the following paragraph

The final phase of occupation was EBII (third millennium BCE).[dubious – discuss][citation needed] Remains of sheep, goat and cattle were discovered, as well as fish bones and shells.[citation needed] Wheat, barley, vegetables, olives, and grapes were cultivated.[citation needed]

was this,

Moain Sadeq, Urban History of South-Western Palestine during the Bronze Age. A Historical and Archaeological Study in the View of Gaza Region. International Journal of Business, Humanities and Technology, Vol. 2 No. 7; 2012

but then the source was removed by somebody because of where the article was published. Since the archaeologist in this case is reputable, I consider this info reliable. This info can probably be found elsewhere, although it'll take time to look for another source. Y-barton (talk) 17:42, 14 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Y-barton, thanks.

Headbomb, hi. I see you removed a source, leaving the quoted material in place and replacing the quoted article with a cn tag. Very uncommon, to put it mildly. Either the material is poorly sourced and therefore unreliable, or it's not. Your edit summary reads "predatory journal". I read up and found the publisher clearly stamped as a cheat. However, the definition of "predatory publisher" plainly puts the blame on the profiteering, cheating "publisher", w/o disqualifying the cheated authors, other than in terms of naivete. The author, Moain Sadeq, was the co-head of excavation at the tell together with Pierre de Miroschedji. Of course it's likely that the authorities (Hamas? PA? It's Gaza.) only allowed the French archaeologist to dig if he worked and published in tandem with a man of their choice, but that doesn't disqualify Mr. Sadeq. He's probably not in a position to access any journal he wishes. So more is needed to disqualify an article (not the journal) written by a local archaeologist who co-headed the excavation of the discussed site. I'm putting it back in unless you can offer convincing arguments against using the article as a source. Mind that a general-interest newspaper and a "press monitoring organization" (Times of Israel and MEMRI) have been left in as acceptable sources. Cheers, Arminden (talk) 23:24, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

See WP:VANPRED#Use in the real world vs use on Wikipedia. This is simply not a reliable source, so we cannot rely on it. I left the material in place because I thought other references could be found for this. If they can't be found, then that material should be removed Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:27, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That's ok, I've already found some relevant French article, and I'll fix this problem soon. Y-barton (talk) 02:47, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Changing the citation style

Would anyone mind if I changed the style of references in the article so that it uses short references as well as the bibliography? See Wressle Castle#Notes for what I have in mind. It means that when a source is used multiple times with different pages it doesn't take up as much space. Richard Nevell (talk) 15:34, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

GA review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Tell es-Sakan/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: Richard Nevell (talk · contribs) 23:26, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: Jimfbleak (talk · contribs) 10:05, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Richard Nevell: just for starters, the script indicates three concerns. de Miroschedji, Pierre; Sadeq, Moain (2001) is just the usual ResearchGate flag, I'm happy with that source. I'd like some clarification why Memri Alaan TV is an independent, reputable source. I note that you have a YouTube video, which is generally discouraged, so I'd welcome some clarification on that. Jimfbleak - talk to me? 10:21, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting article on the TV page only adds to my concern aboiut NPOV 13:47, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to review the article, Jimfbleak. I included a link to the YouTube video to give an impression of the extent of the site, and its proximity to next building works. The static images in other sources go some way towards that, but I thought that video gives a better impression. It could be moved to the external links section, but I tried the ‘external media’ template to give it some prominence. At the very least, it needs a more informative caption as on reflection it's not clear what the reader should expect to see in the video.

The Memri Alaan TV source is relict from before the article's expansion. Looking at it again, MEMRI TV is reproducing a video report by Alaan TV and translating it from Arabic into English. The context at Middle East Media Research Institute#Translation accuracy and controversy has me considering whether that's the right approach. I can't find the original report on Alaan TV's website, but video reports aren't easy to navigate without good descriptions and I'm searching using Google Translate so it's entirely possible to miss something.

The source was used to support that statement that there were more protests once the bulldozing restarted. The Al-Monitor piece supports that, so I think the statement can remain while a potentially problematic source (MEMRI TV) is removed. The Wikipedia article on Al-Monitor suggests that it is a more reliable source. Richard Nevell (talk) 18:11, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

@Richard Nevell: First the nitpicks:

Check variety of English, at least one "center" in lead.

I think that's the only (now changed); I've been using British English spelling variations and that one was from an older version of the article. Richard Nevell (talk) 23:02, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

about 5 km south of Gaza City convert?

Done. Richard Nevell (talk) 23:02, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You have a few duplicated links, please use the script to check.

Done. Richard Nevell (talk) 23:02, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Grammar fixes needed in sentences Tell es-Sakan began as an unfortified settlement,, and a defensive wall built later... Archaeologists Pierre de Miroschedji and Moain Sadeq there were... the 221 items from archaeological sites in Gaza remained in Paris until 2006... The items from the 2000 exhibition remained in Paris until 2007... destruction of approximately one quarter of the archaeological site. (need hyphen in fraction, I think)

I think you're right about the hyphen. I've addressed the other grammatical points. In particular, I thought the text about the exhibitions was a bit clunky so I've rearranged it, hopefully without introducing new issues. Richard Nevell (talk) 23:02, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Link radiocarbon dated

Done. Richard Nevell (talk) 23:02, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

See historical periodization at Bronze Age seems to be your only Oxford spelling

I think that's the only one so I've swapped it for periodisation for consistency. Richard Nevell (talk) 23:02, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Jimfbleak - talk to me? 13:47, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

GA review

I'm no expert on this topic, but the writing is good, with a few minor grammatical issues now addresses, and it appears to be broad and comprehensive in its coverage. I think there was always going to be some issue with the coverage of the war damage, but I think you have done all that is realistically possible in terms of sourcing and neutrally reporting that aspect. No issues with stability, edit wars or copyright. The images add to the article, are appropriate and are captioned.

Overall: PASS Jimfbleak - talk to me? 08:15, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Jimfbleak: Thank you, that means a lot. The topic isn't one I was familiar with coming in (period or region) so I had a lot of catching up to do. Hopefully, that might mean I've erred on the side of over-explaining. Richard Nevell (talk) 18:26, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Music

I have been thinking for a while about whether to mention Davide Verotta's "Tell es-Sakan" - a piece of classical music written in response to the ongoing Gaza war. What gave me pause is that it hasn't received much independent coverage, but we can make use of primary sources in some cases and this seemed like one where that would be suitable. I appreciate that without independent sources the significance is difficult to gauge as Verotta doesn't have his own Wikipedia page. But it is a response to the conflict that specifically mentions Tell es-Sakan, which is rare so I think worth including as a result.

As such, I have added a short sentence about the music.

I've been unsure on this point for a while, so welcome input if others would like to chime in - whether for or against inclusion. Richard Nevell (talk) 14:15, 22 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Egyptian city

The section on the Egyptian city contains the following text:

Archaeologists Pierre de Miroschedji and Moain Sadeq, who led the excavations at Tell es-Sakan, propose that there were three areas of Egyptian expansion into the southern Levant during the late 4th millennium BCE

The reference is de Miroschedji & Sadeq 2005, pp. 163–165, in particular the part which reads.

These observations are essential for a better understanding of the archaeological significance of Tell es-Sakan at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. They allow the formulation of a working hypothesis, to be tested by future excavations. At least for the period corresponding to the very end of the Predynastic/Early Bronze Age I period (i.e. the 31st century)...

The bolding is my own highlight. Initially, the text in the section on the Egyptian city referred to the late 3rd millennium as that is what the quote says, however it must be the 4th millennium that was meant. The 31st century BCE is part of the 4th millennium BCE, and since the section of the source is about the Egyptian settlement which was inhabited between 3300BCE and 3000BCE The authors must have meant the end of the 4th millennium.

I'm recording this here in case anyone spots the discrepancy between the Wikipedia article and the source. It took me a while to spot it. Richard Nevell (talk) 19:33, 30 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]