FINLAND & PALESTINE Proceedings of a Joint Workshop

Finnish Orientallsts ______________________________________e
subject is the Samaritan community and the publication of
their Pentateuch.
Archaeology of the Holy Land has been of growing interest.
Eero JunkkaaJa (1947) has led several groups to join excavations
in Israel, joining the digs at Afeq both near Tel Aviv and in
Golan with Moshe Kochavi (-2008), in Emmaus-Nicopolis with
Michele Piccirillo (1970-2008) and this writer and Karl-Heinz
Fleckenstein and elsewhere. Many of his volunteers have
joined as assistants and researchers the Tel Kinneret Regional
Project, an international archaeological project in Tel Oreime
that continues the work of Volkmar Fritz.
last but not least I mention the interest of Finns in the Assyrian
and Babylonian languages. It has its roots in a linguistic error ­
Finnish is a rare agglunative language that modifies the meaning
of words by adding things to the end of words instead of
using prepositions as most languages in the world, including
Hebrew and Arabic. Ancient Sumerian was also agglunative so
some researchers in Helsinki were assuming that perhaps Sumerian
and Finnish are relatives.
Well. They are not related. But the interest in Mesopotamian
studies began and has beautiful fruits. The current project of
publishing the neo-Assyrian royal archives is one of these. This
internationally noted project directed by Simo Parpola, The
Neo-Assyrian Corpus Project, has been going on centered in
Helsinki University since 1987.
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