Talk:Tell Jemmeh

the name of this article

Yallayallaletsgo changed the name of this article without discussion from Tell Jemmeh to Tel Gama, with the comment "this is the official name of the site, and it is the most commonly and historically used name." The first part of the reason is undoubtedly true; it is the official name. The other parts are not true. The name "Tel Gama" did not exist until some time in the 1960s when Israel adopted it as part of the general program to replace Arabic names. Moreover, "Tell Jemmeh" and its variants (Tell/Tall Jemmeh/Jemma/etc) are overwhelmingly more common in English usage. For example, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research has 81 articles mentioning Tell Jemmeh and 4 mentioning Tel Gamma. The most common name used in JStor journals is "Tell Jemma/Jamma/Jemmeh" by a very large margin. Tell Jemmeh/Jemma beats Tel Gama/Gamma by more than 7 times at Google Scholar. Recent Israeli journals use the official name more often, though. The excavator van Beek used Tel Gamma for an Israeli journal and later Tell Jemmeh for two American journals. Even for the transliterated Hebrew name, the spelling Gamma is a lot more common than Gama, so in fact the new article name is possibly the least common name. Zero^talk 05:32, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

Zero0000 When starting this article I followed van Beek's approach. This is how the site is mentioned in the comprehensive excavation report, which includes over 1000 pages on the site. These sites don't really have an "official name", and Hebrew sources often use "Jemmeh" instead of Gamma. In this article about a recent discovery at the site last year you can hear Sa'ar Ganor of the Israel Antiquities Authority pronounce the name "Tell Jemmeh". In short, revert it back. (Haven't touched Wikipedia for a long time I don't remember how to properly do it)--Bolter21 (talk to me) 13:53, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

@Bolter21: Thanks, I changed it back. By "official name" I mean the name which is printed on the maps produced by the Survey of Israel. It is "Tell Jemmeh" at least until 1959, and "Tel Gamma" now. I couldn't find it on some lists of name changes around 1970 but I know "Tel Gamma" existed as a name in the early 1970s. Anyway there is no doubt that the "common name" in English is still Tell Jemmeh. Zero^talk 01:53, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

I have no source available to support this claim, but official names in Israel are quite terrible. Transliteration of Arabic/Hebrew names to Arabic is very clunky and there's often inconsistency between how a name appears on an official map of the Survey of Israel versus a name that appears on the IAA's Archaeological Survey of Israel, not to mention they are also inconsistent with road signs and with how people actually call these places. The 2021 topographic map of Israel gives half of the Arab villages an alternate Hebrew name that no one uses such as Kfar Qesem for Kafr Qassem or Gilgal of Jaljulia. Most people in academic sources don't really have a serious problem with using the original Arabic name of archaeological sites.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 14:44, 5 October 2021 (UTC)