Jinn and Treasure in Palestine

I might be a bit late noticing this, but a fantastic article appeared this summer in the 2012 volume of the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology: Salah Hussein Al-Houdalieh, “Archaeological Heritage and Spiritual Protection: Looting and Jinn in Palestine“.  As the title suggests, the article explores the role of jinni in the looting of antiquities in the contemporary Occupied Palestinian National Territories (OPNT). 

Al-Houdalieh argues that looting continues to have roots in economic dispossession, political instability, and religious teachings that might be understood to permit looting or, at least, to remove an significant moral stigma. The role of the jinn in looting practices in Palestine represents an apparently unique phenomenon and involves sometimes well-organized bands of looters collaborating with sheikhs (who are often simply local holy men) who can call up and wrangle jinni. These jinn tend to then speak through a possessed individual and lead the looter gang to a particular buried treasure or explain its location. The jinn evidently protect the treasure so getting their attention and bringing them under control is absolutely vital to get good directions where to conduct a rewarding excavation. However, as some of Al-Houdalieh’s informants explained, individual jinni can be duplicitous and tricky moving treasure even after excavations have begun or offering confusing directions.  The author points out that these powers tend to make excavations under the direction of jinn particular unprofitable and unsuccessful. What is striking, however, is that a significant number of looters continue to rely on jinn to aid in locating treasures. 

The notion that excavations with the aid of jinn are largely unsuccessful hints that the motivations for looting may not be as simple as material gain. As scholars have observed among archaeologists and other excavators who rely upon dreams to identify the location of buried treasure, the goal of excavating is often as much about affirming the presence of supernatural involvement in day-to-day life as it is finding particularly valuable objects. The tendency to see looting practices as being motivated by financial gain alone may speak more to the cultures who study looting and are invested in a capitalist worldview that cannot but monetize the perceived cultural value of antiquities. In places like Palestine where the value of antiquities depends on intellectual traditions and markets that exist outside their dominant cultural discourse, a direct relationship between excavation practice and material gain may be overstated.

It would appear that the lack of success experienced by looters who looked to jinn to guide them to treasure relates to an economic and epistemological system that does not coincide with prevailing Western ways of thinking. Like the practice of excavating without publishing that is rather more common in Eastern Mediterranean countries or following the guidance of dreams, Al-Houdalieh’s exploration of the role of jinn in looting in Palestine demonstrate the limits of archaeology’s universalizing claims of “scientifical” practices.