ARCHAEOLOGY
(See Cover) Even as his spaceships reach toward the future and the stars, modern man is more concerned than ever with his past on his own planet. From China to Peru, diggers are everywhere. And nowhere are they busier than in the ancient heart land of the Near East, where Western culture was born.
The pick-and-shovel brigades have invaded Gibeon, where once the sun stood still for Joshua; painstakingly they have probed for the ruins of Gordion, capital of Phrygia, where poor King Midas saw his concubines turn to gold at his touch. The city of Ephesus, sacred to the goddess Artemis, and Aphrodisias, sacred to Aphrodite, are yielding their age-old secrets. The remnants of Hatra, destroyed long ago by the Persians, have been recovered from the debris of centuries. Samarra is being excavated—that lovely capital of Abbasside caliphs, who ruled over the Near East during Europe's dark ages.
Everywhere archaeologists, armed with all the advantages of modern science, are extending the geography of history. Aerial cameras detect the faint outlines of long-demolished walls; delicate airborne magnetometers ferret out forgotten fortifications; measurements of minute bits of carbon establish accurate dates back beyond any written record. Mummies are submitted to autopsy for a knowledge of ancient diseases. Fossilized grains of pollen testify to the climate in which they grew. Reused writing materials, called palimpsests, are irradiated with ultraviolet light and reveal words that were erased thousands of years ago.
The techniques are exceedingly delicate; the skills required are highly specialized. Modern archaeology has developed into an intricate and cooperative effort as its practitioners have gathered a vast new library of information about the dim background of civilization. The current fashion is to work in tight teams, with experts at hand to debate every judgment. Yet for all the advantages of a burgeoning technology, the man who uses its gadgets least and operates most often as a solo scientist has contributed outstandingly to the expanding knowledge of the past.
To Scholar-Adventurer-Rabbi Nelson Glueck, 63, archaeology is less a matter of digging than it is of discerning. It is less large projects of reconstruction than it is large efforts of imagination and even larger exercises of scholarship. It is a provocative amalgam of insight and adventure. It is the act of finding an inch-long fragment of pottery on the dull grey desert, and it is the art of seeing a whole camp site in the broken shard. It is the ability to hold that relic in the hand and hear in the mind's ear an echo of some forgotten language, almost understood.
Mists of Morning. At a time when archaeology is so dependent on so many disciplines, Glueck's individual achievement seems almost paradoxical. But paradox is the measure of the man. He is a rabbi who has never served a congregation, but who, speaking partly in Hebrew, delivered the benediction—"May the Lord be gracious unto thee" —at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration. He is president of Cincinnati's Hebrew Union College, but as an educator he spends much of his time thousands of miles from his classrooms.
As an archaeologist he leans heavily on a source that many an expert considers undependable: the Old Testament stories that to Nelson