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Bible in hand, Glueck has ranged the Holy Land off and on for 36 years. "Out on the desert," he says, "there is sometimes so much mist in the morning that you cannot travel. You have to wait for the sun to burn it off. To me, archaeology is like burning the mist off the Bible." His work, he hastens to add, is far from an effort to use archaeology to prove the existence of God. Even to try, he believes, would be to "confuse fact with faith, history with holiness, science with religion." To him, the Bible is an indispensable guide as he goes about his work of filling blank areas on the world's historical maps and bringing lost nations to vivid life.
With the Bible's help Glueck has discovered more than 1,000 ancient sites in Transjordan and 500 more in the Negev. He has won fresh understanding of the age of Abraham and set a firmer date for the Exodus; he has clarified the socio-economic history of the Judean kings and filled out man's scanty knowledge of the once-thriving kingdom of the Nabataeans. He has located the long-lost copper mines of King Solomon and accurately spotted the site of Solomon's port on the Red Sea. Most important of all, he has found in the parched Negev a promise of space for the constricted nation of Israel.
Extraordinary Book. Dr. Glueck is quick to insist that for all his accomplishment, his work touches only one aspect of archaeology's many-sided search for man's past. Until rather recently, history began with Herodotus, who wrote in Greece about 450 B.C. But great civilizations rose and fell long before the Greeks, and were forgotten except for legend.
The one great breach in the wall of silence about the ancient world is the Old Testament. This extraordinary book pulses with the record of stirring events that took place 1,500 years before Herodotus. Armies march and kings conspire in its lively pages. Prophets thunder their warnings; courtiers and diplomats conspire subtly. Commoners love and hate, worship and sin, bear children and tend their vineyards.
In many ways the Palestine of the Old Testament is the world's most in teresting focus of early history. It cannot match the magnificent ruins of Egypt and Mesopotamia, but it was always a corridor between those great centers and was deeply affected by both of them. Armies from east and west marched back and forth, and with them came languages and art forms, gods and ideas. This cross-fertilization may explain why the small, poor land of Palestine is the source of two of the world's great religions, Christianity and Judaism, and sacred to still a third, Mohammedanism.
The Holy Land is encrusted with ruins. Ancient fortresses crown its hills and ancient roads wind among them. The fields are full of the pottery fragments that archaeologists call potsherds. Rising above the plains stand the curious, flat-topped mounds called tells, which are the corpses of long-dead cities. Early diggers, many of them hardly more than treasure hunters, found little meaning in this hodgepodge of antiquity. Without inscriptions it was almost impossible to identify the various levels of occupation piled one upon another as the centuries passed. Late Moslem ruins were hailed as belonging to the time of Jesus; crusaders' strongholds