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Summer after summer Glueck returned to find and date hundreds of such sites, and to his growing amazement he noted that none contained types of pottery older than 1300 B.C. and therefore the sites themselves could not be older. The date of the Exodus, deduced from legend and doubtful Egyptian records, has often been given as early as 1500 B.C. But Glueck's potsherds proved that at that time the Israelites could have marched through Edom and Moab with hardly any opposition. If Edom was too strong for them, as the Bible says, they must have arrived at a time that was no earlier than 1300 B.C.
Surface Man. Throughout his explorations, Glueck remained a "surface man," which means that he covered large areas, guided by reason, tradition and literary clues, and learned what he could from surface finds. The "digger" school deplores this approach as super ficial. Nothing counts, say the diggers, until the careful, laborious toil of exca vation has extracted every droplet of evidence. To the strict diggers, the edu cated estimates of the surface men are all too fallible. The balanced truth is that each method has advantages, de pending on the nature of the country and the sites.
Some Palestinian tells are 70 ft. thick and contain dozens of different layers of debris. Obviously little can be learned about them by looking only at their surfaces; they are the proper hunting grounds of diggers, who work back through the slow accretion of years. But in arid regions, where the tells are bare of vegetation, they erode faster, and the desert wind carries their dust away. In Jordan and southern Palestine there are tells that have worn to ground level. Only their potsherds have survived, all ages and types mingled together, their edges rounded like pebbles on a beach. Glueck found many such sites with nothing but quantities of potsherds spread thickly on the ground. Beneath them was barren earth. By studying the potsherds he could decide when the city was founded, when it was abandoned, and what sort of people lived in it. Years of patient digging would have told him no more.
Occasionally the Bible led him to a site that demanded digging. He had long been fascinated by a verse describing the Promised Land as a place "whose stones are iron and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass." The word brass seems to be a mistranslation for copper, and though Palestine was not noted for producing the metal, Glueck trusted his Biblical Baedeker and kept looking for signs of ancient copper mining.
First clues came when he led an expedition into the Wadi el 'Araba, the great desert depression that leads south from the Dead Sea toward the Gulf of Aqaba. It is a fearful place, whipped by sandstorms and almost waterless, but the foothills to the east are crowned by fortresses, many of them, to judge by their pottery, dating from the time of King Solomon (961 to 922 B.C.). Glueck wondered why Solomon, so renowned for wisdom, valued this barren waste so highly. Then the Bedouins told him about a place called Khirbet Nahas —literally "copper ruin." The name, the Arabs said, had been