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One of the most interesting of the postwar digs was conducted by Professor Robert Braidwood of the University of Chicago, whose longtime project has been to search for evidence of the great moment when the first men turned from wandering hunters to settled farmers. This invention of agriculture was the take-off point for human civilization—before it, all was savagery. Apparently the big switch may have come 12,000 years ago in northern Iraq, where Braidwood found a primitive agricultural hamlet, which he calls Jarmo.
Homesick for the Desert. All over the earth the quest has spread for undiscovered chapters of man's history. The wonder is that in the spate of technical activity a place remains for a pure surface man like Glueck. But he has earned that place many times over. After the partition of Palestine between Israel and Jordan in 1948, the Holy Land calmed down a bit and Glueck took stock. He liked the job of college president and had made a great success of it. Hebrew Union College is now a plush and prosperous institution. It has merged with New York's Jewish Institute of Religion and has sprouted outposts in Los Angeles and Jerusalem. The Cincinnati campus is now dominated by its graduate school, which has more Christian than Jewish students and is the recognized U.S. center for Semitic studies.
For all his devotion to Cincinnati, his wife and his son Jonathan, Glueck was still homesick for the desert; he longed to finger potsherds again, squint into the setting sun for the shadows of ancient trails, feel the Bible come alive in his hand as he walked over Biblical lands. But settled parts of Israel were not his style; he did not like routine digging. And he could no longer explore in Arab territory. Jordan officials still denounce him as a spy who mapped their country to help Israeli invaders.
One place was left: the Negev, the barren southern half of Israel, which juts like an isosceles triangle with its apex on the Gulf of Aqaba. In the Negev, Glueck saw a chance to use archaeology to influence the future of Israel by revealing the history of its distant past.
When modern Israel was born, the Negev was a barren waste supporting only a tiny population of hungry Bedouins. But it had not always been so empty. Everywhere were the relics of ancient people: mounds, forts, roads, wells and walled fields. The common explanation was that the climate had got drier, turning a once fertile country into desert. But Glueck was not convinced. During his long, painstaking exploration of neighboring Transjordan, he had looked for evidence of climatic change and found none. Instead he found evidence that the country had been fairly thickly settled during periods of political stability. After invaders swept through, its people turned back to the life of nomads and were dominated for centuries by wild tribes from the Arabian Desert. Then a new civilization took hold of the land again and repopulated it. If this happened in Trans-Jordan, he reasoned, it probably happened in the Negev too.
Once more the Old Testament backed him up. Careful reading of the Book of Genesis shows that Abraham and the other Hebrew patriarchs were not real Bedouins. For one thing, camels had