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If this was the way that Abraham lived, and the historical memory of the Bible says that it was, the patriarch must have found well-populated country in the Negev all the way to Egypt. He traveled there on foot without difficulty. What happened to those inhabitants of the ancient Negev? asked Glueck. He suspected that invaders periodically wiped them out or pushed them back into nomadism, just as in Transjordan.
In 1952, with the enthusiastic help of the young Israeli government, Glueck began a mile-by-mile survey of the Negev. He could no longer move about unarmed; the local Bedouins were no menace, but armed Arab infiltrators were constantly crossing Israel's borders rigged for murder and sabotage. Glueck was forced to travel with a patrol of 15 to 20 Israeli soldiers armed with rifles, machine guns and hand grenades, and equipped with radios to call for help when needed.
Glueck never learned to like a mili tary escort, but he made the best of the situation by picking his guards from the Israeli army's large supply of passionate amateur archaeologists. From the first, his survey showed what he had hoped: that the Negev had been inhabited at many periods of history. It was never thickly settled, but everywhere there was evidence that its population had built up periodically in times of political stability. Then came war and disorder, and the Negev declined into nomadism. Probably its highest point came when a talented Arabian people, the Nabatae-ans, moved in from Transjordan just before the start of the Christian era.
Glueck discovered relics of the Naba-taeans and became fascinated with them. Except for their famous capital, Petra, Poet John William Burgon's "rose-red city half as old as time," the Naba-taeans were almost unknown, but they had prospered mightily. Their cities, roads and forts were all over Trans-Jordan. They knew how to make the most of a water-short land, and when they moved into the Negev, they outdid themselves. Glueck often found their elaborate water systems almost intact, though seldom used or recognized by the modern inhabitants.
Concentrating Rain. Most of the Negev gets less than 6 in. of rain per year, and it usually comes in winter in short, sudden downpours. It does not sink into the hard ground; it pours into the dry wadies, sometimes foaming all the way to the Mediterranean. The best way to make practical use of this sort of rainfall is to concentrate the water as much as possible where it will do the most good—which is exactly what the Naba-taeans did in the Negev. The more Glueck studied their works, the more he admired their industry and engineering skill.
The basic Nabataean trick was to throw stone walls across the wadies to delay flash floods. Trapped by the walls, the water sank into the ground, depositing silt that built up fertile soil. To trap even more water, the Naba-taeans built good-sized stone dams across the larger wadies; they cut channels along hilltops to divert water to fields that could use it best. To supply