Word: ancients
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Once Glueck won the freedom of the desert, though, he found himself in an archaeological paradise. He wandered through the ancient lands on the far side of the Jordan, Bible in hand, and everywhere he found traces of ancient people. Usually potsherds told him who they were. Other explorers may have reported a ruined fortress on a hill and a low tell beyond it. If inscriptions were lacking, as they generally were, only vague guesses, based on general appearance, could set the age of the find. Glueck was the first to determine that the fort was built in the reign...
...They Live? As his experience increased, Glueck developed an almost infallible knack for finding sites of ancient communities. First he looked for springs or waterholes. In that dusty land, every source of water is sure to attract settlers. He also followed the trails of modern Bedouins. "The coun try has not changed," he says, "so they still use the same paths that were followed in ancient times." He kept asking himself how they lived. "Were there caravan routes going through? You have to have a good reason for each settlement...
...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...
...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...
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...