Word: archaeologists
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ancient pagan religion of Babylonia managed to hold out in a single city for 1,500 years after Babylonia fell. Visiting the U.S. last week, British Archaeologist David Storm Rice told how he rummaged in the almost unexplored ruins of Harran in southern Turkey. Harran was a thriving Moslem city until it was destroyed by the Mongols in the 13th century A.D., but Dr. Rice's interest goes back to 2000 B.C., when Harran was a famous center of worship of the long-bearded moon-god, Sin, giver of light and wisdom. Harran was also visited by Abraham...
...Britain is strewn with the ruins of their villas and fortifications. But the barbarian Anglo-Saxon bands that invaded Britain after the Roman legions withdrew in the 5th century lived in crude timber buildings that rotted away with the centuries, leaving only the faintest of traces. Last week Archaeologist Brian Hope-Taylor reported the discovery and exploration of the biggest early Anglo-Saxon structure yet found in Britain-one of the rectangular great halls described in Beowulf, where a leader's thegns gathered to tell tall stories or quaff themselves torpid on mead or beer...
...worthwhile pockets are as hard to hit as producing oil wells. Some of the underground tombs left by the Etruscans who lived there 2,500 years, ago still contain priceless art treasures, while others, robbed centuries ago, are not worth the trouble and expense. When a modern, authorized graverobber (archaeologist) finds a tomb and digs laboriously into it, he often finds only dust and broken crockery. Last week Amateur Archaeologist Carlo Lerici was proving that modern scientific techniques can take the gamble and much of the secret out of Etruscan tomb-hunting...
...first full report on the murals, prepared by Archaeologist Carl H. Kraeling, director of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, and a team of Yale experts, will be published this month (Yale University; $15). Ironically, the pictures were preserved by what probably seemed to Dura's Jews to be their desecration. The commander of the city's Roman garrison, faced with the threat of an enemy attack, did his best to prepare the city against Persian siege tactics. To keep the city walls from collapsing even if they were undermined, the commander ordered the street nearest...
...inspired by, illustrations. The scenes pictured were not chosen at random from the whole Bible, but illustrate individual books, carefully following the text from beginning to end, thus strongly indicating an accompanying text. And this is particularly surprising, because the Jews had rigid prohibitions against pictorial representations of Scripture. Archaeologist Kraeling's explanation: during the period of close contact between Judaism and the Hellenic world, the Jews must have translated their sacred literature into Greek "to bring the contents of the Biblical books to the attention of the cultured Greek-reading public." To serve these "promotional and propagandistic purposes...