Word: archaeologists
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Exciting stuff but almost certainly fictional. Traill, who has studied Schliemann for nearly 20 years, first became skeptical of the archaeologist's veracity in 1978, when he found an eyewitness account Schliemann wrote about a San Francisco fire. Schliemann lived in California in the early 1850s, amassing a fortune as a banker during the gold rush (he also made millions as an indigo trader and a sometimes shady profiteer in Russia during the Crimean War). But the fire occurred while Schliemann was out of town, and a month earlier than the report said...
Writers in those days found nothing wrong with a little embellishment to dress up a story. But as an archaeologist, Schliemann committed an even greater sin: he claimed to have found together within what he called a royal palace some objects that were almost certainly discovered separately and outside the nearby city wall. Why did he twist the facts? Probably, says Traill, because his obsession with verifying the Iliad--quite real, even if it didn't date from childhood--demanded proof that King Priam, Helen's father-in-law, existed. What better proof than a royal treasure...
...highways and the towns that line them have long since been eclipsed by the Interstate and strips of EconoLodges and Burger Kings. For modern cruise-control motorists, the fractured skeleton of the U.S. highway system has been relegated to the realm of the cultural archaeologist, a reminder of how Americans used to travel before the age of the jug handle and the clover leaf...
Instead, argues Tel Aviv University archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, the settlement of the Promised Land was a gradual process over a long period, and involved people both from within Canaan and from outside. "Some came from the Hittite country, some from the desert to the east and some from the south," he says. "I would also accept the idea that a core emanated from Egypt, and these people brought with them the idea of monotheism." Only after they had united in a sort of tribal league did they become the Israelites, and while they undoubtedly fought their neighbors for territory...
...even be called the Holy Grail of biblical archaeology - is a royal archive from before the time of King David or King Solomon. No such archive has ever been located inside Israel, although surrounding countries have yielded many from the same era. Sighs Amnon Ben-Tor, a Hebrew University archaeologist: "It's like striking oil. Everywhere but here...