Word: caving
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...when Perrot and a team of diggers were investigating a small hill on the sandy desert south of Beersheeba. For three months he had found little; then one day a workman, who had just urged him to call the whole thing off, fell through the sand into a deep cave. Perrot climbed down after him with professional precaution and found what he thinks was a village of the Biblical Horites...
Most students of Bible history believe that the Negeb, Israel's southern desert, was an uninhabited wilderness when Abraham (a middle Bronze Age man) came to Beersheeba about 1500 B.C. One short reference puzzled them. The book of Genesis (14:6) refers to Horites (cave dwellers) who lived "by the wilderness" and were smitten by Chedorlaomer, King of Elam. But until the fall of Perrot's man, no trace of the Horites had been found...
...studying the well-kept cave dwellings, Perrot could form a pretty good idea of the lives and customs of the pre-Abraham Horites. They were farmers who got water from the bed of a nearby wadi and stored it in underground cisterns. They had sheep, cattle and dogs, but no horses or asses. They grew barley, wheat, lentils and peas. Two of their barley varieties are still grown today, but their wheat is a novel type not found even in ancient Egypt. The harvested grain was stored in underground chambers or in massive earthenware jars for current...
Perrot's work in the land of the Horites is not finished. In the outskirts of Beersheeba, he has found seven buried cave villages, one of which has a two-storied room shaped like an hourglass. When he has explored all of them and learned by radioactive analysis just how old they are, he will be able to tell better than the Bible does what life was like "by the wilderness" before the time of Abraham...
...contrast, the sunniest tale in the book is by that late great skeptic, André Gide, who tells his version of how Theseus bested the Minotaur. The thesis of Gide's Theseus is that the cave of the Minotaur is seductive as well as labyrinthine, a lotus land of indolence and confusion which exists in every man's mind more surely than it ever did in ancient Crete, and that each man must sally forth from it after slaying his personal monsters of fear and convention. In his serene, neoclassic way. Gide puts a French accent...