Word: glanzman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...This state of historical ignorance may be about to end. An international team of archaeologists has been searching for hard evidence of the Queen's existence since 1988, and according to project field director William Glanzman of the University of Calgary, the solution to the mystery may lie amid the ruins of a 3,500-year-old temple complex in northern Yemen. Known in Arabic as Mahram Bilqis - "the Queen of Sheba's sanctified place" - the sprawling ruins are situated about 130 km east of Yemen's capital, Sana'a, and just a few kilometers from the ancient citadel...
...Glanzman's assertion would once have been considered ludicrous. That's because experts believed the earliest signs of civilization on the Arabian peninsula dated to just 700 B.C., more than 200 years after the Queen of Sheba's lifetime. But in the late 1980s, pottery shards from Wadi al-Jubah, not far from Marib, was found to be 3,500 years old. Suddenly, a wealth of other circumstantial evidence, both cultural and religious, made the Queen's existence seem a lot more plausible...
...Glanzman's assertion would once have been considered ludicrous. That's because experts believed the earliest signs of civilization on the Arabian peninsula dated to just 700 B.C., more than 200 years after the Queen of Sheba's lifetime. But in the late 1980s, pottery shards from Wadi al-Jubah, not far from Marib, was found to be 3,500 years old. Suddenly, a wealth of other circumstantial evidence, both cultural and religious, made the Queen's existence seem a lot more plausible...
...ancient citadel of Marib, which rises above the desert about three miles to the north. A separate team from the German Archaeological Institute, meanwhile, has uncovered dozens of multistory mausoleums in a cemetery area southwest of the oval enclosure. "We have excavated less than 1% of the entire site," Glanzman marvels. "This is the largest and one of the most important pre-Islamic sanctuaries on the Arabian peninsula. It's really, really huge...
...evidence--inscriptions, wall paintings, fragments of bronze statues, pottery vessels, animal bones and 2,000-year-old pieces of frankincense that still retain their distinctive fragrance--indicates that the site was used continuously from at least 1200 B.C. until the 6th century A.D. The potsherds are particularly important, Glanzman says. "They may be the key to sequencing the archaeological history of the region. The technology is very sophisticated and shows a high level of civilization." References in the inscriptions reveal that the temple was dedicated to Almaqah, the southern Arabian god of the moon and of agricultural fertility...