Word: glueck
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Surface Man. Throughout his explorations, Glueck remained a "surface man," which means that he covered large areas, guided by reason, tradition and literary clues, and learned what he could from surface finds. The "digger" school deplores this approach as super ficial. Nothing counts, say the diggers, until the careful, laborious toil of exca vation has extracted every droplet of evidence. To the strict diggers, the edu cated estimates of the surface men are all too fallible. The balanced truth is that each method has advantages, de pending on the nature of the country and the sites...
...tells are bare of vegetation, they erode faster, and the desert wind carries their dust away. In Jordan and southern Palestine there are tells that have worn to ground level. Only their potsherds have survived, all ages and types mingled together, their edges rounded like pebbles on a beach. Glueck found many such sites with nothing but quantities of potsherds spread thickly on the ground. Beneath them was barren earth. By studying the potsherds he could decide when the city was founded, when it was abandoned, and what sort of people lived in it. Years of patient digging would have...
...digging. He had long been fascinated by a verse describing the 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...
...from the Dead Sea toward the Gulf of Aqaba. It is a fearful place, whipped by sandstorms and almost waterless, but the foothills to the east are crowned by fortresses, many of them, to judge by their pottery, dating from the time of King Solomon (961 to 922 B.C.). Glueck wondered why Solomon, so renowned for wisdom, valued this barren waste so highly. Then the Bedouins told him about a place called Khirbet Nahas -literally "copper ruin." The name, the Arabs said, had been
Homesick for the Desert. All over the earth the quest has spread for undiscovered chapters of man's history. The wonder is that in the spate of technical activity a place remains for a pure surface man like Glueck. But he has earned that place many times over. After the partition of Palestine between Israel and Jordan in 1948, the Holy Land calmed down a bit and Glueck took stock. He liked the job of college president and had made a great success of it. Hebrew Union College is now a plush and prosperous institution. It has merged with...