Word: nabataean
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Guided by Glueck's creative archaeology, young pioneers from the cramped nation of Israel are already putting the Nabataean waterworks back into use, repairing the dams, cleaning out the cisterns, planting crops in the walled fields. The population there is rising, even beyond the ends of the spreading pipelines. Some day it may pass the level that it reached at the time of Abraham...
...Albright's system. For three years he served as his professor's pottery man, labeling, studying and endlessly discussing every potsherd from Albright's excavations. He acquired an uncanny feeling for these humble trifles. He could tell at a glance whether a fragment came from a Nabataean water bottle or a cooking pot from the days of Joshua. He still has this ability, and when he picks up a potsherd, he handles it as tenderly as a Chinese esthete caressing a piece of jade. "Pottery is man's most enduring material," he says with emotion. "Wood...
...basic Nabataean trick was to throw stone walls across the wadies to delay flash floods. Trapped by the walls, the water sank into the ground, depositing silt that built up fertile soil. To trap even more water, the Naba-taeans built good-sized stone dams across the larger wadies; they cut channels along hilltops to divert water to fields that could use it best. To supply
Pottery Mains. The Nabataean capital, Petra, is a museum of exceptional hydraulic engineering. Besides the Siq dam and diversion system, it has a spreading network of channels cut into the rock to lead water to the city from distant springs. In one detail the Nabataeans were even ahead of the Romans. Instead of high aqueducts, they used carefully sealed pottery pipes to carry water under pressure, as modern water systems use pipes of metal...
When he hears of visiting engineers searching for water in Nabataean country, Dr. Hammond likes to point out that the tricks of modern geology can be a waste of time. The first step, he believes, should be to look for fragments of Nabataean pottery, which was remarkably thin and strong. It often leads to ruins of buildings in apparently waterless places. "But water is always available," says Dr. Hammond. "The Nabataeans wouldn't have built a town if they couldn't get water...