Diggers

Enthusiastic men roaming the earth by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds, probing for remains of vanished animals, men and civilizations. . . . Scholarly men poring over clues in the quiet of their libraries, piecing together forgotten pages of the world's history. . . . Hopeful men searching by air for signs of lost glories. . . . Diggers all, builders all of the never-finished bridge between past and present. Prime news of diggers since the first of the year:

Panama. Not until this year did Dr. Samuel Kirkland Lothrop reveal the extent and significance of the fabulous treasures which he and other Harvard archeologists have uncovered In three years of unpublicized digging in the Province of Cocle, 90 mi. from the Canal Zone. The region was inhabited half a millennium ago by a rich and industrious people, culturally apart from the Incas to the south, from the Mayas and Aztecs to the north. Christopher Columbus encountered them on his fourth and last voyage (1502), went home to tell of their massive gold breast ornaments. Before long Panama was swarming with gold-hungry Spaniards, killing, pillaging, torturing, sending streams of gleaming booty to the coast. More than once the wily Cocles fought off their tormentors, and in 1531 a few unconquered survivors retreated west to the high Sierras, where their descendants still live. A few yellowed pages of Spanish historians shed some light on the Coclee culture before it was destroyed. The Cocles had several distinct castes. Aris- tocrats painted and tattooed themselves, wore few clothes, as many precious ornaments as they could. The women supported their breasts on a pair of golden bars which were carried by thongs over the shoulders. For protection the fighters had golden helmets, golden elbow-length cuffs, golden greaves. For arms they had clubs, spears, arrows and darts which in the air made a whistling noise. The chiefs and nobles were polygamous. They ate with their fingers but used finger-bowls. A dead chief was either mummified by fire or buried with his wives and retainers, who prepared for the ordeal by getting as drunk as possible. But of the tons of treasure that went back to Spain, all was melted up or disappeared, and for four centuries no concrete trace of the Cocles came to light. About 30 years ago the Rio Grande de Cocle shifted its course, cut through an ancient Cocle burial ground. Five years ago some natives, poling up the river when the water was unusually low, spied something shining on the bank. They went ashore, scooped up enough shining things to buy many jars of heady chicha. Soon Harvard's Peabody Museum heard of the curiously wrought gold ornaments on sale in a Panama City antique shop. The result was the Lothrop expedition. In one grave alone, containing a score of skeletons laid out on stone slabs, the Harvard diggers found more than 2,000 objects. In gold there were pendants studded with semiprecious stones, bead necklaces, cuffs, rods with decorated tips which the Cocles stuck in their ears, breastplates embossed with strange monsters, plaques bearing robot-like human faces. There were mirrors of hematite, agate beads and pendants, statuets carved from ribs of the manatee (sea cow), spearpoints made of sting-ray spines and sawfish teeth, shark's tooth necklaces, wild boars' tusks set in gold.

Iraq. A director of diggers is Dr. James Henry Breasted, founder and head of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, foremost U. S. archeologist. Now 68, he has twelve lieutenants at work all over the Near East. Last year he visited them by airplane, brought back news of a great aqueduct built by Sennacherib (TIME, Jan. 1). Last month he went to Manhattan to receive from the hands of a special messenger the most important find any of his men have made this year--a clay tablet no bigger than Primo Camera's hand, bearing four columns of marks resembling quail tracks. To learned eyes these cuneiform inscriptions revealed the names and dates of 95 Assyrian kings. Staffmember Gordon Loud of the Iraq expedition turned up the tablet beneath rubbish in the palace of Sennacherib's father, Sargon II, at Khorsabad. Sargon and Sennacherib ruled Assyria seven centuries before Christ. Names of only a few earlier monarchs were known, possibly because Sennacherib moved the records to Ninevah when he abandoned the Khorsabad palace after his father's death. The tablet he neglected to take along now furnishes the names of an unbroken succession of kings from the 23rd or 24th century B. C. down to one named Ashurnirari V (753-746 B. C.) When the tablet has been studied and photostated it will be returned to the Iraq Government, whose property it is.

Arabia-- "Have discovered legendary city of Sheba. Twenty towers or temples still standing. On north boundary Rouba-el-Khali. Have taken photographs for l'Intransigeant--Andre Malraux." Those electric words, cabled from Djibouti in far-off French Somaliland, last week jerked the editors of Paris' evening paper l'Intransigeant from their mulling over the Stavisky scandal. Soon across the front pages of the world Press flashed what promised to be either the archeological story-of-the-year or the year's No. 1 archeological hoax. Andre Malraux is a handsome young writer who has done some poking around in French Indo-China. In 1933 he was awarded the Prix Goncourt, top French literary kudos. Last month in a plane borrowed from a friend in the airmail service he and Capt. Corniglion Molinier, army pilot, took off from Paris for Djibouti, bent on finding the capital of the dusky queen of Biblical legend. Last week's meager reports indicated that the two men flew from Djibouti across the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb and 900 mi. northeast into the Great Arabian Desert, almost to the Persian Gulf; that they found walled ruins in such a hilly terrain they dared not land and returned non-stop to Djibouti; that they would attempt the trip again. Unknown to history, even in legend the Queen of Sheba emerges only as a resplendent traveler to the court of Solomon. In varying forms the Bible, Koran and Talmud all tell the tale. According to I Kings 10, she came to Solomon with lavish gifts, considerable skepticism and many hard questions. When she saw his wisdom, his piety, his house, his banquet table, his servants and their apparel, she renounced her skepticism and "there was no more spirit in her." From that lack of spirit, according to Abyssinian legend, sprang the line of Abyssinia's present monarch, crafty brown Haile Selassie. The Arabian version has it that the Queen of Sheba's name was Balkis, that she went to Solomon in fear and trembling. Consensus of scholars is that the capital of Saba (Sheba) was Mareb, about 750 mi. from last week's putative discovery. Once a flourishing and autonomous trade centre, during the early Christian era Mareb fell to successive conquerors and its decay was hastened by the collapse of a great irrigation dam. Modern explorers have found the ruins and numerous inscriptions to identify them, but no mention of any queen. Some authorities suggest that a queen may have lived in the north of Arabia and acquired the wealth of Mareb by force or subterfuge.

Both Bertram Sidney Thomas, first white man to cross the great Southern Arabian Desert (1930), and H. St. John Philby, a later traveler, encountered natives who told them of a once magnificent city buried in the sands. Aware of this, some archeologists hesitated to throw too much cold water on the Malraux bulletin, preferred to wait and see the photographs which lucky l'Intransigeant was expecting.

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