Diggers

Assiduous men roam the world, in large groups and small, to uncover forgotten things in old places freshly found. Recent doings of diggers:

Iraq-- "Squat and thickset, with head disproportionately large, the woman stands holding her hands before her breast. She wears the traditional garment of sheepskin and her hair, gathered in a heavy roll, is confined by a fillet of lapis lazuli inlay. The eyes are of shell and lapis lazuli and the eyebrows are inlaid with bituminous paste." Thus did Dr. Charles Leonard Woolley report one of his latest finds. A popeyed, club-footed little figure of alabaster, 10 in. high, found in a soldier's grave with its head touching the blade of the warrior's bronze ax, it was the first stone burial statuet turned up at Ur of the Chaldees, where Dr. Woolley has long been directing a joint expedition of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania.

Scrabbling at the bottom of a great pit 50 ft. deep, the diggers bared a necropolis of 200 graves which they ascribed to the Jemdet Nasr period, nearly four millennia before Christ. Despite the pilferings of ancient vandals, countless beads of lapis lazuli, carnelian, crystal, shell, marble, chalcedony and gold still encircled the necks and hips of crumbling skeletons with tightly bent legs. Up two long flights of steps carved by sweating natives in the clay walls of the pit were carried 770 vessels of alabaster, gypsum, limestone, diorite. and some of copper, all buried long before the Patriarch Abraham trod the same soil.

Thus was concluded the twelfth and final year of an archeological emprise which has revealed much about the Sumerians, oldest of known civilized peoples.

Legends of a Golden Age or a Garden of Eden are probably dim memories of the lost homeland whence the restless Sumerians drifted into the Euphrates Valley. They knew how to use the wheel and the arch, how to irrigate their lands, and they had begun to write, Belief in immortality is indicated by the sacrifice of servants after a royal death. Clay cups were always found in the tombs beside the victims, and Dr. Woolley's energetic wife guessed that they drank a narcotic or poison. Her husband finds this plausible, makes bold thus to recreate a royal Sumerian funeral: "Down the sloping passage comes a procession of people, the members of the court, soldiers, men-servants, and women, the latter in all their finery . . . and with them musicians bearing harps or lyres, cymbals, and sistra. . . . Each man and woman brought a little cup . . . the musicians played up to the last, and then each drank from the cup. . . . Then some one came down and killed the animals, and perhaps arranged the drugged bodies, and when that was done earth was flung from above." India. As mountains go, Asia's toplofty Himalayas are young. Yale's Dr. Hellmut de Terra thinks they are even younger than is commonly supposed, that climatic changes caused by their vigorous upthrusts may have influenced the evolution of man and anthropoid apes. Geologist de Terra organized the Yale North India Expedition, took along a biologist, a paleontologist and Mrs. de Terra as photographer. After 15 months scouring a wide terrain, he issued a report this spring. Burrowing into the Badlands of Potwar, the party found five jawbones of apes, representing three new classifications, two of which more closely resemble homo sapiens than any other fossil apes ever discovered.* One genus they named Ramapithecns in honor of Rama, stalwart, uxorious hero of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana. Another they christened Sitgriva-pitkeens, after Sugriva, king of the monkeys who helped Rama get his wife back from the demon-king of Ceylon. The third they named Bramapithecus for the Hindu God Brahma.

Ramapithecus had a V-shaped upper jaw more similar to human form than to the U-shaped jaws of modern gorillas, orangs, chimpanzees. Sugrivapithecus had a well-developed chin like that of primitive man. Both had close-set, almost human teeth, lacking the formidable canine tusks of the great apes of today. The third genus was more like extinct apes previously discovered.

As for traces of early man, the party found crude scrapers and knives made of limestone and volcanic rock. First evidence of an Old Stone Age culture in northern India, these implements were unearthed in a Pleistocene swamp deposit 500,000 years old. Other notable finds included fossils of land tortoises big enough to dwarf the Galapagos giants, and of four-horned ruminants bigger than rhinoceroses but related to giraffes.

Mexico. Clustered on a high ridge near Oaxaca, a maze of ruins that once was the flourishing Zapotec city of Monte Alban has been probed for three years by Mexican archeologists. Monte Alban made prime news when the diggers entering a tomb were confronted by a group of long- dead dignitaries clad in gold. This year Dr. Alfonso Caso of the National Museum of Mexico penetrated Tomb 43. found the owner's skeleton stretched full length, was astounded by two objects lying beside the skull. They were spool-shaped stone earrings, coated with jade as thin and perfectly fitting as if applied by electroplating.

Most Zapotec skulls show signs of having been artificially flattened in childhood, and the teeth are filed and inlaid with tiny disks of various minerals. The Monte Alban tombs bear inscriptions that seem to be dates but the Zapotec symbols have not been deciphered as have the Mayan and Aztec. A clue to Monte Alban's age turned up this season when Dr. Caso found a Tlachtli, or ball court. A religious rite as well as a pastime, Tlachtli underwent rule changes in the course of time. Monte Alban's Tlachtli had sloping instead of vertical sides, a single central altar instead of several in groups. From these facts Dr. Caso deduced that it was built some 1,000 years ago.

Assyria, Tahai was the name of a high functionary under Shalmaneser III, who ruled Assyria eight centuries before Christ. At that time top government officials were accustomed to cast lots annually among themselves to decide for which one the next calendar year should be named. As an "eponym official" for one year, the winner of that ancient crap-game deemed his place in history secure. Last month was discovered a cube of baked clay hardly more than an inch on a side, inscribed: "Lot of Tahae." The die was found not on Babylon's site but at New Haven. Conn., in the Babylonian Collection of Yale University, and was rescued from obscurity by Acting Curator Ferris J. Stephens.

*The famed creature unearthed in Java more than 40 years ago seemed half man, half ape at first and he was accordingly called Pithecanthropus credits. Closer study of his skull, however, caused him to be classed with the komlnidae, the human family to which belong such later celebrities as Piltdown Man, Pekin Man, Heidelberg Man, Rhodesian Man. Sir Arthur Keith thinks it possible that old Pitlfcanthropus could talk.

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