The Shards of History
ARCHAEOLOGY
(See Cover) Even as his spaceships reach toward the future and the stars, modern man is more concerned than ever with his past on his own planet. From China to Peru, diggers are everywhere. And nowhere are they busier than in the ancient heart land of the Near East, where Western culture was born.
The pick-and-shovel brigades have invaded Gibeon, where once the sun stood still for Joshua; painstakingly they have probed for the ruins of Gordion, capital of Phrygia, where poor King Midas saw his concubines turn to gold at his touch. The city of Ephesus, sacred to the goddess Artemis, and Aphrodisias, sacred to Aphrodite, are yielding their age-old secrets. The remnants of Hatra, destroyed long ago by the Persians, have been recovered from the debris of centuries. Samarra is being excavated--that lovely capital of Abbasside caliphs, who ruled over the Near East during Europe's dark ages.
Everywhere archaeologists, armed with all the advantages of modern science, are extending the geography of history. Aerial cameras detect the faint outlines of long-demolished walls; delicate airborne magnetometers ferret out forgotten fortifications; measurements of minute bits of carbon establish accurate dates back beyond any written record. Mummies are submitted to autopsy for a knowledge of ancient diseases. Fossilized grains of pollen testify to the climate in which they grew. Reused writing materials, called palimpsests, are irradiated with ultraviolet light and reveal words that were erased thousands of years ago.
The techniques are exceedingly delicate; the skills required are highly specialized. Modern archaeology has developed into an intricate and cooperative effort as its practitioners have gathered a vast new library of information about the dim background of civilization. The current fashion is to work in tight teams, with experts at hand to debate every judgment. Yet for all the advantages of a burgeoning technology, the man who uses its gadgets least and operates most often as a solo scientist has contributed outstandingly to the expanding knowledge of the past.
To Scholar-Adventurer-Rabbi Nelson Glueck, 63, archaeology is less a matter of digging than it is of discerning. It is less large projects of reconstruction than it is large efforts of imagination and even larger exercises of scholarship. It is a provocative amalgam of insight and adventure. It is the act of finding an inch-long fragment of pottery on the dull grey desert, and it is the art of seeing a whole camp site in the broken shard. It is the ability to hold that relic in the hand and hear in the mind's ear an echo of some forgotten language, almost understood.
Mists of Morning. At a time when archaeology is so dependent on so many disciplines, Glueck's individual achievement seems almost paradoxical. But paradox is the measure of the man. He is a rabbi who has never served a congregation, but who, speaking partly in Hebrew, delivered the benediction--"May the Lord be gracious unto thee" --at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration. He is president of Cincinnati's Hebrew Union College, but as an educator he spends much of his time thousands of miles from his classrooms.
As an archaeologist he leans heavily on a source that many an expert considers undependable: the Old Testament stories that to Nelson Glueck make up "the amazing historical memory of the Bible."
Bible in hand, Glueck has ranged the Holy Land off and on for 36 years. "Out on the desert," he says, "there is sometimes so much mist in the morning that you cannot travel. You have to wait for the sun to burn it off. To me, archaeology is like burning the mist off the Bible." His work, he hastens to add, is far from an effort to use archaeology to prove the existence of God. Even to try, he believes, would be to "confuse fact with faith, history with holiness, science with religion." To him, the Bible is an indispensable guide as he goes about his work of filling blank areas on the world's historical maps and bringing lost nations to vivid life.
With the Bible's help Glueck has discovered more than 1,000 ancient sites in Transjordan and 500 more in the Negev. He has won fresh understanding of the age of Abraham and set a firmer date for the Exodus; he has clarified the socio-economic history of the Judean kings and filled out man's scanty knowledge of the once-thriving kingdom of the Nabataeans. He has located the long-lost copper mines of King Solomon and accurately spotted the site of Solomon's port on the Red Sea. Most important of all, he has found in the parched Negev a promise of space for the constricted nation of Israel.
Extraordinary Book. Dr. Glueck is quick to insist that for all his accomplishment, his work touches only one aspect of archaeology's many-sided search for man's past. Until rather recently, history began with Herodotus, who wrote in Greece about 450 B.C. But great civilizations rose and fell long before the Greeks, and were forgotten except for legend.
The one great breach in the wall of silence about the ancient world is the Old Testament. This extraordinary book pulses with the record of stirring events that took place 1,500 years before Herodotus. Armies march and kings conspire in its lively pages. Prophets thunder their warnings; courtiers and diplomats conspire subtly. Commoners love and hate, worship and sin, bear children and tend their vineyards.
In many ways the Palestine of the Old Testament is the world's most in teresting focus of early history. It cannot match the magnificent ruins of Egypt and Mesopotamia, but it was always a corridor between those great centers and was deeply affected by both of them. Armies from east and west marched back and forth, and with them came languages and art forms, gods and ideas. This cross-fertilization may explain why the small, poor land of Palestine is the source of two of the world's great religions, Christianity and Judaism, and sacred to still a third, Mohammedanism.
The Holy Land is encrusted with ruins. Ancient fortresses crown its hills and ancient roads wind among them. The fields are full of the pottery fragments that archaeologists call potsherds. Rising above the plains stand the curious, flat-topped mounds called tells, which are the corpses of long-dead cities. Early diggers, many of them hardly more than treasure hunters, found little meaning in this hodgepodge of antiquity. Without inscriptions it was almost impossible to identify the various levels of occupation piled one upon another as the centuries passed. Late Moslem ruins were hailed as belonging to the time of Jesus; crusaders' strongholds were attributed to King David.
High Interest. One of the first efforts to set up an accurate system for dating Holy Land ruins was made by Johns Hopkins Professor William Foxwell Albright, dean of Palestinian archaeology. As head of Palestine's American School of Oriental Research in the 1920s, Albright began the monumental task of classifying Palestinian potsherds, sorting them out by curvature, thickness, color, material--hundreds of different variations. Fragments found near coins or a rare bit of writing could be placed accurately in time. And with those bench marks other layers of a tell could be properly located in history.
Albright was well into his work in 1927 when Nelson Glueck arrived at the institute as a student. The young scholar seemed already engaged in a determined effort to escape the rabbinate for which he had been trained. He had entered Hebrew Union College at 14, earned a B.H.L. (Bachelor of Hebrew Literature), and gone on to get a B.A. from the University of Cincinnati. He was ordained in 1923, but instead of taking a pulpit he took off for Germany. Shifting from university to university in the continental manner, Glueck studied Eastern lore at Heidelberg and Berlin, got a Ph.D. at Jena with a formidable thesis entitled Das Wort Hesed im alttestamentlichen Sprachgebrauche (The Word Grace in Old Testament Usage). Then he returned to Berlin to study Assyrian and Ethiopic. He was already feeling that the archaeology of the Bible would be his life's high interest.
In Palestine, Glueck recognized at once the magic of 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 disappears, stone crumbles, glass decays, metal corrodes. Only pottery lasts forever."
Even while he was learning the pottery code, the young rabbi kept coming back to the historical cadences of the Hebrew Old Testament. He planned his first ambitious explorations in Moab, Edom, Ammon, and the wild desert haunts of the Kenites and Midianites.
Nothing could sway his purpose.
He went home in 1931 to marry Helen Ransohof Iglauer, a medical student at the University of Cincinnati who is now a professor of medicine there. Albright had made him head of the American School by then, but neither marriage nor administrative duties kept him from his project. He brought his bride to Jerusalem, parked her there, and in the summer of 1932 he set out for the East on camelback. He took one Arab companion and a Hebrew Bible.
Desert Etiquette. Those were wild years in Palestine, as the Jews and Arabs warmed up for full-scale war. Shots rang in the narrow streets of Jerusalem; machine guns chattered beyond the Judean hills. It was not time for an unarmed rabbi to go exploring in Arab country, but Glueck was never questioned about his religion. "That a Jew should wander by himself in Trans-Jordan," he says, "was so unheard of that no one thought to ask."
He was always careful to observe the strict rules of desert etiquette. "When you come into Bedouin territory," he explains, "you've got to find their camp and check in. You ask for the sheik and tell him who you are and what you're up to. He's almost always friendly, usually too friendly. He has his people prepare a tremendous feast, just as Abraham killed a calf for his guests. You sit around the fire, stuffed with food and talking endlessly. Then you are taken to the guest tent and covered against the cold with the tribe's best blankets. Your hosts mean well, but the food is sometimes odd--sheep's eyes are something I never got used to. And the blankets are full of bedbugs. A guest of the Bedouins always gets covered with bites."
And if keeping peace with the Arabs had its elements of unpleasantness, coming to terms with the desert itself was every bit as difficult. Over the course of his archaeological career, Glueck estimates, he has eaten his own weight in sand. Recurrently parched and hungry, he figures that he has lost a cumulative total of 1,000 Ibs. But the slim rabbi with the emphatic eyebrows always emerged from his Bedouin robes in perfect health.
Once Glueck won the freedom of the desert, though, he found himself in an archaeological paradise. He wandered through the ancient lands on the far side of the Jordan, Bible in hand, and everywhere he found traces of ancient people. Usually potsherds told him who they were. Other explorers may have reported a ruined fortress on a hill and a low tell beyond it. If inscriptions were lacking, as they generally were, only vague guesses, based on general appearance, could set the age of the find. Glueck was the first to determine that the fort was built in the reign of a specific king of Judah, or that the tell, dated from the age of Abraham, perhaps 1,300 years earlier. All that he needed was a look at the potsherds; sometimes he could identify them from the altitude of a camel back.
How Did They Live? As his experience increased, Glueck developed an almost infallible knack for finding sites of ancient communities. First he looked for springs or waterholes. In that dusty land, every source of water is sure to attract settlers. He also followed the trails of modern Bedouins. "The coun try has not changed," he says, "so they still use the same paths that were followed in ancient times." He kept asking himself how they lived. "Were there caravan routes going through? You have to have a good reason for each settlement."
And always there was the evidence of the Bible. The Old Testament names numerous "cities," tells roughly where they stood, and suggests where to look for more. When the Israelites under Moses were pressing toward the Promised Land, they asked permission to pass through Edom and Moab on the shore of the Dead Sea, promising to stay on the "king's highway," and not to drink the water of the country. Still the King of Edom refused, forcing the Israelites to detour through the dangerous eastern desert.
Edom and Moab were almost unin habited when Glueck started his survey, but he was sure that if they were strong enough at the time of the Exodus to repel the redoubtable Israelites, they must have been well armed and well organized. Just where he had expected, the adventurous archaeologist found the towns, blockhouses and frontier fortresses of shadowy Edom and Moab. He identified them by the pottery code and set a date for each settlement within a few score years.
Summer after summer Glueck returned to find and date hundreds of such sites, and to his growing amazement he noted that none contained types of pottery older than 1300 B.C. and therefore the sites themselves could not be older. The date of the Exodus, deduced from legend and doubtful Egyptian records, has often been given as early as 1500 B.C. But Glueck's potsherds proved that at that time the Israelites could have marched through Edom and Moab with hardly any opposition. If Edom was too strong for them, as the Bible says, they must have arrived at a time that was no earlier than 1300 B.C.
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.
Some Palestinian tells are 70 ft. thick and contain dozens of different layers of debris. Obviously little can be learned about them by looking only at their surfaces; they are the proper hunting grounds of diggers, who work back through the slow accretion of years. But in arid regions, where the 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 told him no more.
Occasionally the Bible led him to a site that demanded 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.
First clues came when he led an expedition into the Wadi el 'Araba, the great desert depression that leads south 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 told to them by their fathers. They did not know what it signified.
Glueck and his companions knew as soon as they saw the place. Khirbet Nahas, now in Jordan, was the center of a mining and smelting complex, part of which can be traced back to the Early Bronze Age. Most of the crude furnaces and miners' huts were built during the Iron Age, which includes the time of Solomon. The large amount of slag proves that copper was smelted there in quantity, making the place well worth protecting with a chain of forts.
Apes & Peacocks. Another favorite passage in Glueck's guidebook spoke of Solomon's seaport: "And King Solomon made a navy of ships in Ezion-geber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea in the land of Edom." The Queen of Sheba presumably passed through Ezion-geber on her visit to Solomon, and every three years a fleet of merchant ships brought "gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks."
There are many archaeological sites at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, the eastern branch of the Red Sea, but no one knew which, if any, was Solomon's seaport. A German explorer, Fritz Frank, discovered a low mound called Tell el Khalifa that seemed to fill the requirements. But Frank had no way of backing up his guess. When Glueck came along, he quickly satisfied himself by means of the pottery code that the tell was indeed Solomonic. But why was it built in such an unpleasant place, where water is scarce and a tremendous wind, often laden with sand, roars down the wadi? A brief investigation brought the answer: Ezion-geber was only incidentally a seaport. It was principally an elaborate copper smelter built to use the blast effect of the prevailing wind.
On the spot, Glueck turned temporarily from a surface man to a dogged digger. Financed by grants from the American Philosophical Society and the Smithsonian Institution, he braved the heat and the dust storms to excavate the smelter. The buildings that he revealed are probably the best examples of early industrialism. The massive walls of the smelter are pierced with intricate holes and channels through which the wind still whistles.
Well-Covered Spy. By the time Glueck finished his dig, World War II was raging, and he barely managed to get his share of the finds shipped back to the U.S. He followed later, via Bombay and Cape Town, and reconciled himself to staying out of the Near East for the duration. But a few months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he got a telephone summons to appear in Washington without delay. By lunchtime the next day he was working for General "Wild Bill" Donovan's Office of Strategic Services. He took a quick course in how to handle codes, and soon he was on his way back to Transjordan. "I had the best cover of any spy," he says, "because it was real. I went on doing what I had always done. I would investigate five to ten archaeological sites per day, then find the nearest Arab encampment."
During the long evening gabfests he got all the local news, sounded out Arab public opinion, watched for Nazi spies, kept track of the rather secretive British. For "archaeological purposes" he even managed to borrow the best British air photos of Transjordan, and got them copied for the OSS. "I was supposed to play some sort of Lawrence of Arabia role," he says. "I knew all about the country, so I would have been invaluable if we had landed troops there. But we did not."
With archaeology at a standstill in most of the rest of the world, Glueck made good use of the war years. He mapped Transjordan more thoroughly than it had ever been mapped before, listing 1,200 archaeological sites. He completed his survey in 1947, just as strife between Arabs and Jews was becoming so fierce that even the most disarming rabbi could not travel safely in Arab country. Glueck went back to his intermittent professor's job at Hebrew Union College, where he was promptly elected head of the board of governors. He did not resist; H.U.C. is probably the only college in the world that can be governed from the back of a camel 8,000 miles away.
Oldest on Earth. With the war over and the world quieting down, archaeology everywhere made a tremendous spurt forward. Its findings rivaled the great discoveries of the 19th century, when the great names of Sir Flinders Petrie and Heinrich Schliemann were synonymous with the discovery of whole civilizations that had been almost or wholly forgotten. During the iron age of the two World Wars, the "hard" sciences built around physics and electronics had taken the center of the stage. Now there was time and safety for search again. Out of the soil came fertility goddesses, the pinup girls of Neolithic times. With them came sam ples of the earliest-known alphabet. In Galilee the diggers found a mosaic synagogue floor and nearby the inscribed name of Pontius Pilate. At Nemrud Dagh in Turkey they found colossal stone heads of kings, gods and their animal companions.
Some advances were not directly the work of archaeologists. The Dead Sea scrolls were accidental treasure found by curious Arabs poking into Judean caves. Great strides in desert exploration were made possible by the war-derived Jeep, which carries more than a camel, goes faster and farther and consumes even less water. In Palestine the meticulous diggers began their attacks on the great tells. The work is still going on, with new finances and all the newest methods. Instead of burrowing at random or clearing away whole levels by main force, the diggers like to sink small test shafts and dig narrow preliminary trenches. Then they lay out promising areas in checkerboard squares and dig shafts in each square, leaving solid partitions of untouched material in between. Every object found is recorded and photographed. Potsherds are collected as greedily as if they were golden coins. As the shafts go down through thousands of years of occupancy, segments of each ancient wall and floor are left in the partitions where they can be used for continual checking.
University of Pennsylvania Professor James B. Pritchard made spectacular use of this laborious method at a tell just north of Jerusalem. There Pritchard proved that the modern Arab village of El-Jib is Gibeon, the place where Joshua smote the Amorites. Another extraordinary dig was at Jericho north of the Dead Sea, where Oxford's formidable Kathleen Kenyon used the latest methods on a tell that had been inhabited for 5,500 years before Joshua blew the trumpets that made its walls fall down.
Down went Miss Kenyon too, to the bottom of the tell where she found a Neolithic town with regular buildings and defensive walls which carbon 14 proved to have been built in Jericho's green oasis as early as 6800 B.C. This is 3,400 years before the first dynasty in Egypt. It makes Jericho the oldest known town on earth.
One of the most interesting of the postwar digs was conducted by Professor Robert Braidwood of the University of Chicago, whose longtime project has been to search for evidence of the great moment when the first men turned from wandering hunters to settled farmers. This invention of agriculture was the take-off point for human civilization--before it, all was savagery. Apparently the big switch may have come 12,000 years ago in northern Iraq, where Braidwood found a primitive agricultural hamlet, which he calls Jarmo.
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 New York's Jewish Institute of Religion and has sprouted outposts in Los Angeles and Jerusalem. The Cincinnati campus is now dominated by its graduate school, which has more Christian than Jewish students and is the recognized U.S. center for Semitic studies.
For all his devotion to Cincinnati, his wife and his son Jonathan, Glueck was still homesick for the desert; he longed to finger potsherds again, squint into the setting sun for the shadows of ancient trails, feel the Bible come alive in his hand as he walked over Biblical lands. But settled parts of Israel were not his style; he did not like routine digging. And he could no longer explore in Arab territory. Jordan officials still denounce him as a spy who mapped their country to help Israeli invaders.
One place was left: the Negev, the barren southern half of Israel, which juts like an isosceles triangle with its apex on the Gulf of Aqaba. In the Negev, Glueck saw a chance to use archaeology to influence the future of Israel by revealing the history of its distant past.
When modern Israel was born, the Negev was a barren waste supporting only a tiny population of hungry Bedouins. But it had not always been so empty. Everywhere were the relics of ancient people: mounds, forts, roads, wells and walled fields. The common explanation was that the climate had got drier, turning a once fertile country into desert. But Glueck was not convinced. During his long, painstaking exploration of neighboring Transjordan, he had looked for evidence of climatic change and found none. Instead he found evidence that the country had been fairly thickly settled during periods of political stability. After invaders swept through, its people turned back to the life of nomads and were dominated for centuries by wild tribes from the Arabian Desert. Then a new civilization took hold of the land again and repopulated it. If this happened in Trans-Jordan, he reasoned, it probably happened in the Negev too.
Once more the Old Testament backed him up. Careful reading of the Book of Genesis shows that Abraham and the other Hebrew patriarchs were not real Bedouins. For one thing, camels had not yet been domesticated; long journeys over waterless stretches were not as easy as in more recent times. The patriarchs grazed their cattle, sheep and goats on the edge of agricultural country, getting water from the farmers, doing a little farming themselves, and trading wool, cheese and other pastoral products for grain and manufactured articles.
If this was the way that Abraham lived, and the historical memory of the Bible says that it was, the patriarch must have found well-populated country in the Negev all the way to Egypt. He traveled there on foot without difficulty. What happened to those inhabitants of the ancient Negev? asked Glueck. He suspected that invaders periodically wiped them out or pushed them back into nomadism, just as in Transjordan.
In 1952, with the enthusiastic help of the young Israeli government, Glueck began a mile-by-mile survey of the Negev. He could no longer move about unarmed; the local Bedouins were no menace, but armed Arab infiltrators were constantly crossing Israel's borders rigged for murder and sabotage. Glueck was forced to travel with a patrol of 15 to 20 Israeli soldiers armed with rifles, machine guns and hand grenades, and equipped with radios to call for help when needed.
Glueck never learned to like a mili tary escort, but he made the best of the situation by picking his guards from the Israeli army's large supply of passionate amateur archaeologists. From the first, his survey showed what he had hoped: that the Negev had been inhabited at many periods of history. It was never thickly settled, but everywhere there was evidence that its population had built up periodically in times of political stability. Then came war and disorder, and the Negev declined into nomadism. Probably its highest point came when a talented Arabian people, the Nabatae-ans, moved in from Transjordan just before the start of the Christian era.
Glueck discovered relics of the Naba-taeans and became fascinated with them. Except for their famous capital, Petra, Poet John William Burgon's "rose-red city half as old as time," the Naba-taeans were almost unknown, but they had prospered mightily. Their cities, roads and forts were all over Trans-Jordan. They knew how to make the most of a water-short land, and when they moved into the Negev, they outdid themselves. Glueck often found their elaborate water systems almost intact, though seldom used or recognized by the modern inhabitants.
Concentrating Rain. Most of the Negev gets less than 6 in. of rain per year, and it usually comes in winter in short, sudden downpours. It does not sink into the hard ground; it pours into the dry wadies, sometimes foaming all the way to the Mediterranean. The best way to make practical use of this sort of rainfall is to concentrate the water as much as possible where it will do the most good--which is exactly what the Naba-taeans did in the Negev. The more Glueck studied their works, the more he admired their industry and engineering skill.
The 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 water for man and beast during the hot summer when no rain fell, they carved enormous cisterns in the rock and made them watertight with many layers of plaster. These cisterns still exist by the thousands and are only waiting to be cleaned out. Glueck considers them more dependable than the common Israeli pipelines, which can be cut by Arab saboteurs.
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.
More than Life. But no such triumphs are enough to contain the 63-year-old adventurer. Somehow he has found time to write three books popularizing archaeology--including the well-known Rivers in the Desert. And in the intervals while he is at home being a college president, Glueck is writing a massive book about the Nabataeans.
But his heart remains in the Negev. Still active enough to keep the figure of an undergraduate, he spends his summers in Israel, taking to the field as soon as the heat has burned off all vegetation to reveal telltale potsherds. Sometimes he gets shot at, but he seems to enjoy such trouble. Last summer he briefly visited Ain-Mugharah (Spring of the Caves). "It's smack on the Sinai border," he says, "and it's a little dangerous. A cliff overhangs the spring; anyone can shoot down." There are many ancient sites there from the time of Abraham and the Judean Kings, but "no one goes there now," Glueck says, "except a few Bedouins, the Egyptian infiltrators and an archaeologist like me."
Next summer he will be back at Ain-Mugharah again. "There is something there," he says, "not just things to find, but the threads of history to tie up. That is the great reward of my kind of exploring." Danger there may be, but to the scientist it is no more than a calculated risk. "What the explorer is after," says Explorer Glueck modestly, "is more important than his life."
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