ARCHAEOLOGY

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28471, 28 December 1957, Page 3

ARCHAEOLOGY

Adventures in the Nearest East. By Cyrus Gordon. Phoenix House, Ltd. 192 pp.. The archaeologist’s present activities are conveyed in this passage; “The age of treasure hunting is over, for it is no longer a legitimate form of archaeology Instead of that, the discipline of the archaeologist now requires well-recorded, stratigraphic excavation. A site is excavated layer by layer, and what is found in each layer is recorded, photographed. planned and described The value of stratigraphic excavation is best brought out by the fact that it has vastly widened the horizon that we had of human history a hundred years' ago. We can now go back to perhaps about the year 6000 B.C. so that our knowledge Of architecture. of art, of countless aspects of life, is now vastly enlarged—thanks to stratigraphic excavation.”

Dr. Gordon’s book deals with field work and excavation in Palestine and Mesopotamia and the earlier chapters are devoted to the techniques of excavation, something of what the finds were and what thqy reveal. There are descriptions of the Arabian Desert and those who live in it

such as the charming story of a camel boy picking a bouquet of desert flowers—yellow, blue, red and all the colours of the rainbow—and giving it most affectionately to his camel . . . and of Sheik Mohammed Sheik Mohammed, a very valuable man who acted as my assistant foreman, asked me one day what we were trying to accomplish by digging: why were we spending good money to find old Potsherds and bricks and fragmentary walls. I called him aside and said. ‘Sheik Mohammed you are an intelligent man and I speak to you as Such. We are looking for traces of early civilisations—for things belonging to

ancient men whom Allah has destroyed.’ ‘Ah!’ said he surprised, ‘Ah! But why did you not tell me it was that you wanted? Had you told me, I could)have showed you where the e tombs of the Kings of Moab are.’ ” (Following up this amazing statement what they actually unearthed were, as they had foreseen, remains of occupation from the twenty-first to the nineteenth centuries 8.C., with no vestige of the tombs of the kings of Moab.) But archaeological discoveries. Dr. Gordon says, “are not sup-' posed either to prove or disprove Scripture. However, archaeological discoveries coming from the world in ’ which the Scriptures were written indisputably add to *he sum total of our knowledge of that and give us perspective as well as more individual facts.”

With clarity, enthusiasm and scholarship, Dr. Gordon brings to our mind and eye the pattern of life in the centuries before the birth of Christ: this book is a human historv—domestic, social, legal, and economic—and one of the most fascinating chapters is devoted to four or five generations of a specific family in the Amarna Age (the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries 8.C.). On clay tablets, written in a provincial dialect of Babylonian, are recorded all their transactions, important and trivial: transactions of sale, loan, exchange; marriage: adoption, and divorce. There are three maps and twentyfive plates, which include a set of photographs of seal cylinders to illustrate the chapter on Glyptic Art. More numerous illustrations would have overbalanced a book of this length, but appreciation of “Adventures in the Nearest East” would be deepened if it could be read with the help of L H. Grollenberg’s “Atlas of the Bible” with its magnificent photographs and maps.