12 Friday, June 4, 1982
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Holy Land Archeology Reviewed in 'Digging for God and Country'
(Continued from Page 11)
tions of the city.
In 1867-1880, Grove
raised money for the Pales-
tine Exploration Fund to
allow a new excavator,
Warren, to survey, map and
excavate in the Holy Land.
Warren arrived in Jaffa
with picks, shovels and
wheelbarrows ready to ex-
cavate the Haram-ash
both in London and in
Jerusalem was at a height.
Rabbis, the Pasha, scholars
and tourists descended the
shafts to inspect the work
and contribute money. A
Palestine Museum was
begun at the Dudley Gal-
lery in London in 1869.
The bizarre story of the
Moabite stone, (a relic bear-
ing a documentary inscrip-
tion describing the victory
of a Moabite king over
Judah and Israel) involved
suspicion, greed, intrigue,
bribery and diplomatic ma-
neuvering. The French,
British and Germans each
tried to purchase the stone
from the Bedouin tribal
leader, Bani-Hamideh.
Suspecting that it contained
a secret treasure, the Be-
douins destroyed the stone
by repeatedly burning it
and plunging it into water
to wrest from it the secret.
Only fragments were left
to be later assembled.
Pieced together like a jig-
saw puzzle, it was finally
displayed in the Louvre in
1873.
Mapping the Holy
Land was divided be-
tween the British Pales-
tine Exploration Fund
under Wilson, who
planned to map all of
Palestine, and the
American Palestine
Exploration Society,
which planned to map
Transjordan.
The mapping skill of the
Sharif, but the Nazif Pasha,
responding to Islamic pro-
tests, forced Warren to limit
his work to a distance of 40
feet from the wall.
Warren, not daunted,
sunk shafts vertically at
this limit and then bur-
rowed to the wall to discover
an ancient pavement 100
feet underground.
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British far excelled that of
the Americans. The com-
pleted British survey actu-
ally defined the limits of the
future country, as the Ot-
toman Empire gradually
crumbled and Palestine was
cut away from Syria. When
the British vied with the
Egyptians over interests in
the Suez Canal area, the
British campaign in the
Holy Land was eventually
successful because of the ex-
cellent mapping by the mili-
tary engineers.
Tragic Story of
Antiquities Trader
A lively trade in tourism
and antiquities developed
on the heels of the ar-
cheological interst. The
story of Moses Wilhelm
Shapira, a Jew converted to
Anglicanism, who had an
antiquities shop on Chris-
tian's Street in Jerusalem,
ended tragically.
Shapira, who had come to
Jerusalem from Keiv at 26
and who had established a
reputable trade in artifacts,
was involved in selling sus-
pected forged Moabite pot-
tery containing inscriptions
in letters like those on the
Moabite stone. Although
probably innocent of fraud,
and himself a victim of the
perpetrators of it, Shapira
was not able to shake off the
suspicion of guilt.
Years later, when he
was about to sell to the
British Museum several
ancient scrolls from a
section of Dueteronomy,
scrolls that had been ver-
ified by experts, the
charge by a French
scholar that the scrolls
were forged caused the
British Museum to with-
draw its offer of a million
pounds for their pur-
chase. The museum also
withdrew the scrolls
from a current exhibition
and discredited the seller
as a swindler. Shapira
commited suicide.
Eventually more scrolls,
now called the Dead Sea
Scrolls, were discovered in
the same condition as Shap-
ira's scrolls. But Shapira's
scrolls were sold on the an-
tiquities market for a few
pounds and eventually dis-
appeared.
Silverman closes the 19th
Century work with the con-
tribution of Flinders Petrie,
who came in 1890 from ex-
cavations in Egypt to direct
the dig at Tell Hesy, east of
Gaza. Petrie pioneered in
the field of archeology the
dating of levels of excava-
tion (the strata) by pieces of
broken pottery, called
sherds, which have been so
expertly classified that they
can identify the time slot of
a layer.
Petrie was shocked that
comparative dating had not
been done in Palestine to
equate historical develop-
ment within the country
with areas beyond. Eventu-
ally Petrie returned to work
in Egypt leaving the site to
a new director, an American
named Bliss. Under him the
cuneiform tablet of Tell
Hesy was discovered, a
document from the .14th
Century BCE disclosing an
Egyptian control of Canaan:
Archeology had begun to
write history.
The Germans under
Kaiser Wilhelm II
entered the field of bibli-
cal archeology with a dig
at Megiddo led by
Schumacher with a crew
of 150 laborers, as the
Deutsche Palestina Ver-
ein was formed. The
Germans organized the
laborers efficiently with
five male diggers to 15
women carriers and
bonuses for finds in the
10-hour day. Archeology
had become an industry.
When digging in the
Glailee unearthed the syn-
agogue at Capernaum,
Germay firmly established
itself in the Middle East
with scholarship backed by
money and political influ-
ence. The Kaiser and the
Sultan cemeted a bond of
friendship.
U.S. Influence
Starts in 1900s
The Americans, mean-
while, had established in
1905-1910 the American
School of Oriental Research
in Jerusalem supported by
universities who each con-
tributed $100 for the pur-
chase of the building.
.G.A. Reisner, a trained
archeologist, was chosen by
Charles Eliot Norton to ex-
cavate Sebaste in Samaria,
while Jacob H. Schiff gave
the money to Harvard for a
Semitic museum and
$50,000 for the excavation.
Reisner had already
been committed to return
to Egypt, and the German
Schumacher was chosen
to lead the dig, which un-
covered a stairway to a
temple to Augustus,
along with mosaic floors
and an altar with impe-
rial sculpture. When
Reisner returned, how-
ever, he had to move all of
Schumacher's dumped
debris to uncover the
walls of the city.
Reisner discovered more
than 60 ostraca (pottery
fragments with inscrip-
tions), with Hebrew cursive
script shedding new light on
daily life with records of tax
payments on wine and oil,
and with names of persons
who had lived in the ancient
city.
In his penultimate chap-
ter, Silverman describes the
frantic attempts by the
Britisher Montague Parker
to locate the treasure of Sol-
omon's Temple by reopen-
ing subterranean passages
under the Temple Mount in
a dig directed by a clair-
voyant in London. By brib-
ing the local official to allow
him to dig on the Haram-
ash-Sharif secretly at night,
Parker, when discovered,
caused a riot that nearly
cost him his life.
The final chapter covered
the preparations for war in
the Holy Land with the
British, French and Rus-
sians allied against Ger-
many, Austria and Turkey.
In 1913, with war clouds
gathering over the Near
East, two British ar-
cheologists arrived in the
Negev to participate in the
mapping of the wilderness
— Leonard Woolley and
T.E. Lawrence. The last
piece to the puzzle map of
Palestine was completed —
from the upper Galilee to
the Gulf of Aqaba. The
British Palestine Explora 7
tion Fund maps were ready
to be used by army intelli-
gence at the outbreak of
war.
The Jewish Palestit
Exploration Society was
formed in Jerusalem
shortly before the war
and in 1920 began exca-
vations near Tiberias in
the Galilee. The Jews
themselves had entered
the field of archeology,
and they have continued
to discover and interpret
their own history.
Silverman himself is evi-
dence of how a Jewish
scholar can bring impartial
research techniques to bear
in uncovering the fascinat-
ing history of this excava-
tion fever. His scholarly
notes complete the book,
which can be criticized only
for ending so soon.
Born in Boston and edu-
cated at Wesleyan Univer-
sity, Silverman has studied
at the Institute of Archeol-
ogy of Hebrew University
for his graduate work. He
subsequently has worked as
a field archeologist for the
Department of Antiquities
and Museums of Israel. He
has excavated at Akko with
the University of Haifa.
It is to be hoped that Sil-
verman will continue his
historical survey of excava-
tions in Israel with the sub-
sequent digs from 1917. to
the present.
Support Group
Plays Important
Role at BGU
NEW YORK (JTA) —
Support groups in the
United States for Israeli
universities can legiti-
mately be considered a
commitment to a goal of
global significance, accord-
ing to Robert Arnow,
president of the American
Associates of Ben-Gurion
University.
Such support groups are
standard components of the
educational scene for many
universities in many coun-
tries. Ben-Gurion Univer-
sity has similar support
groups in Australia, Swit-
zerland, South Africa and
Britain, Arnow said.
Arnow stressed the uni-
versity's accomplishment--
in desert reclamation, sc
tlement and developmen.
which have worldwide sig-
nificance.
He cited the university's
Jacob Blaustein's Desert
Research Institute as the
only one in the world where
scientists study all aspects
of human settlement in a
desert environment. Re-
search includes ecology,
flora and fauna, water,
climatology, energy, ag-
riculture and economics.
,
Those who have courage
to love should have courage
to suffer.