Science: Diggers

Recent discoveries in archeology: Palestine. Sir Charles Marston is spending much of his bicycle fortune for archeological research because he believes the world is a little better off every time his diggers confirm some scrap of Biblical history. Marston-financed is theexpedition of Wellcome Historical Medical Museum of London, now probing the site of ancient Lachish, southwest of Jerusalem. Last month Expedition Leader J. L. Starkey & staff turned up twelve fragments of pottery bearing the name, written in ink, of many a notable figure of the decadent period from Solomon’s first temple in 970 B. C. to the Babylonian conquest in 606 B. C. (TIME, March 25). Last week Sir Charles, just turning 68, was in Manhattan for his third marriage (see p. 70). He told reporters he was a little irked by news of the Wellcome expedition which he had not authorized and which did not mention his name or his book, New Bible Evidence.

Meantime further finds were being made at Lachish which the expedition members, with Sir Charles off attending to other matters, did not feel like withholding. One was a seal inscribed in Hebrew: “To Gedaliah, who rules the house.” Gedaliah, son of Ahikam, was an honorable and generous man (“gather ye wine, and summer fruits, and oil”) appointed by Nebuchadnezzar to govern conquered Mizpah (Jeremiah 40: 7-16). The Feast of Gedaliah is still celebrated by orthodox Jews the week before Yom Kippur.

The story is that the Babylonians had hemmed in the beleaguered city with a ring of uprooted olive trees, set them afire. Leader Starkey found a circle of charred stones and wood ash extending clear around the city. In the ashes were innumerable olive pits.

Greece. Dr. Theodore Leslie Shear of Princeton has been directing diggers in Greece since 1911, in Athens since 1931. He has laid bare the ancient Athenian agora (market place), brought to light a multitude of priceless relics (TIME, Jan. 1, 1934). Last month, 50 ft. below the site of the Senate, near the Acropolis, he came upon a Mycenaean cemetery which he dated at 1500 B. C. Surrounded by wine jars, remains of food and clothing, many of the skeletons were almost perfectly preserved. U. S. Minister to Greece Lincoln MacVeagh, something of an archeologist himself, thought the find might prove to be among the most important in a decade. Dr. Shear planned to ship one of the skeletons, protected by wax, to anthropologists of Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History in the hope that its exact age and race affiliation could be determined.

Haiti. Because the steersman was careless, Christopher Columbus’ flagship Santa Maria went hopelessly aground somewhere off Haiti on Christmas Eve, 1492. The ship was unloaded and from her timbers the doughty admiral, bent on founding a colony, built a fort which he called La Navidad—his first New World settlement. Columbus traded falcon bells to the natives for gold, left 44 of his men in charge, sailed off to new adventures. When he returned to the island during his second voyage he found the fort burned, the men massacred by natives or scattered in the wilds. The question remained for modern historians: exactly where was that fort?

Maurice Ries of Tulane University pored over maps old and new, charts of tides, winds and currents, especially over the Las Casas abstracts from Columbus’ diaries. On the marshy coast near Cap Haitien is the fishing village of Petit Anse, and near the village is a hill called Mont St. Michel. Atop that hill, Mr. Ries decided after working over his clues, the fort almost certainly stood. With the help of the island government and the U. S. Minister, Mr. Ries & wife examined the site. They found the hand-guard of a Spanish rapier, a ring bearing the seal of Queen Isabella, a pair of falcon bells.

Egypt. The calm-browed Sphinx, probably an image of the Sun God Horus. faces east as if to guard the tombs and temples of the Pharaohs from the rising sun. Most scholars assume that the Sphinx was carved from rock during the Fourth Dynasty, which James Henry Breasted’s chronology puts in the neighborhood of 2900 B. C. Three kings of this dynasty—Cheops, Chephren, Mycerinus —built the three great pyramids of Gizeh. This season Egyptologist Selim Hassan, burrowing in the pyramid area, found evidence that the Sphinx was later than the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren, but may have been built at Chephren’s direction during his life or shortly after.

Professor Hassan excavated a roadway leading from Chephren’s temple at the base of his pyramid toward the Valley Temple of Chephren (“Temple of the Sphinx”). There were holes bored in the road as if to receive supports for a canopy running the entire length. Professor Hassan assumed that the road was used for transporting sacred objects from one temple to another. But instead of skirting the Sphinx, the road led straight to it and stopped abruptly. The Egyptologist logically deduced that the road was built first, was broken in the middle by the subsequent erection of the Sphinx.

Last week it was reported from Cairo that Professor Hassan had found fragments of two huge “sun boats” carved deep in the rock south of the Valley Temple. In these boats the dead king was supposed to accompany the sun daily on the westward journey overhead and he obscure return eastward through Hades at night. The “day boat” was 94 ft. long and the “night boat,” which had wo decks and a mast, 104 ft.