In a previous post I continued a thread on a 19th century Bible Lands text by Rev. Frank S. DeHaas. Here is the final entry, this time just for enjoying the illustrations…
Category Archives: Archaeology and Antiquities
Buried Cities Recovered #5
In a previous post I continued a thread on a 19th century Bible Lands text by Rev. Frank S. DeHaas. Now it is on to a description of Egypt around 1880…
Buried Cities Recovered #4
In a previous post I continued a thread on a 19th century Bible Lands text by Rev. Frank S. DeHaas. Now it is on to Jerusalem, holiest of the holiest places for this Protestant pilgrim. Yet again he has a hard time seeing past the poverty and destruction. But then he is consoled by the fact that such ruin was all according to prophecy. Unfortunately for a century more than this book, facts are indeed stubborn things and the artifacts DeHaas thought so compelling turn out not to be very factual.
Buried Cities Recovered #3
In a previous post I continued a thread on a 19th century Bible Lands text by Rev. Frank S. DeHaas. His account covers Egypt and Palestine. He entered Palestine at the port of Jaffa and discusses his disembarking, which he compares to the turmoil surrounding Jonah on the same sea, in the following passage. But it seems the crowded streets of Jaffa did not inspire the kind of reverence he wanted from traversing on holy ground. So he was quite glad to be out and out where the patriarchs trekked…
Buried Cities Recovered
During the 19th century there was a flourishing genre of “Explorations in the Bible Lands.” As the geography and archaeology of the Holy Land came to light, often with only a modicum of scientific investigation, books flooded the market on how the remains and customs in this area were bringing the Bible to life for Protestants in England and America. Despite Mark Twain’s biting satire of the genre in his Innocents Abroad, the Bible Lands books piled on. One of these is Buried Cities Recovered by the Rev. Frank S. DeHass, who was appointed U.S. Consul to Palestine, where he lived for a considerable period. This was first published in 1882 and was in its 10th edition only two years later. The small print at the bottom of the title page says it all: “CONTAINING A FULL ACCOUNT OF EGYPT AND THE EGYPTIANS, RISE AND FALL OF EMPIRES IN THE LIGHT OF PROPHECY, AND WONDERFUL CONFIRMATION OF REVELATION BY LATE DISCOVERIES.” Such was the enthusiasm of Bible enthusiasts of the late 19th century.
The dedication of the book, reproduced below, is quite flowerly and hardly leaves anyone out, except perhaps the emerging higher critics of the Bible at the time.
to be continued
Occupy Mecca
by Omid Safi, Religion News Service, August 28, 2012
It is time, and past time, to Occupy Mecca.
I am adamantly not talking about a disaster US occupation, a la Iraq and Afghanistan.
What I am calling for is nothing less than millions of faithful pilgrims saving Mecca from destruction.
I would call the destruction imminent, except that it is not imminent. It has already happened.
No, it’s not the Americans, or the Israelis, who would be destroying Mecca.
It’s the so-called Guardians of the two holy sites (Mecca and Medina), the Saudi royal elites, who have negligently stood by over the last two decades as the majority of holy sites in these two most sacred Muslim cities have been destroyed, sacrificed to the false gods of modernization, capitalism, and progress.
Saudi Wahhabis have a long history of destroying shrines, including those of the family of the Prophet in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Continue reading Occupy Mecca
Ethnic Indo-European languages?
gold chariot from a hoard found near the Oxus River in Central Asia ca 500 BCE, British Museum
Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia, Biologists Say
By NICHOLAS WADE, New York Times, August 24, 2012
Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages.
The family includes English and most other European languages, as well as Persian, Hindi and many others. Despite the importance of the languages, specialists have long disagreed about their origin.
Linguists believe that the first speakers of the mother tongue, known as proto-Indo-European, were chariot-driving pastoralists who burst out of their homeland on the steppes above the Black Sea about 4,000 years ago and conquered Europe and Asia. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Indo-European speakers were peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, about 9,000 years ago, who disseminated their language by the hoe, not the sword.
The new entrant to the debate is an evolutionary biologist, Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He and colleagues have taken the existing vocabulary and geographical range of 103 Indo-European languages and computationally walked them back in time and place to their statistically most likely origin.
The result, they announced in Thursday’s issue of the journal Science, is that “we found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin.†Both the timing and the root of the tree of Indo-European languages “fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8,000 to 9,500 years ago,†they report.
But despite its advanced statistical methods, their study may not convince everyone. Continue reading Ethnic Indo-European languages?
Horses of Early Arabia
The largest, and to date the most significant, of more than 300 artifacts found so far at al-Magar is a sculpture fragment whose head, muzzle, nostrils, arched neck, shoulder, withers and overall proportions resemble those of a horse, though it may represent an ass, an onager or a hybrid. Eighty-six centimeters (34″) long, 18 centimeters (7″) thick and weighing more than 135 kilograms (300 lbs), it is provisionally dated to about 7000 bce.
The latest issue of Saudi ARAMCO World (May/June 2012) has a fascinating article about archaeological finds at the site of Magar in southwestern Saudi Arabia. It features an early sculpture of a horse, among other artifacts.