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Contributor
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Los Angeles area
Posts: 40,549
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Ossuary in the New Yorker
David Samuels has an article "Written in Stone", in the New Yorker magazine of April 12. There is nothing really new in the article and no reason to go out and get it, and it is not online.
But the opening had this interesting tidbit: Oded Golan tells a story about his first major discovery, made during a trip with his parents to Tel Hazor, an archeological site near the Sea of Galiilee.
Quote:
"Hazor was the biggest city in Israel during the mid-second millenium BC" Golan said. "I found a small clag fragment, which I could immediately identify as written in cuneiform." When he arrived home in Tel Aviv, Golan, said, he telephoned the archeologist Yigael Yadin, and told him about the fragment. "He came to my parents' apartment." Golan said, "and he found that the fragment was part of a dictionary written in two languages, both in cuneiform. One is Akkadian, the other is Sumerian--from the seventeenth century BC if I'm not wrong. It's interesting how a dictionary was developed, becuase it was very functional. It was purely a commercial dictionary for traders, and the words are actually like 'good price,' 'bad price,' 'high price,' 'low price,' things like that.
"But the more fascinating story behind it," he went on, "is that Yigael brought several aerial photographs of the mound, and he asked me, 'Oded, tell me wehre did you find it? Because this dictionary probably belonged to the Palace at Hazor, which I am looking for.' He even mentioned Yavin, the king of Hazor, who is mentioned in the Bible."
Unable to remember where, exactly, he had found the shard, the boy turned to his fertile imagination to aid the archeologist. "I said to myself, 'If I was the king of Hazor, where would I put my own palace?' Golan recalled. "So I told Yadin that I thought it was probably very close to the place where I found it, and I pointed to a specific place."
A curious look passed over Golan's face as re recollected the scene. "You know, several years ago I went to Hazor, and I found the the Hebrew University had been working there for years, at the place where I pointed with my finger, Golan said. "And I spoke to some people, and they said that Yadin, in his so-called will, his scholarly testament, had mentioned that he believed that the palace of Hazor should be at that place.
"And the most incredible part of the story is that the palace is there," Golan said. He fixed me with a wide-eyed stare. "They found the biggest place in the world at exactly the spot where I pointed, where I would have put my own palace asa a boy, if I were the king of Hazor."
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04-11-2004, 11:06 PM
