Fifteen Years in Sinai - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > BAR > July/August 1984

Fifteen Years in Sinai

Israeli archeologists discover a new world

By Itzhaq Beit-Arieh

We were driving south, along the Gulf of Suez, heading for our excavation site when our jeep broke down. Fortunately, it happened on a paved road, before we turned onto the desert track that would take us to a desolate site in the interior of the Sinai Peninsula, still 65 miles away. We had another bit of good luck—a Bedouin mechanic from a nearby village offered to help. A friendly fellow, he happily engaged us in conversation. “I’ve heard about you,” he said. “Oh?” “Yes. You’re the Israelis who are digging for gold in the hills near Jebela […]

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Footnotes

1.

Jebel means mountain in Arabic.

2.

A wadi is a dry riverbed that may be filled once or twice a year by winter floods.

3.

Lithic means stone; hence the name Paleolithic for the period when this flint stone culture predominated.

4.

Named after the site where this culture was first identified.

5.

It is not the wadi that is called Maghara, although it has come to be called so popularly. There are several wadis in this region, only one of which is called—sometimes—Maghara.

6.

Stelae are upright stone slabs or pillars bearing inscriptions or sculptural designs.

7.

This inverted apostrophe is the scholarly symbol for the Hebrew letter ‘ayin, a guttural sound unknown to English, produced by tightening the throat.

8.

Acrophonic indicates that the sound of the alphabetic sign was the first sound in the object depicted. For example, a picture of a house, pronounced beth, had the phonetic value b.

9.

Graffiti are drawings or writing scratched, cut or written on a wall or a rock.

Endnotes

1.

Rothenberg, Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, first excavated in Sinai in 1956. His major survey of the Sinai peninsula began in 1967 and continued until 1978.