Inside BAR

004

The Shapira Affair

John M. Allegro (“The Shapira Affair”) is both a popular and scholarly author. He has written five books on the Dead Sea Scrolls. For 16 years lecturer in Old Testament Studies at Manchester University, Great Britain, Allegro has served as an advisor to the Jordanian government on the Scrolls, has prepared a documentary film about them for BBC, and has served for years on one of the international editing teams deciphering them. Commenting on that last aspect of his activities, Allegro wrote BAR, “I am still the only member of our small international editing team on the Dead Sea Scrolls to have published all his allotted material in its definitive form, and feel strongly that it is high time my colleagues let the public share in the secrets they have been sitting on for the past 25 years.”

He has written one final book on the subject—his ‘swan song’ he says—which will be published next month by Westbridge, Newton, Abbot and Devon, entitled The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth. In the works now is a novel about events of the First Jewish Revolt in 66 A.D.

Allegro makes his home on the Isle of Man, writing and lecturing full-time.

Ancient Burial Customs Preserved in Jericho Hills

Mother to three young children, Rachel Hachlili (“Ancient Burial Customs Preserved in Jericho Hills”) is a lecturer at Tel-Aviv University where she teaches Greek art and, her special field of interest, ancient Jewish art. She has written many articles on iconography and symbolism and, in particular, about the zodiac. In addition to the Jewish cemetery at Jericho, Hachlili has excavated at Ashdod, Arad, the Judean Desert Caves, Masada, Hamat-Tiberias, and the synagogues at Caesarea.

Her post-graduate studies at Oxford University and Columbia University, and a research fellowship at the Jewish Museum in New York whetted her appetite for travel which continues to be one of her keen interests.

Digging in the City of David

A lawyer by training, Mendel Kaplan of Johannesburg, South Africa, today directs his family’s international business in steel wire products. A leader of South Africa’s Jewish community, Kaplan shares his passionate interest in Old Testament archaeology with his wife Jill, and together with their five children, they are building a home in Jerusalem overlooking the Old City. It will be apparent to readers of “Digging in the City of David” that Mendel Kaplan is involved in these excavations to a far greater extent than is usual for one who sits on the managing committee of a dig and directs the flow of funds.

Yigal Shiloh, Director of the City of David Project, is, in the non-digging season, Lecturer in Archaeology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He pursued both his undergraduate and graduate studies at that university’s Institute of Archaeology, and was visiting lecturer in Syro-Palestinian archaeology at the Harvard Divinity School in 1975. Shiloh has excavated all over Israel for 18 years—at Arad, Masada, Megiddo, and ‘in Jerusalem’s Citadel.

A Cryptogram in the Phoenician Inscription from Brazil

Marshall McKusick (“A Cryptogram in the Phoenician Inscription from Brazil”) received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale University in 1960 and has been at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, since that time. He has been the State Archaeologist of Iowa for 15 years.

It was from the research for his soon-to-be published book, Atlantic Voyages to Prehistoric America (Southern Illinois University Press, 1980) that Dr. McKusick put together the article in this issue which further pursues the authenticity of the Paraiba inscription. Atlantic Voyages is about the numerous hoaxes, frauds, and misidentifications concerning Phoenician, Egyptian, Celtic, and Norse voyages to the New World. Dr. McKusick wrote BAR that among these hoaxes, the Paraiba inscription is one of the most important because it was the cleverest of the 19th-century forgeries and among the most controversial of the many alleged connections between the Mediterranean and the Americas.

He lives in Iowa City with his wife Charity and their three children. His hobbies include canoeing, scuba diving, and working on his two Model A roadsters.

The Shapira Affair