Carl Sagan is the author of the 1978 Pulitzer prize-winning Dragons of Eden and the current best-seller Broca’s Brain from which his story “A Scientist Looks at Velikovsky’s ‘Worlds in Collision’” is adapted. In this article, Sagan responds to the unorthodox but popular astronomer Immanuel Velikovsky who proposes to account for a number of Biblical events by relating them to the near-collision of the earth with a comet which later became the planet Venus.
Sagan is David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies there. He received his Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Chicago in 1960. After teaching at both Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology, he moved to Cornell in 1972.
This past year he has been at work creating a thirteen-week television series entitled ‘Cosmos,’ which will appear next fall on public television networks throughout the nation.
A second major section of this month’s BAR considers some practical aspects of digging. One story describes opportunities for volunteers to join digs this summer—“Volunteer Opportunities in 1980”; another, “Rescue in the Biblical Negev,” reports on the progress of rescue excavations in the Negev by the coordinator, Moshe Kochavi.
Kochavi is Chairman of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University and a familiar name to readers from both his excavation and subsequent restoration of Izbet Sartah for BAR’s Archaeological Preservation Fund. He is an expert in the historical geography of Israel, a busy editor, and Director, since 1972, of the ongoing excavations at Aphek-Antipatris.
The third story in the dig section is by an adventurous high school English teacher from Minneapolis, Crystal Loudenback, who was a first time dig volunteer last summer at Tel Ira in the Biblical Negev. In “A Volunteer in the Negev,” Loudenback describes in an amusingly anecdotal way life on a dig.
The Madaba mosaic map, discovered in Madaba, Jordan at the turn of the century, depicts a densely settled Negev filled with towns and villages. Some of those towns and villages were unknown from any other context. Now, Rudolph Cohen, in “The Marvelous Mosaics of Kissufim,” has given life to one of those towns, Orda, with his excavation of the sixth century A.D. Church of St. Elias.
Cohen is intimately acquainted with today’s Negev—having served for five years as head of the Israeli Archaeological Survey team for the Negev, and, subsequently, for 13 years, as Southern (Negev) District Archaeologist with the Department of Antiquities. He has excavated many of the sites uncovered in his surveys, including Iron Age fortresses, such as Atar Haro’a, Horvat Haluqim, Ein Qedeis and Kadesh Barnea. Most recently, in connection with the archaeological rescue work in the Negev following the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreements, he directed the most wide-ranging survey of the Negev ever carried out.
Carl Sagan is the author of the 1978 Pulitzer prize-winning Dragons of Eden and the current best-seller Broca’s Brain from which his story “A Scientist Looks at Velikovsky’s ‘Worlds in Collision’” is adapted. In this article, Sagan responds to the unorthodox but popular astronomer Immanuel Velikovsky who proposes to account for a number of Biblical events by relating them to the near-collision of the earth with a comet which later became the planet Venus. Sagan is David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies there. He received his […]
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