Image Details

Photo by Roger Wood/Dept. of Antiquities/Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Scholars associate the pottery (shown here, compare with image of landscape at Qurayyah) from Qurayyah with the Midianites, the very people that Moses was said to dwell among when he first fled Egypt—and from whom he chose his wife, Zipporah. Evidence of habitation and culture from that same time period—the presumed time of the Exodus—is practically nonexistent in the Sinai peninsula. Harvard scholar Frank Moore Cross believes that the paucity of evidence in Sinai—and the considerable remains in Qurayyah, Al-Bad’ and other Midianite sites—points in favor of an Arabian location for Mt. Sinai.