Diggers

In preceding issues, TIME reported significant efforts and exhumations by archaeologists, paleontologists, geologists, ethnologists, anthropologists, etc., in the Americas and Europe during the past few months. Following are efforts and exhumations in Asia Minor, Asia, Africa.

In Asia Minor the outstanding new expeditions were British and Austrian.

At Constantinople, a British Academy group, led by Stanley Casson, Oxford (New College) don, dug down 25 feet to the original arena level of the Byzantine Hippodrome, begun in the 2nd Century A. D. and completed in 330 by Constantine the Great. They were rewarded by Byzantine ceramics, early Turkish faience and discovery of the fact that the "spina" of ancient hippodromes was not always a wall running down the centre of the arena. In Constantino's hippodrome, at least, the "spina" was replaced by a wall of separated monuments. Among these were a 50-foot Egyptian obelisk originally 94 feet high and a column bearing a beheaded bronze snake from Delphi. These monuments, piped, used to spout fountains at the hippodrome spectacles.

At Ephesus, led by Professor Keil of Vienna, diggers located what they guessed were the labyrinthine catacombs wherein the seven Christians of about 250 A. D., who were later called the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, hid from persecution, were sealed in by their pursuers and miraculously awoke 200 years later. They also found fragments of the earliest city of Ephesus (10th Century B. C.) with traces of Kybele, the locality's particular version of the divine matriarch common to many religions in the Mediterranean Basin before the spread of the sacrificial Son-of-God form of religion.

In Petra, abandoned stone city of northern Arabia, a Bedouin started great excitement by happening to poke a certain boulder in a certain way and, later, telling what he had seen. The boulder had tilted, dropping him into a shallow vault, then crashed shut. Feeling his way through Stygian passages for perhaps half a mile, he reached (he said) a large, lighted chamber whence six other tunnels burrowed further into the mountain. Commanding the chamber was a monster urn up which the curious Bedouin clambered to peer in. Within--yes, the veritable heaps of gems and gold of Ali Baba's "Open, Sesame" story. Knotting a clutch of treasure in his burnoose, he next chipped a crack in his prison's rose-red sandstone wall, widening it to a passage which brought him out high on the slope above the valley of Petra. . . . The interest of treasure-hunters in his fabulous story was scarcely greater than that of archaeologists. Petra is a historical mystery. It was the capital of the plundering Nabataeans whose domain, in 100 B. C., stretched from Damascus on the north to Gaza on the west, through Palestine and east into the Arabian Desert. Some unrecorded tragedy wiped out the Nabataeans and made their city shunned by Arabs. The location was lost to European science until a German explorer found it again in 1812. . . . British Museum savants, aided now by their country's protectorate in Palestine, were first to set out for a thorough examination of the inaccessible ruin.

Some 400 miles east of Aden, on the coast of the Arabian Sea, a Commander Crauford of the British Navy found, he said, the lost city of Ophir, whence Solomon's navy fetched home 450 talents of gold-- II CHRONICLES VIII, 18.

At Ur, Mesopotamia, home of Nebuchadnezzar, birthplace of Abraham, the joint digging of the Brit- ish Museum and the University of Pennsylvania was continued. Finds included records of kings unknown to history, who reigned in 3500 B. C. Their graves contained hoards of gold and copper spearheads (in bundles), chisels, arrows (by the quiverful), a mace, axheads, adzes, beads and pendants of lapis lazuli; a gold vanity box, complete with tweezers; a gaming board.

Near Jerusalem, Professor William F. Bade of an expedition sent by the Pacific School of Religion to unearth Biblical Mizpah, pressed his work and returned home last fortnight. Mizpah was used by the Israelites as a fortress and capital during the Babylonian invasion. Its walls were 16 feet to 25 feet thick. Stratified ruins revealed civilizations stretching back from 500 to 3000 B. C. In a 7th Century B. C. cellar were found wine jars and a statue of the Egyptian god, Bes.

Ten other expeditions were active in Palestine, representing seven nations, but their reports were scant. Sir Flinders Petrie, aged 74, and for decades an outstanding Egyptologist, transferred his attention to southern Palestine--"Egypt over the border," he called it-- where he thought he might find the origins of the Badarian culture in Egypt (10000 to 13000 B. C.).

In Asia. The domain of the early Tatar khans, in the Altai mountains of Thibet and the Gobi Desert, is now the archaeological province of General Peter K. Kozlov, Russian geographer and digger persistent. Twenty years ago he found the dead city of Khara-Khoto whose last khan, Hara-Tzyan-Tzyun, buried 80 carloads of silver in a profound well before being wiped out by an Imperial Chinese army in the 13th Century. Digger Kozlov frequently revisits the region for further data. His latest expedition set out from Moscow last spring.

Paleontologically speaking, the Gobi and Altai regions are the provinces of Digger Roy Chapman Andrews of the American Museum of Natural History. His discoveries have strengthened the theory that Asia was the point of dispersal of Mammalia. Civic ructions impeded his work last year (TIME, April 26, 1926), but last spring he was off again to try and add evidence of humans to his unparalleled find of dinosaurs and their eggs, baluchitheria, etc.

Explorer Sven Hedin of Sweden set out for Mongolia last spring also, undeterred by Chinese newspapers which asked by what right foreigners like the Drs. Hedin and Andrews took scientific finds out of Asia. Dr. Hedin had agreed to share equally with China anything he might find.

Digger Nels Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History, and Mrs. Nelson, returned from scouring the muddy reaches of the upper Yangtze-Kiang. They had peered into hundreds of caves, found nothing of note.

In Africa digging continued at ancient Carthage and inland from the Gulf of Gabes, but only minor reports were issued. The chief scene of operations was Egypt.

Digger Cecil Firth, working for the Antiquities Department of the Egyptian Government, ferreted out the tomb of King Zoser (5000 B. C.) or his queen or his architect, Im-Hotep, who built the step pyramid at Sakkara, far beneath which Ferreter Firth made the find (TIME, April 11). Diggers Robert Mond and W. M. Emery of the Institute of Archaeology of Liverpool University found a colossal sarcophagus, 11 ft. by 8 ft. by 10 ft. with a lid two feet thick, which they concluded was made for an Apis (sacred bull).

Digger Francis W. Kelsey of the University of Michigan brought back news of relics of the Roman occupation of Egypt found on the edge of the Libyan Desert in the Fayoum (northern Egypt). There were two letters from "Appolinarius to Taesis, his mother," telling her of his being drafted into the imperial army and sending greetings to his brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbors.

Digger Howard Carter continued probing into the private life of Tutankhamen and family. The much-photographed mausoleum yielded golden statuettes, sacred barques (one showing King Tut poised on the prow ready to hurl a boomerang, probably at a duck); a royal fan of black and white ostrich plumes with a ten-inch gold handle; a secret crypt where perhaps the mummy of Ankh-nes-Amen,* widow of King Tut, would be found.

Diggers from the Vienna Academy of Sciences, on their concession near the Giza pyramids, found a quadrangular room with a corbeled brick dome in a Fourth Dynasty (3000 B. C.) tomb. This type of architecture was supposed to date from the Roman period (30 B. C.-639 A. D.). Hard by was the sarcophagus of Senab, a dwarf master of the royal wardrobe whose personality or wealth was so great that he married a princess, Sentites.

Digger James H. Breasted of the University of Chicago came home with news of the five expeditions directed by him and to demonstrate a new method he had invented for preserving inscriptions,! utilizing the camera, draughtsmanship and the reading ability of oriental scholars.

Most important, perhaps, was the conclusion of two years of patient work at Giza, home of the Sphinx, by Digger George A. Reisner of Harvard University and the Boston Museum. In 1925, one of his corps detected a smear of white plaster in a rock scarp near the Cheops Pyramid. Probed, the smear revealed a tunnel into a vertical shaft which descended 100 feet in a limestone fault. At the bottom was a crypt, evidently for some important personage buried there secretly, without any surface monument. Through a crevice, the diggers beheld a sarcophagus of translucent white alabaster, surrounded by an immense litter of personal articles.

Dr. Reisner suspected it was the tomb of Queen Hetep-Heres, mother of Cheops, and many months of meticulous examination and removal of priceless debris proved him right. It was the first intact tomb ever found of a person of the Fourth Dynasty (3000 B. C.).

Not until last March was the sarcophagus opened. Despite its elaborate concealment, the magnificent array around it and the obvious fact that thieves had never penetrated to it, the sarcophagus was empty. Cheops, having had one experience with thieves -at Dahshur, had evidently carried his ruse of concealment one step beyond extreme caution and hidden his mother's mummy still elsewhere.

Disappointed but not downcast, Dr. Reisner hunted further, in recesses of the Cheops Pyramid itself. Last May he found the tomb of one of Cheops' granddaughters and a canopic box containing organic matter in a yellowish liquid. Perhaps the organic matter was Queen Hetep-Heres' entrails, removed before mummification. But her mummy was still missing.

In Algeria, Alonzo W. Pond of the Logan Museum (Beloit College) found a prehistoric child's bones, beneath a layer of flint and bone implements. Mr. Pond was inclined to join the school of thought which designates Africa as the cradle of humanity.

In Kenya Colony, Digger L. S. Leakey reported finding the skeleton of a six-foot cave man of non-negroid characteristics, surrounded by mesolithic flints.

* Digger H. H. Von der Osten of the University of Chicago returned last autumn from the Hittite cities of Asia Minor with a manuscript which seemed to show that Queen Ankh-nes-Amen, after King Tut's death, wrote and asked a Hittite king if he had a marriageable son. tDr. Breasted is said to have read and translated every old Egyptian inscription ever discovered.