Diggers

The pick & shovel corps of Science toils far afield, probing the earth for traces of vanished animals, men and civilizations. Recent doings of the diggers:

Young Egypt. Last November, Dr. Walter Bryan Emery, British archeologist in the service of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, climbed a desert bluff at Sakkara within sight of the pyramids of Giza. Below lay the fertile checkerboard fields of the flat Nile valley. A few miles away peasants grazed their goats among the jumbled ruins of Memphis, first capital of Egypt.

The bluff's surface was littered with fragments of pottery and alabaster, but these were modern for Egypt, perhaps 2,000 years old. Dr. Emery was not interested in them. He sized up the lay of the land. Then he pointed, like a "dowser" sensing a deep vein of water. "There's something big," he said, "and very old under there."

His pick-&-shovel men sank a shaft laboriously through layers of "recent" graves. Below the lowest they found what they sought: a great tomb 50 ft. wide and 150 ft. long. It was built of sun-dried mud brick, not finely chiseled stone, for it dated from the dim beginning years, when Great-Grandmother Egypt herself was young.

The royal tomb, second largest and the oldest ever found, had been looted by grave robbers before the pyramids were started, but it still contained plenty of relics for modern archeologists. Crude hieroglyphics identified it as the tomb of Queen Mereneith, wife of Zer, second (or third) Pharaoh of Egypt's First Dynasty. Date: about 3400 B.C.

Like their descendants for 30 centuries, those early Egyptians were dark with the thought of death, and of the perilous journey to the other world. Commoners had to travel light, but Queen Mereneith got a bang-up traveling outfit. Her body was rubbed with resin, wrapped in cloth strips with the arms outside (not strapped to the side, as in later mummies) and placed in a wooden sarcophagus. In the walls of the tomb, brightly painted like a palace interior, were false doors through which her soul could escape. She had all the furniture she might need, and plenty of food and wine, sealed safely in pottery vessels.

The Queen did not travel alone. In 23 small tombs around her royal chamber lay skeletons of her servants, killed at her death to attend her on the journey. Each had the special tools of his trade so he could serve his mistress. Beside a sacrificed painter lay his paint pots. A boat-builder's skilled spirit hands would provide for the Queen's transportation on the Nile of the other world.

Promised Land. In Palestine the diggers were busy too, and some of the things they found were older than the Old Testament. When Joshua led his barbaric Bedouins out of the desert about 1400 B.C., he showed them a promised land almost as old as Egypt, and dotted with ancient cities. Some of these are still only names in the Bible. Others are slowly yielding their secrets to Bible-minded diggers.

One Palestinian digger is bearded Dominican Father Roland de Vaux (described by a colleague as "rather a dandy for a Dominican"). At Tell el-Farah, near Nablus in central Palestine, he found a likely spot, staked out a 40-acre claim. On the surface were iron age remains, rather recent for the Holy Land. Below, the bronze age began. Father de Vaux believes that he may prove his city to be ancient Tirzah, first capital of the secessionist Kingdom of Israel, which Jeroboam split off from Judah after the death of Solomon about 937 B.C.

If so, Jeroboam chose no upstart city for his capital. When Father de Vaux dug deeper, he found proof that the site had been inhabited in 4000 B.C. Nearly 30 centuries had passed over it before the Israelites first burst into the land of Palestine.

In Jerusalem the diggers were searching for truth in a city where every square yard is encrusted with stoutly defended legend. Recently they discovered evidence calculated to knock the props from under the holiest spot in Christendom, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

According to Hebrews 13:12, Jesus was crucified "without the gate." This agrees with Hebrew custom, which forbade a crucifixion or burial within a city wall. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands on a hill traditionally identified as Calvary (where the Bible says that Jesus was crucified, was buried, and rose on the third day).

The church lies well inside the present wall of Jerusalem. But this does not bother the traditionalists, who attribute this wall to the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who ruled from 117 to 138 A.D. The wall enclosing the city at the time of the crucifixion, they say, was built by King Herod, and left Calvary outside.

This hypothetical wall has never been found, but for some time great stones have been showing up far outside the present wall. Recently the diggers found some more. Many believe that they are remains of the actual outermost wall and that the present wall, many times rebuilt, is Herod's.

If these subversive diggers are right, Calvary must have been somewhere else, and Jesus cannot have been crucified or buried anywhere near the present Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Soviet Mysteries. Most tantalizing blank spot on the diggers' map of the world is Soviet Russia. Modern man himself probably developed somewhere in Soviet Asia. Scattered thickly from the Black Sea to Manchuria are fascinating mysteries which the diggers yearn to probe. But the Soviet Government excludes outsiders; Soviet diggers, like learned squirrels, hide their choicest finds from outside scrutiny.

Two major digs are now in progress. In Russian Azerbaijan, close to the Persian border, the Soviet Government is building a hydroelectric dam. Red Army tanks, doubling as bulldozers, uncovered relics which looked so interesting that experts from Baku took over.

So far, they have found 1,500 objects: gold and silver jewelry, carved signets, artistic glassware and pottery. Here a considerable city must have flourished, perhaps 3,000 years ago. Its inhabitants, to judge from skeletons found on the site, were strapping fellows well over six feet tall. But who they were and what happened to them the Soviet diggers have not decided, and they have published no details.

The other Soviet dig is in the Crimea, north of Simferopol. In 1827, a peasant turned up a carved stone. Since then a few diggers have puttered around the site, but not until 1945 did a real dig get going. Soviet archeologists call the place "Neapolis [New City] of the Scythians."

It was apparently a big, rich, fortified town with elaborate tombs, industries and catacombs, which probably clung to the edge of the steppes for several thousand years. It may have been a contact point between Western civilization and the savage nomads of Asia. If so, the world's archeologists would like to hear more about it. But Soviet Digger Pavel Shultz will not tell more until his findings have been printed (if they ever are) in a Soviet publication.

Fossil Punts. In Britain, where amateur archeologists rummage for everything from Piltdown Man to Saxon arrowheads, two Yorkshire brothers struck pay mud in the River Humber. Since boyhood, Ted and William Wright had scoured the country near Hull, looking for likely sites. Best bet, they decided, was a mud bank in the Humber; it ought to be full of interesting stuff washed down the river since ancient days.

Whenever they could spare the time, the brothers waded out at low tide to dig in the gluey brown mud. In 1937, they found three planks which looked old enough for any antiquarian. Between the ebb & flood, the toilers of the Humber dug like inspired muskrats, building a mud wall to protect their find from being washed away by the currents. More planks appeared. Maybe it was a boat? By Jove, it was a boat!

The brothers joined His Majesty's forces in 1939, but the war only slowed their digging. They hurried back to the Humber at every leave to spot, in 1940. a second boat. When they were "demobbed" last year, a corps of enthusiasts joined the sloshy fun, extracted the boats, bore them off for exhibition in London. Experts pronounced them boats of the ancient, blue-dyed Britons, older than Julius Caesar by about 400 years.

The boats are blunt-ended like the punts still popular on conservative British rivers. Forty-five feet long by four feet wide, they were built of four-inch, hewn-oak planks, laced together with yew-fiber ropes, the seams caulked with moss. They showed that the ancient Britons were seagoing (or at least river-going) long before the Romans discovered them.

Pacific Venice. When the U.S. took the mid-Pacific island of Ponape from the Japanese, it fell heir to an unsolved mystery. On a reef off the east coast of the dot-on-the-map island are a great stone fortress and 50 artificial islets. Ponape natives call it Nanmatol, but they shun it superstitiously and have only the flimsiest traditions to explain why people built it.

The main enclosure, 185 ft. long by 115 ft. wide, has thick walls up to 40-ft. high built of basalt columns laid crosswise, rather like the logs of a log cabin. Huge rough steps lead to a courtyard. Inside is another wall, and inside that a stone-roofed vault. The man-made islets are separated by shallow canals, some of them choked with tumbled blocks. The citadel itself is in fair condition, though so overgrown with jungle that few details are visible.

Nearest and most probable source of the stone (a "cyclopean" basalt naturally divided into columns as it cooled from molten lava) is 15 miles away by sea. The heavy masses must have been ferried across to Nanmatol on rafts or dugouts, and horsed into position by main force and primitive awkwardness.

Nanmatol has never been properly studied. When Germany owned Ponape before World War I, a few scientists made sketchy reports. Nonscientific visitors have written up the mystery without solving it. Some archeologists believe the ruins to be 3,000 years old, and attribute them to "Protomalayans" or "Protopolynesians." Another theory favors kinky-haired Melanesians from the New Guinea region, who build less ambitious islands off their own coasts today.

No one has guessed what social force (the lash or superstition) called forth so mighty an effort, or what happened to the people who built Fortress Nanmatol. Director Peter H. Buck of Honolulu's Bishop Museum (whose mother was a New Zealand Maori) hopes the U.S. will clear up Japan's neglected mystery and retell the tale of the daring, industrious primitives who sailed the Pacific sea reaches millenniums ago.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.