Diggers' Year

Men who roam the earth, picking and probing it for remains of vanished animals, men and civilizations, had a successful, if not sensational, year in 1933. An antique world was more generous in giving up its hidden treasures than a modern world in the fourth year of a depression was in supplying cash for researches. Yet as archeologists last week viewed their year in retrospect they could point to a surprising number of diggers at work all over the earth.* Prime doings of diggers during the twelvemonth:

Persia & Irak. "And the trees that bear wool I clipped." So wrote Sennacherib, king of the Assyrians seven centuries before Christ. His wool-bearing "trees" were the earliest known cotton. For the cotton and for his fabulous gardens at Nineveh he needed water. Dr. James Henry Breasted, famed founder-director of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, returning from an airplane visit to his twelve lieutenants and their staffs busy in the Near East, said that Sennacherib brought his water through a 3O-mi. aqueduct. A member of the Irak expedition, led by a friendly native, had found a 1,000-ft. section of it still standing on pointed arches. Most ancient aqueduct ever discovered, it was at first mistaken for a "bridge" because the standing part spanned a river. Dr. Breasted's lieutenant in charge of the Persepolis expedition, Archaeologist Ernst Emil Herzfeld of Germany, had more to report to his chief since the utensils, paintings and sculpture which he described last winter (TIME, Jan. 30). Cutting through a ridge to shift his railroad, Dr. Herzfeld came upon hundreds of cuneiform tablets in the Elamite (pre-Persian) language which he hoped would give the battles of Marathon and Salamis, so vaingloriously described by Greeks, a different slant. C. A joint expedition of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, exploring Ur of the Chaldees under the direction of the Museum's veteran Excavator Charles Leonard Woolley, unearthed a temple dedicated to the moon-goddess Nin-Gal. complete with shrines and food preparation chambers. Also discovered was a brick-lined well, sunk by King Ur-Engur (2300 B. C.) and conscientously repaired by later rulers, one of whom imbedded eight tablets in the masonry describing his work. Greece. Continuing their long delving into the Athenian marketplace, men under Princeton's Dr. Theodore Leslie Shear sifted 23,000 tons of earth, turned up 15,000 coins of ancient Greece and the nations who traded with her. Another prize was a broad-browed, calm-eyed marble bust of Augustus, first Roman Emperor, intact except for the tip of the nose. Still another was a Mycenaean sepulchre containing a "very unusual" gold signet ring and three skeletons. On the site of old Corinth, Princeton's Professor Richard Stillwell was excited when he uncovered a mosaic floor 31 by 24 ft., laid by Romans of the empire period. Its central panel depicted a palm-bearing athlete and a seated figure of Eutychia. In the nearby temple of Aesculapius, Patron of Healing, Professor Stillwell's men found terra cotta models of parts of the human body, apparently brought by invalids as votive offerings. Palestine. And when Jehu was come . . . Jezebel heard of it; and she painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at a window. . . . And he lifted up his face to the window, and said, Who is on my side? who? And there looked out to him two or three eunuchs. And he said, Throw her down. So they threw her down: and some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses: and he trode her under foot Thus, in the lush verses of II Kings 9, died Jezebel, famed oldtime hussy. Buried more than two millennia ago, Jezebel's tower was uncovered by Harvard's Dr. Kirsopp Lake. Some 30 ft. high (probably much higher originally), it was composed of granite blocks set three deep, so that the total thickness of the wall was twelve feet. China. Back to the Choukoutien cave, 40 mi. from Peiping. where four years ago he brought to light the skull of the Pekin man-- (TIME, Dec. 23, 1929), went Pei Wen-chung, Chinese geologist, to dig in a fresh opening near the main excavation. There he found two nearly complete skulls of men apparently much closer kin to modern man than to the Pekin man, together with bone & flint implements, vestiges of fire-making, bones of an extinct species of baboon. It seemed to Mr. Pei that the cave must have been successively inhabited by baboons, Pekin man and his modern successor.

P: Dr. Sven Anders Hedin, 68, has been too busy to marry. Sweden's foremost expeditionist, he has prowled over Central Asia, pried into its secrets, off & on for 48 years. His last expedition started in 1926. Since then he and his men, largest scientific army ever to set foot on Asian soil, have crawled over China and Mongolia on a 2,600-mile front like an army of locusts. Before they were through they had unearthed 10,000 scripts painted on wood before paper was invented recounting raids on the ancient Chinese silk route to Rome; insects 100,000,000 years old, preserved in rock; dinosaur bones, rare plants.

Syria. Gouging along a big embankment north of the obliterated city of Dura-Europos, Yale diggers under Professor Clark Hopkins encountered the main room of a synagog. The walls were covered with frescoes painted, according to inscriptions, in 244 A. D., and depicting the exodus from Egypt; the engulfing of Pharaoh's host in the Red Sea; the numbering of the tribes of Israel; Moses and the burning bush; Moses holding the Tablets of the Law; the destruction of pagan idols. "Astounding and magnificent!" exclaimed Professor Hopkins.

A great melting-pot was Dura. Founded by the Macedonians about 300 B. C., it fell successively to the Parthian, Roman and Sassanid empires, maintaining always a partly Semitic population. Excavating the Roman quarter later in the year. Professor Hopkins found in a private dwelling a 20-ft. mural depicting banquet and hunting scenes, the first in formalized Parthian style, the second showing Assyrian influence. A prime find here was the first portrait ever discovered of a cornicularius, a Roman soldier who wore on his helmet two small horns as a badge of merit.

U. S. Digging in this country last year was largely done, to the horror of zealous archeologists, by thieves. With alarmed fulminations the Smithsonian Institution declared that ancient Indian burial mounds and village sites were being gutted of skulls, bones, dolls, utensils to be sold to tourists at filling stations for a few dollars. The Smithsonian and other museums had sheafs of letters offering such plunder for sale. Precious records of the past, which might have been explored to good advantage by expert expeditions were funds not lacking, were being ruined.

Thus the fretting Smithsonian diggers were happy to announce last month that a project financed by CWA funds and approved by CWAdministrator Hopkins would shortly be under way. Some 1,000 unemployed men under expert direction will comb Indian mounds in five states. The archeologists hope to reconstruct the story of what happened in the southeastern U. S. in pre-Columbus times.

*This week the Archaeological Institute of America meets in Washington for formal discussion.*Sinanthropus (Pekin man) is claimed to be the second oldest hominid discovered. The oldest: Pithecanthropus erectus (Java man).

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