Doleful Diggers

While digging into the wars of long-dead peoples, it is annoying to archeologists to be bothered by the wars of the living. The University of Chicago's famed Oriental Institute has an expedition now at work in Tell Fakhariyeh in northern Syria, a great mound (tell means mound) which they suppose to be the site of a city that nourished 1,500 years B. c., and which later was a walled Roman camp. With World War II continually threatening the eastern Mediterranean, the diggers-Dr.

Calvin W. McEwan, Mrs. McEwan and Harold D. Hill-had a good deal of trouble just getting visas to reach the site. After they got there they were officially advised to go home. When they decided to stay and cabled Chicago for funds, officials shrugged, obligingly transmitted the cable without further ado. In the message they also dolefully revealed that at the top of the mound, which they had to cut through, were the remains of some 70.000 human bodies, apparently buried there after fighting or massacres in World War I.

In 1933 the Oriental Institute had no less than twelve expeditions probing the rich antiquities of the Near East, and its director, the late, great James Henry Breasted, scurried around from camp to camp by airplane. Now in this area the Institute has only one expedition, the McEwan party at Tell Fakhariyeh. War is not the only reason for this; another reason is diminished income.

Dr. John Albert Wilson, the Institute's young (40), affable director who suc ceeded Dr. Breasted, explained last week that the Institute used to get fat annual appropriations from the Rockefellers' General Education Board. In 1936 the Board, which had started to distribute its capital gave the Institute a final lump-sum endowment of $2,000,000. The Institute has since been operating mostly on the income from this, which amounts to about a third of the former yearly grants. Few other U. S. diggers are working the war-clouded Near East. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, however, has a party at Gizeh in Egypt, where it has labored continuously for 35 years, and where it unearthed among other treasures the gold-cased furniture of Queen Hetep heres I. The American Schools of Oriental Research have a party on the site of King Solomon's ancient Red Sea port (TIME, May 30, 1938) and an expedition based at Bagdad which is making a prehistoric survey of North Syria and Iraq. All these archeologists have to be ready to jump at the first crack of a cannon.

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