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:

The Footless Gods. In Luxor, Egypt, archeologists from the University of Chicago are patiently pecking away at mud plaster on the interior walls of the temple of Rameses III. They have been at it for years, for the temple contains Egyptian bas-reliefs religiously preserved. When Egypt was Christianized, the temple was turned into a church; the Christians chiseled off the heads & feet of the ancient, carved gods (works of the devil) and covered them with mud. Now the Chicago diggers are picking off the mud, almost grain by grain, and finding beneath it the ancient gods, headless and footless, but otherwise almost as clear and devilish as new.

The Unknown Tongue. Some relics of the ancients are wrapped, not in the mud, but in the deeper mystery of a still-untranslated language. The big-nosed Hittites (Sons of Heth in the Bible), who dominated Asia Minor from earliest biblical times, left stone-cut inscriptions so numerous and so lengthy that they seemed likely to contain plenty of ancient history. But since the diggers lacked a key to the stiff hieroglyphic characters, all they could do was bite their learned nails and hope that a key stone would turn up eventually.

Last fall, hardy Turkish diggers hacked their way into a dense, bandit-ridden forest in southern Anatolia. There they discovered a Hittite royal palace with lines of two-headed stone bulls. Among the bulls the diggers found the long-sought key: 30 stones with parallel inscriptions in Hittite hieroglyphics and early Phoenician, a translatable Semitic language. The first words the ancient language spoke to modern scholars (self-praise by King Asitawandas, servant of Baal) were not particularly interesting, but the hieroglyphic code was broken. Scholars were sure that other inscriptions, now readable, would tell them the story of the Sons of Heth, who fought with Egyptians and Mesopotamians when the world was younger.

The Visiting Lady. Dear to South African diggers are colored cave drawings, some made by modern Bushmen, some (perhaps) very old. French Digger Abbe Henri Breuil favors the "very old" theory. In the Drakensberg mountains he found drawings of men who were certainly not Bushmen. They wore long cloaks with triangular markings and serrated bottom edges. On their shoulders they carried quivers. After studying them for a while, the romantic abbe decided that they might be ancient Sumerians who wandered down to South Africa thousands of years ago and posed for indigenous portrait painters.

In the remote mountains of Southwest Africa is another rock painting (discovered by Germans in 1917) which the abbe visited by long-distance desert safari. The central figure is that of a woman with clothes on (not a Bushman custom). Her features are European, the abbe decided, and her costume resembles that of the lady bullfighters of ancient Crete, home of the Minotaur. How she got to Southwest Africa the abbe does not know, but he thinks the painting must be at least 4,000 years old.

Bushmanologist Dorothea Bleek, 80, of Capetown, is not so imaginative. She has seen a reproduction of the painting, and suggests that it is not so very old. The central figure, she thinks, is no lady bullfighter strayed from ancient Crete. More likely she's a lady missionary, sent to enlighten (and pose for) the Bushmen by some zealous missionary society.

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