Diggers

In Beersheeba, Israel, Archaeologist Jean Perrot of the French National Center of Scientific Research was assembling workers last week to excavate some of the strangest dwellings ever built by man. The original find was made in 1952, when Perrot and a team of diggers were investigating a small hill on the sandy desert south of Beersheeba. For three months he had found little; then one day a workman, who had just urged him to call the whole thing off, fell through the sand into a deep cave. Perrot climbed down after him with professional precaution and found what he thinks was a village of the Biblical Horites.

Most students of Bible history believe that the Negeb, Israel's southern desert, was an uninhabited wilderness when Abraham (a middle Bronze Age man) came to Beersheeba about 1500 B.C. One short reference puzzled them. The book of Genesis (14:6) refers to Horites (cave dwellers) who lived "by the wilderness" and were smitten by Chedorlaomer, King of Elam. But until the fall of Perrot's man, no trace of the Horites had been found.

Locked Door. Carefully and laboriously over two seasons, Perrot uncovered the Horite village. All the rooms were deep underground, reached by vertical shafts about ten feet long with steps and handholds cut in the hard dirt. Each oval habitation, some 20 feet long, was connected with others by long tunnels. Most extraordinary thing about the Horite dwellings was that they were completely furnished. The entrances were blocked up with stones (the ancient equivalent of locking the door), but everything was in as perfect order as if the inhabitants had just stepped out after tidying up after dinner. Perrot does not know why they left or why they never came back. For all he knows, they may have been smitten on the way home by King Chedorlaomer.

At any rate, their tunnel doorways drifted over with sand--leaving after perhaps 5,000 years an almost perfect subject for archaeological study. Beside the ash-filled fireplaces stood bowls and cups. Tools were neatly stacked. Last offerings to the gods were laid out on the floors, and storage bins held enough grain to feed the inhabitants who never came home.

By studying the well-kept cave dwellings, Perrot could form a pretty good idea of the lives and customs of the pre-Abraham Horites. They were farmers who got water from the bed of a nearby wadi and stored it in underground cisterns. They had sheep, cattle and dogs, but no horses or asses. They grew barley, wheat, lentils and peas. Two of their barley varieties are still grown today, but their wheat is a novel type not found even in ancient Egypt. The harvested grain was stored in underground chambers or in massive earthenware jars for current use.

The Horites were excellent craftsmen. They made fine pottery and effective tools out of bone, flint and copper. The copper they smelted from ore out of the same deposits south of the Dead Sea that King Solomon mined many centuries later. They pulverized it with massive stones and roasted it in furnaces under a forced draught from blowpipes.

Their art work, much of which was found in excellent condition, was skillfully and tastefully made. Their figurines look as if they had been modeled by a Copper Age Picasso. They cut conch shells (traded from Egypt) into delicate lacework. Turquoise from Sinai they made into necklaces and amulets.

Burned Babies. Perrot could even get some idea of their religion. Its rites seem to have centered around decorated pebbles, symmetrically arranged. In the caves, he found cross-marked pebbles laid out in an oval. Pebbles painted with dots and lines were laid out in a crescent. He thinks the Horites believed that the pebbles contained the spirits of their ancestors. (They certainly cared little for the ancestors' bones; they tossed a few loose bones of their dead into disused storage bins.) Their religion must have had at least one grisly feature. The partly burned skeletons of four infants were found tucked into niches in the dirt walls. Perhaps the infants were sacrificed just before the Horites started on their last outing.

Perrot's work in the land of the Horites is not finished. In the outskirts of Beersheeba, he has found seven buried cave villages, one of which has a two-storied room shaped like an hourglass. When he has explored all of them and learned by radioactive analysis just how old they are, he will be able to tell better than the Bible does what life was like "by the wilderness" before the time of Abraham.

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