See Ze'ev Herzog, Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho: Biblical Myth and Archaeological Reality, Prometheus 4.
www.prometheus.demon.co.uk
In message <B29E2061DFF93D438FF451CC911E8FFD2D8E7F at KC-
MAIL1.kc.umkc.edu>, Forstater, Mathew <ForstaterM at umkc.edu> writes
>Haven't read all the replies top this yet, so I apologize if I am
>repeating anything already said. There is a very good piece by G. W.
>Bowersock, 1984, Journal of Palestine Studies, "Palestine: Ancient
>History and Modern Politics." The relative paucity of available
>archeological research concerning the pre-Islamic Arab presence in
>Palestine can be attributed to three major causes. The first is the
>western obession with "biblical" archeology. Second, among adherents to
>Islam, the time before the prophet Muhammad is traditionally referred to
>by the Arabic term _jahiliyya_, emaning "age of ignorance". The prime
>cause, however, is that in Israel, archaeology is politics. Zionist
>ideology propagates the belief that Jewish-Arab conflict has been
>continuous throughout history, and that Arab presence in Palestine has
>been recent and minimal. Therefore, any evidence to the contrary is
>seen to threaten the basic premises upon which the necessity of a
>"Jewish," rather than a democratic, state is founded. Two pieces of
>evidence of this type are noted by Bowersock. The first is a set of
>personal doscuments found by Israeli archaeologist (and politician)
>Yigael Yadin in the early 1960s in a desert cave in the area which in
>the Roman period was known as Judea. The documents concern a Jewish
>woman named Babatha who went into hiding during a Jewish uprising
>against the Romans:
>
>"As we can tell from the few tantalizing excerpts and summaries that
>have been published, these documents concern the legal affairs of this
>woman over a period of some forty years. She and her family not only
>observed the transtion from Arab kingdom to Roman province in the
>territory known as Arabia: she and her family actually lived there at
>the time. It is clear that the relationship between Jews and Arabs in
>the territory south of the Dead Sea was a harmonious one. It is amply
>apparent that in the archive of Babatha we have precious documentation
>for a social coherence in Palestine that mirrored the administrative and
>geographic unity. It scarcely matters whether it is by accident or by
>desogn that neither Yadin or any other Israeli scholar has seen fit to
>publish this extraodinary material. In a society in which archeological
>studies are often extensively reported, the fact that it to this day
>remains unpublished is eloquent enough." (pp. 52-53).
>
>More recently, a stone bearing the writing of Nabataean Arabs was
>discovered in the Negev desert. Written in a "single script" in both
>Nabataean and Arabic languages, the text has been estimated to date from
>the middle of the second century A.D., which would make it the earliest
>known example of the Arabic language:
>
>"It is obviously significant that the inscription was lying in the Negev
>desert. The stone is weathered and brittle. Its signifiance for
>pre-Islamic scholarship could be enormous. In any other country with a
>serious interest in archeology, this object would have been removed to a
>protected place for safekeeping. More than that, one might have
>expected some publicity for so important a discovery. But there has
>been no publicatrion of the inscription, and it still lies today under
>the desert sun." (p. 57)
-- James Heartfield