Quotes About Archaeology

Love poems, discovered in Egyptian tombs, strongly hint that it was the Egyptian women who did the courting, oftimes wooing the male by plying him with intoxicants to weaken his protestations.

In December 1945 an Egyptian peasant, digging for soft and fertile soil near the village of Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt, exhumed a red earthenware jar. It proved to contain thirteen codices— papyrus books or scrolls—bound in leather.

Anthropology is the only discipline that can access evidence about the entire human experience on this planet.

The future of Judaism depended upon many other centres of the Jewish Dispersion even more than upon Rome. But archaeological evidence for all these centres remains sparse. There were catacombs at Venusia (Venosa) in south Italy. The Jewish necropolis

In the third millennium BCE, modern archaeology has shown that there were indeed thousands of villages and dozens of small 'states' dotted across the river valleys of central China, rectangular walled towns of rammed earth, each with its own ruler. And in that period our narrative begins.

The earliest examples of reading and writing date back many thousands of years. As long ago as 8000 BC, people were using small clay tokens engraved with simple symbols to keep track of quantities of livestock and other goods.

??te ?ehirlerin katlar? birbirine kar???yor, i?te arkeolog-kar?ncalar! Her ?eyi yerli yerine yerle?tiriyorlar, i?te onlar?n sayesinde her ?ey Birdenbire anlam kazan?yor: Dört ta? bir ?ehir, yirmi iki kupon bedava bir apartman kat? oluyor, i?te yer levhalar?, i?te Yunanca, Latince ve bizim dilce.

In a thousand years archaeologists will dig up tanning beds and think we fried people as punishment.

Collecting antiquities is to archeology as rape is to love.

No se podía andar por el mundo mendigando piezas arqueológicas robadas por expresidentes, sin que de vez en cuando no se sintiera un profundo ramalazo de pinche vergüenza nacional.

Rhynia, haute de cinquante centimètres, doit son nom au lieu de sa découverte dans le comté de Rhynie, en Écosse, où elle fut engloutie lors d'une éruption volcanique. Il y a des Pompéi de fleurs.

Someone once told me that archaeologists are anthropologists who don't like live people. They dig up dead ones because dead ones can't talk back. That's not quite true. But I think live people are too fast for most archaeologists. We're a slow-moving lot.

But that was the trouble with ancient artifacts - no one really knew what they did.

Musee de l'Homme.

We are all theologians. We are all philosophers. We are all archaeologists who dig into the mounds of our lives to try to make sense of the civilization that is our story. This God-designed mental motivation is accompanied by wonderful and mysterious analytical gifts. This drive and those gifts set us apart from the rest of creation. They are holy, created by God to draw us to him, so that we can know him and understand ourselves in light of his existence and will.

It would be ironic for an archaeologist to catch something nasty from the past, perhaps the ultimate in experimental archaeology!

prehistoric tomb," Glenn said. "There aren't any dolmen

BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGISTS are about as certain as you can be about these things that the conquest of Canaan as the Bible describes did not happen: no mass invasion from the outside by an Israelite army, and no extermination of Canaanites as God commanded.

Israel's beginnings are mysterious from an archaeological point of view, so we can't be dogmatic about explaining how and when Israel began. But it does seem that a nation eventually called "Israel" probably came on the scene gradually and relatively peacefully.

Too often, historians and archaeologists fabricate cheap mysteries, "Why did this great civilization suddenly collapse?," because they refuse to accept the obvious: that states are odious structures that their populations destroy whenever they get the opportunity, and sometimes even when they face impossible odds.