Strata: Beth-Shean Antiquities Destroyed
Biblical Archaeology Review is the flagship publication of the Biblical Archaeology Society. For more than 40 years it has been making the world of archaeology in the lands of the Bible come alive for the interested layperson. Full of vivid images and articles written by leading scholars, this is a must read for anyone interested in the archaeology of the ancient Near East.
Debates about the authenticity of artifacts are not limited to Biblical archaeology. However, disputants in other fields fight their battles differently. Rather than turning to a committee for an unequivocal decision, which then becomes the object of a rancorous debate, scholars try to settle their disputes through empirical testing, argument and counter-argument.
Imagine! Imagine that I had not had what seemed at the time like a casual conversation with two well-known Jerusalem scholars at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Atlanta last November. Imagine that therefore I did not know the identity of the two unnamed sources in the story Eric Meyers put out on the Internet.
This attractive new volume joins dozens of late-19th and early-20th century photographs of Jerusalem with a commentary drawn from contemporary travelogues and letters, many of them cited at length. The effect is to convey in considerable detail the sights and sounds of Ottoman Jerusalem. We find, for example, the following description of a visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque: