5,500 Year Old Villages Are Found In Israel

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TEL AVIV—AP—One of the most important recent discoveries of ancient ruins in Israel might not have been made if a 23 year old farm worker had not kept his eyes open. It happened that David Alon is not only interested in chickens and cauliflowers but in archeology as well.

Whenever he can take a day off at the Kibbuz (Jewish collective settlement) at Mishmar Hanegev, David roams the countryside looking for traces of the past. One day in the Negev Desert, he came across some pottery fragments which gave him a hunch there might be something more underground.

Because he told Jean Perrot, French archeologist in Jerusalem, about his find, two 5,500 year old villages have been excavated.

Two Ancient Villages Perrot visited the suspected areas near Beersheba in Southern Israel, made a preliminary survey and found he had been led by the young man to the site of two villages from the chalcolithic age (4500-3000 BC)—villages inhabited propably a thousand years before Abraham pitched his tent in the vicinity.

The French National Center of Scientific Research in Paris granted Perrot the financial support for further diggings. Sent to Israel in 1945, Perrot took part in excavating a 7,000 year old neolithic town near Abou Gosh and then assisted the late French consul general, Rene Neuville, in his stone age discoveries in various parts of the Judean hills.

Earlier there were other excavations dating back to the chalcolithic age here but no chalcolithic dwelling ever excavated in Israel or Mandatory Palestine was built in the fortress like tower form unearthed at Bir Abou Mater.

How this transcription was made

Date confirmed on the page (folio-partial).

Context added by this archive

MARIA'S FLAGGED SLIDE. Folio above the headline reads only 'Sacramento, California'; no date is printed on the clipping, so the date is label-only in effect. No byline; AP credit in the dateline. There is no deck; 'Two Ancient Villages', 'No Round Houses' and 'Would Not Happen Today' are crossheads.

PRINTER'S ERROR PRESERVED: 'villages inhabited propably a thousand years before Abraham' — 'propably' for 'probably', kept as printed.

WORDS FOR THE PLACE, IN THE PAPER'S OWN SPELLING AND IN ITS OWN ORDER: 'Israel', 'Tel Aviv', 'the Kibbuz (Jewish collective settlement) at Mishmar Hanegev', 'the Negev Desert', 'Jerusalem', 'Beersheba in Southern Israel', 'Abou Gosh', 'the Judean hills', 'Israel or Mandatory Palestine', 'Teleilat-el-Ghassoul in the Jordan Valley southeast of Jericho, in what is now Hashemite Jordan territory', 'Bir Abou Mater', 'Cyprus and Mesopotamia', 'the copper mines exploited by King Solomon much later are far south of Beersheba, near the Red Sea coast', 'Ouadi Fennan (Fennan Valley) on the Hashemite Jordan side of the Dead Sea canyon', 'a place very close to Beersheba of today: the old Arab name of the site is Bir Abou Mater'.

THE PALESTINIAN TOWNS NAMED, WITH THE PAPER'S SPELLING FIRST: - 'Beersheba' — Bi'r al-Sab‘, the Palestinian town of the northern Negev, depopulated in October 1948.

The paper calls it 'Beersheba of today' and places it 'in Southern Israel'. - 'Bir Abou Mater' — Bi'r Abu Māṭir, given explicitly as 'the old Arab name of the site', a place 'very close to Beersheba'. - 'Abou Gosh' — Abu Ghosh, the Palestinian village west of Jerusalem whose inhabitants were not expelled in 1948. - 'Teleilat-el-Ghassoul' — Tulaylat al-Ghassul, across the river in Jordanian territory, named as such. - 'Ouadi Fennan' — Wadi Faynan, likewise in Jordan.

WHAT IS ABSENT: 'Palestine' appears exactly once, as 'Mandatory Palestine', and only as the former administrative label of the ground under the dig. There are no Palestinians in the article.

Arabic place names survive — Bir Abou Mater, Abou Gosh, Beersheba — but the paper frames them as archaeological conveniences ('the old Arab name of the site is...'), not as evidence that people lived there and named these places.

The dig employs '15 local workers' and 'a Hebrew University graduate'; the 15 are never identified by nationality, and the sentence 'There is between the two countries a well guarded armistice frontier never crossed for trade except by smugglers' is the article's only acknowledgement that a line was drawn across this landscape five years earlier.

The human story the paper chooses to tell is that of a 23-year-old Jewish kibbutz worker and a French archeologist. Columns beyond the ones noted were read at page magnification; the 'Mandatory Palestine' sentence, the 'old Arab name' sentence, the lede and the Beersheba paragraph were transcribed from magnified crops.

Cite this clipping

"5,500 Year Old Villages Are Found In Israel," The Sacramento Bee, 29 January 1953. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1953-013. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1953-013