The New York Times · New York, New York · 2 November 1960

CP-1960-015

Touring Nabatean Cities in the Negev

By ROBERT D. KAPLAN

Scan 1384 × 1066 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

A half-hour by car south of Beersheba in the Negev is a cubist landscape of jagged peaks and long plateau walls studded with Bedouin encampments. Through this desert — brown except for a lavender mantle of wildflowers in the spring — Moses and the Israelites wandered 33 centuries ago.

In the third century B.C., another group of nomads, the Nabateans, passed this way seeking a settled existence. By the time of Jesus they had built flourishing cities whose remains remarkably evoke the daily life of that period. The Nabateans were a tribal people who came from Arabia and who adopted the Aramaic language.

Long before modern-day kibbutzniks they created a water-collection system that made it possible for them to live in the desert.

Though less visually spectacular than the Nabatean capital of Petra in Jordan, their three ancient cities in the Negev — Oboda (now called Avdat), Mampsis (Mamshit) and Subeita (Shivta) — offer considerably more in the way of actual remains.

They should be seen before April 1982, when the Israeli Army completes its pullback from the Sinai and the Negev becomes a border area again. Atop a limestone plateau overlooking the desert between Yeroham and Mitzpeh Ramon are the ruins at Avdat, which was a caravan station on the road from Petra to Gaza; now Avdat is a rest stop on the road between Beersheba and Elath.

I walked through its streets, chapels, fortress and columned porticos with the hollow ring of the desert wind in my ears. The past came alive for me here as vividly as it did when I visited Pompeii and Ephesus. It is an easy 10-minute climb from the main road and entrance to the plateau’s summit.

The escarpment is dotted with burial caves, one of which was quite elaborate.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead or folio line is on this clipping, so nothing on the page states a date. BUT THE TEXT ITSELF RULES OUT 1960: the third paragraph reads “They should be seen before April 1982, when the Israeli Army completes its pullback from the Sinai and the Negev becomes a border area again.”

The final Sinai withdrawal under the Camp David accords took place in April 1982, so this piece was written in or shortly before that period — roughly 1981 — not on 1960-11-02. The modern photo-typeset body face and the Photo Researchers picture credit agree with an early-1980s setting.

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