035 On Sunday, January 16, I interviewed Zahi Hawass in his office in Zamalek, the elegant Cairene island in the Nile and home of the Gezira Sports Club, from which Hawass commanded an army of 32,000 employees as secretary general of the Supreme...

039 In 1972 Hershel Shanks took a sabbatical from his legal practice in Washington, D.C. He and his family went to Jerusalem for a year. Once there, the Shanks family became part of a network of friends and colleagues who comprised some of the...

016 016 Pope John Paul II is planning a millennium pilgrimage in 2000 that will take him to Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Sinai—and Iraq! Why Iraq? Because that is where the patriarch Abraham was born—...

040 041 The decision was unanimous: Antiquities collectors are criminals, responsible for the worldwide scourge of looting. That was the theme of the annual meeting of the American Schools of...

052 In an oft-repeated story that the Patent Office denies, a 19th-century Commissioner of Patents announced that he would retire because everything that could be invented would soon be invented. I was reminded of this story as I traveled from...

052 There is nothing quite like it—the joint once-a-year sessions of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), known to all as the Annual Meeting. For...

062 A maturing generation of brilliant young scholars went far toward making the 1990 Annual Meetinga a resounding success. Many of these young scholars are women. For four days in November, 5,613 attendees listened to scholarly presentations in...

022 The first time I telephoned Shlomo Moussaieff I naturally began by introducing myself. “I’m Hershel Shanks, editor of—” “I know who you are,” he interrupted. “I’ve been avoiding you for 20 years.” He has a high-pitched, almost whiny voice,...

042 The crossing of the Red Sea in which the Egyptians drowned was an actual historical event that occurred in 1477 B.C. The miraculous episode took place in the coastal plain south of Lake Menzaleh, west of what is now the Suez Canal. The...

046 047 For nine years, I have written reviews of the Annual Meetinga as objectively as possible. This year, however, I admit to being prejudiced—prejudiced in favor of this year’s meeting...

034 Talk about vision. I certainly had none when I started BAR. It began almost by accident, as an avocation. If I had any fixed notion, it was that it would be a magazine of ideas, not pictures. Excavations in Israel were full of stones, not...

041 The Annual Meetings were held in San Antonio, Texas, this year. They say that you can go outside the city where there are no buildings and the land is so flat that if you take a good pair of binoculars, you can see the back of your head. The...

052 It is one of the most famous sites in Jerusalem—right up there after the Dome of the Rock, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Western Wall. And it is also one of the most exciting to visit—Hezekiah’s Tunnel. But is it really his? The...

025 When the Ta‘âmireh bedouin penetrated the Daliyeh cave (as described in the previous article by Paul Lapp) they found within more than 300 skeletons lying on or covered by mats. The bones were mixed with fragments of manuscripts...

052 Let’s come out with it at the beginning. The archaeological presentations at the Annual Meetinga were, by and large, lackluster. There were notable exceptions, of course (some of which will be mentioned anon), but for the most part it was...

050 051 A congress on Biblical archaeology can’t help but be successful in Jerusalem. The subject seeps from Jerusalem’s stones. And the Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology,...

049 Will the Dead Sea Scrolls and the ruins of Qumran, adjacent to the caves where the scrolls were found, be given to the Palestinians? As the Israelis and Palestinians struggle slowly and painfully toward some kind of accommodation that...

064 We all condemn looting. But there is little talk about what can effectively be done about it. Telling people not to buy what may be looted antiquities makes the authorities feel good but has virtually no effect on looting. In the September...

060 Nine years, almost to the day, after Roman legionaries destroyed God’s house in Jerusalem, God destroyed the luxurious watering holes of the Roman elite. Was this God’s revenge? That’s not exactly the question I want to raise, however. Rather...

051 The following interview with Professor David Noel Freedman was conducted by BAR Editor Hershel Shanks on November 25, 1979. Professor Freedman has been more influential than anyone else in the United States in publicizing the Ebla tablets. In...