« Don't Pee in Your Laptop, At Least not Yet
Main
Why Don't Oil and Conservation Mix? »
August 16, 2005
Saint Catherine's Monastery to be Restored
The Egyptian Minister of Culture made the following announcement,
Minister of Culture Farouq Hosni has sanctioned project to develop Saint Catherine Monastery in South Sinai and the nearby area at a total cost of LE 25 Million [~$4.3M] in 24 months.Dr. Zahi Hawas, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities said that the renovation project will be carried out in four stages.
Shirley and I visited Saint Catherine's as part of a small group led by Nelson Glueck. The tour included the Negev and the Sinai. Ruben Bullard, who was at the time the staff geologist for the Gezer excavation, and Glueck's wife Dr. Helen Glueck joined us. That was in 1970. It was, I believe, Glueck's last trip to the Negev and the Sinai.
The trip was memorable for several reasons. First, I had billed Shirley's first visit to Israel as a second honeymoon with leisurely sight seeing in Jerusalem and environs after almost three months of separation. I had been working at Gezer and she had been in the States looking after our very young children. The opportunity to take the trip with Glueck came up literally while she was flying form Los Angeles to Ben Gurion Airport. So our leisurely second honeymoon consisted of a very short night in Beersheba and four days and nights of roughing it in abandoned Egyptian towns. Remember, the Sinai was under Israeli occupation at the time. We had an Israeli army soldier with us for protection and in one place there was some random gun fire which the soldier told us was nothing to be alarmed about.
With Glueck regaling us with his adventures and the history of the place we visited and Bullard explaining the geology, the education was invaluable. The overnight visit to Saint Catherine's was both the highlight and the lowlight of the trip. Several of us climbed Jebel Musa and we all saw the various wonders of the monastery. One of those wonders was the plumbing. While the men and women had to sleep in separate sparsely equipped dorms, we shared a common bathroom! The plumbing was so inadequate that Helen Glueck, a physician, said she was going to take Lomotol rather than use the toilet! That evening, before bed, we enjoyed a meal of green chicken. Well, at least a few of us enjoyed it.
I doubt that Saint Catherine's has had much done to it since we were there, so restoration is much overdue. I only hope they work on the plumbing.
One sad but memorable event: one of our drivers died while trying to climb Jebel Musa.
All of Glueck's books are fun to read even though they are now quite dated and need to be understood in the scholarly context in which they were written. Here are a few of the most important. The first and the last are quite technical but the middle four are for a more general audience.
- Explorations in Eastern Palestine (4 vol., 1934–51)
- The Other Side of the Jordan (1940)
- The River Jordan (1946)
- Rivers in the Desert: A History of the Negev (1959) [There is a signed copy in our library]
- Deities and Dolphins (1965)
- Hesed in the Bible (1968)
Via Egyptology Blog
Posted by Duane Smith at August 16, 2005 8:24 PM | Read more on Archaeology |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1314
Comments
I don't know if you have heard about this or not but it sounds pretty cool - it will be a tremendous asset for epigraphy.
Posted by: afarensis at August 17, 2005 5:14 PM
Thanks, I had heard of it. The use of x-ray is just one of a whole host of new techniques that involve shining various frequencies and intensities of "light" on inscriptions, tablets, manuscripts and even papyri and then watching with an equal or greater host of sensors to see what reflects or illuminates back. It's all very exciting.
Posted by: Duane at August 17, 2005 5:41 PM
Post a comment
Please read Abnormal Interest's Comments Policy.