Other Archaeological Sites / The Neolithic of the Levant (500 Page Book Online)
Biblical Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb Malachi 4:4 Remember ye the law of Moses my servant which I commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel with the statutes and judgments ... Exodus 24:16 And the glory of the LORD abode upon Mount Sinai and the cloud covered it six days: and the seventh day he called unto Moses out of the midst of the cloud ... Mount Sinai which is also known as Mount Horeb in the Bible is the mountain where God gave The Ten Commandments to Moses. Located in the Sinai Peninsula it was the scene of one of the greatest events in the Israelite people's Wilderness Journey and of all Bible History ... Traditionally it has been assumed that Jebel Musa, a mighty red granite mountain in the Sinai Desert, is the actual Mount Sinai of the Bible. This sacred site soon became the goal of pilgrims from all over the world ... Several other mountains in the Sinai and Negev deserts have been suggested. In one of the most barren and remote sections of the Negev Desert one such site was discovered by archaeologists in 1955 when the Jewish Italian Professor Emmanuel Anati first came to the area at Har Karkom ... Regardless of whether Har Karkom was the Mount Sinai of the Bible it is a sacred mountain with many altars, ceremonial sites and evidence of cultic activity and was one of the prime high places of the Bronze Age in the Sinai Peninsula. A Palaeolithic shrine (30000 BC) indicates that the mountain was sacred from the earliest times. Bronze Age geoglyphs (large pebble drawings) on the mountain appear to be offerings to an invisible sky entity. The 75 square mile area around the site boasts 40000 petroglyphs — the largest concentration of rock art in the Negev — and 892 individual archaeological sites. The remains of a large Bronze Age campsite have been found in the mountain's foothills. Har Karkom still serves as a popular gathering place for nomads just as it has for millennia ... To date nearly 1000 archaeological sites are known in the surveyed area. Many of them belong to the Late Chalcolithic, the Early Bronze Age and the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age; a period dating back to the fourth and the third millennia BC. As we shall see this sequence of periods displays persistent patterns of settlement and of material culture; although it includes the Late Chalcolithic it is referred to as BAC or Bronze Age Complex. The remains of numerous villages of this period are found in the valleys surrounding the mountain ... |