MOUNT SINAI REDISCOVERED

The scenery is an endless waste of brown rocks, valleys in ochre, eroded wadis sprinkled with bushes, monolithic mountains marking the horizon. Most of the existing roads have been imposed upon this landscape in the last two generations. When we conducted our first explorations in Sinai, in the mid twentieth century, archaeologists in this area did not have the use of any means of transport other than their own legs, and occasionally, when they were lucky, camels. Millenary footsteps are revealed by patinated trails heading in all directions. Years after our early fieldwork we came back to this area, in 1980, to carry on an archaeological survey which is still in progress.

Travelling through the harsh land of the Sinai Peninsula and the Negev Desert, hominids arrived in Asia from Africa over one million years ago. In the following ages, the Sinai and the northern Negev became an enduring passageway between Africa and Asia for clans and tribes of migrating peoples. Groups of homo sapiens crossed this region from Africa to the Near East for over 40,000 years, and various prehistoric, proto-historic, and historic peoples followed in the ensuing millennia.

Stories and myths remain as the vestiges of these human migrations and transitions. Oral and written records preserve the movements of some groups, like the frequent military expeditions of the Egyptian pharaohs into the land of Canaan, the Asiatic Hyksos who dominated Egypt in the seventeenth century BC, or the Muslim pilgrims who still cross this territory from Africa to reach Mecca. Among these stories is the biblical narration of the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who reached Egypt from Mesopotamia and Canaan. Another of these biblical stories is the epic of Exodus, according to which the children of Israel crossed the Sinai and the Negev in their flight from Egypt and passage to the "Promised Land." In this territory for the last twenty years an Italian archaeological expedition has carried out a study of a desert mountain: Har Karkom.