Volume 19 / Issue 2

Martin Biddle will take over as director of the University Museum.

By: James D. Muhly

On October 1, 1977, Martin Biddle, of Winchester, England, will take over as director of the University Museum. He will succeed James Pritchard who has served as director since September 30, 1976, following the retirement of Froelich Rainey. Martin Biddle, born in 1937, was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School and at Pembroke College, Cambridge University. […]

Old Questions and New Finds

By: Robert Maddin and Tamara Stech Wheeler and James D. Muhly

Bronze—an alloy of copper and tin—gave its name to one of the periods of antiquity. It is now clear that pure copper and other alloys of copper were also used during the Bronze Age in the Near East and eastern Mediterranean (roughly 3000-1200 B.C.), so the appellation cannot be considered strictly correct, But as a […]

Dagger Wearing in Yemen

By: Schuyler V. R. Cammann

On a recent visit to the Yemen Arab Republic, even before I left the National Airport, I was impressed by the fact that so many adult males, and even some adoles­cents, who had come to meet the plane were still wearing the traditional Arabian dagger called jambiya. The jambiya is a characteristic form of dagger […]

By: Barbara Klamon Kopytoff

There is a story that when Christopher Columbus, after his second voyage to the New World in 1494, was asked to describe the new island he had found in the west, he crumpled a sheet of paper and set it before the Spanish king and queen. The Caribbean island was Jamaica, with its magnificent and […]

By: George F. Dales and Jonathan Mark Kenoyer

Balakot is one of four known ancient coastal sites in Pakistan dating to the period of South Asia’s earliest civilization—the Harappan (or Indus)—that flourished in the centuries just before and after 2000 B.C. This little known civilization has intrigued scholars and students since its discovery in the 1920’s. Its geographic range, from the Arabian Sea […]

From Lobatsi to Tsodilo Hills

By: Frank L. Lambrecht

Except in relation to the surrounding countries of the Republic of South Africa, Rhodesia and South West Africa, the Repub­lic of Botswana (ex Bechuanaland Protector­ate) rarely makes the headlines. The greatest part of the country is occupied by the Kalahari Desert, a desolate expanse but for the fringing areas in the north where they border […]