The Bible of Clay Read Online Free Page B

because their mothers cannot afford to buy them food, so there is very little money left for digging into our own past—or, I should say, the past of all humanity, of all civilization. All our archaeological missions have halted and are waiting for better times.
    "As for my wife, Clara Tannenberg, she has been my assistant for years; we have excavated several sites together. Her grandfather is a man who is passionate about the past and who has helped to finance a number of important archaeological excavations—"
    "Tomb robbers!" someone in the audience called out.
    That voice, and the sound of the nervous laughter in the audience, were like knives through Clara's heart. But Ahmed continued impassively.
    "As I was saying, we are reasonably certain that the scribe who made the two preliminary tablets discovered by Clara's grandfather also went on to transcribe the stories that he says Abraham told him. Other research—including tablet fragments—hint strongly at this. We could be talking about one of the most important discoveries in the history of not just archaeology but also religion and biblical study. I think we should allow Dr. Tannenberg to go on. Clara, please."
    Clara threw a look of gratitude at her husband, took another deep breath, and shakily prepared to proceed. If another of these old fogies interrupted her, she was going to shout them back down. Lord knows she was more than capable of doing it. If her grandfather had witnessed the scene she was going through now, he would have been appalled— and enraged. He had been against her asking the international community for aid. "They're a bunch of arrogant sons of bitches who think they know something," he had said. Her father would never have allowed her to come to Rome, but her father was dead. And now, with the invasion looming, they had to find a way to move forward quickly.
    She scanned the audience briefly and forged ahead. "As I was saying, for several years we concentrated our efforts in Haran, searching for some trace of these other tablets we are certain exist. We found nothing. But on the upper part of the two my grandfather found, the name Shamas appears, clearly written by the same inexperienced hand. In some cases, scribes put the name of the supervisor of the transcription on the top of the tablet, as well as their own name. In the case of these two tablets, there was just the one name: Shamas. Who is Shamas? you may ask.
    "Since the United States declared Iraq its most dangerous enemy, aerial incursions have occurred more and more frequently. You will recall that just a few months ago American planes flying over Iraq claimed to have been attacked by land-to-air missiles, to which they responded by launching a series of cluster bombs. In the bombarded area, between Basra and ancient Ur, in a village named Safran, the explosion revealed the remains of a structure and a wall, and we calculate the perimeter of the wall to be more than five hundred meters.
    "Given the situation in Iraq, it has not been possible to give this structure the attention it deserves, despite the fact that my husband and I, along with a small contingent of workers, have begun to excavate. We believe that this structure may be the storage room for the tablets belonging to a temple or some similar building. We cannot be certain of this, of course, as our work has not progressed far enough to verify any of our findings. We have, however, found many pieces of broken tablets, and much to our surprise, the name Shamas appears clearly on one. Is this the same Shamas associated with Abraham?
    "We do not know, but it may be. The Bible says that Abram, as his name was then, undertook the journey to Canaan with his father's tribe. Some believe that Abraham remained in Haran until his father died and only then began the journey to Canaan. Was Shamas a member of the tribe of Abraham? Did he accompany him to Canaan? These are some of the questions we hope our excavation may answer. However,