Bible Unearthed

This course is about archaeology. But what exactly is “archaeology”? The word literally means “study of the ancient,” coming from a combination of two ancient Greek words archae and logos, but it has become its own historical and scientific field based on the discovery or rediscovery of the past through systematic investigation and excavation. It can be defined as the study of human cultures and history through the recovery, documentation and analysis of material remains, including architecture, artifacts, texts, and biological remnants.

In the last session, we looked at the basics of what archaeology is and how excavation is done. But why even bother doing archaeology? All that research and excavation is difficult, time consuming, and expensive. So why is archaeology important? The basic answer is that archaeology provides us with a window into the past through objective evidence that you can see and touch. The people who write history ultimately get their information from archaeology, whether that be through new information about a rediscovered city, the translation of an ancient text, or artifacts that help us better understand a particular civilization or time period. Without archaeology, we would only know scraps of information about ancient civilizations, people, technologies, beliefs, and languages that have been handed down in books which happened to be preserved over the centuries.

So far, we have looked at a few major discoveries of archaeology, and learned that archaeologists and historians have been excavating ancient sites around the world since the middle of the 19th century. But what have they found, and “who” have they found? Archaeologists excavate houses, forts, palaces, temples, tombs, and even entire cities, but is there evidence left behind of the actual people, and not just buildings or objects? What about all of those people mentioned in ancient historical texts like the Bible? Have their tombs been discovered, or are there any artifacts that attest to their existence in ancient times? In many cases, yes! In fact, archaeological evidence for hundreds of people from ancient times has been discovered.