NEW YORK (Sep. 27)
The discovery of an old Negev route that was ancient even in the time of Abraham, was announced here this week-end by Dr. Nelson Glueck, president of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, who recently returned from a summer archaeological exploration which he conducted in the Negev under the auspices of the David Klau Foundation of New York.
Estimating that the road is more than 5,000 years old, Dr. Glueck said he discovered that the highway, which runs from Sdeh Boker to the Jordanian border, joined the King’s Highway of Biblical mention in Transjordan. His findings, he added, convinced him that the road “had actually been the major east-to-west connection of Israel with Arabia and Egypt.”
He described “sites belonging to the period of Abraham, going back some 4,000 years, and other sites belonging to the period of the Judaean Kingdom, tenth to sixth centuries B. C., and still another to the Nabataean and the Byzantine periods.” It was the Biblical mention of King’s Highway, “the Beduin tracks which always follow ancient ones,” that led him to discover this ancient route.