For more than a hundred years the lands of the Fertile Crescent have been the subject of archaeological investigation.
Excavations at many important sites have enabled scholars to recover the most ancient civilizations of mankind.
While these have importance in their own right, public interest in this area and its history has always been especially strong because of its close association with the Bible.
Much of the new material, however, remains inaccessible to the general reader.
But between the extremes of the scholar's scholar trapped in his own specialized jargon, and the professional popularizer who cannot control the sources of information or distinguish fantasy from fact, there is happily an occasional writer whose work is both scholarly and readable.
The journal The Biblical Archaeologist has been successful in discovering a number of such writers, and some of their work has been brought together in this volume, Articles like those on Manna and The Musical Instruments of Israel, on the Flood and on Sodom and Gomorrah bear closely on the Bible; others, like the several articles on the pagan religions of the ancient world and on the techniques of carbon dating, are indirectly related thereto, but all are at once authoritative and very readable.