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SODDOM AND GOMORRAH ARE 'FOUND AT BOTTOM OF DEAD SEA'
From The Sunday Telegraph, 26 March 2000
By Jonathan Petre
A Bible scholar believes that he has found the ruins of
Sodom and
Gomorrah, the evil cities destroyed by God with fire and
brimstone,
after leading the first expedition to explore the bottom
of the Dead
Sea.
Michael Sanders [a long-time CCNet-subscriber] and an
international
team of researchers discovered what appear to be the
salt-encrusted
remains of ancient settlements on the seabed after
several fraught
weeks diving in a mini submarine. Mr Sanders, a Briton
who is now based
in the United States, said yesterday that he was
"immensely excited"
about the find, and he is already planning a follow-up
expedition.
He said: "The evidence cannot be ignored. I predicted
there must be
something extraordinary there and, lo and behold, there
was. What we
found matches exactly what the remains of an ancient
city might look
like."
Dr John Whitaker, a geologist from Leicester University
and the former
editor of Geology Today, said yesterday that the new
development -
which will be unveiled in a television documentary
tomorrow - appeared
"very significant". He said: "There is a good chance
that these mounds
are covering up brick structures and are one of the lost
cities of the
plains, possibly even Sodom or Gomorrah, though I would
have to examine
the evidence. These Bible stories were handed down by
word of mouth
from generation to generation before they were written
down, and there
seems to be a great deal in this one."
God's destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah to punish the
sexual immorality
of their inhabitants is one of the most graphic episodes
in the Old
Testament. Genesis says that "the Lord rained upon Sodom
and upon
Gomorrah brimstone and fire out of heaven. And he
overthrew those
cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of
the cities, and
that which grew upon the ground".
Many archaeologists and scholars have concluded that the
story was
symbolic, a warning to erring humans of the divine
punishment they
faced for wickedness. But there has been speculation for
centuries that
the cities existed in the region of the Dead Sea. A
growing number of
experts, including Mr Sanders, are now convinced that
"the cities of
the plain" were destroyed by an earthquake, which threw
up flaming
pitch, about 5,000 years ago.
Since the 1960s, archaeologists have discovered mass
graves on a
peninsula jutting into the Dead Sea which contain human
bones dating
from the Old Testament period. And sulphur, or
brimstone, have been
found in nearby cliffs, adding to the mystery.
More recently, Mr Sanders unearthed a map dating from
1650 which
reinforced to his belief that the sites of the two
cities could be
under the north basin, rather than on the southern edge
of the Dead
Sea. He recruited Richard Slater, an American geologist
and expert in
deep sea diving, to take him to the depths of the Dead
Sea in the
two-man Delta mini-submarine that was involved in the
discovery of the
sunken liner, the Lusitani.
Also part of the expedition, which took place in
November, was Zvi
Ben-Avraham, the director of the Dead Sea Research
Centre, who has
studied the region for decades. Their explorations in
November, which
were filmed for a Channel 4 documentary to be broadcast
at 8pm tomorrow
night, were fraught with difficulties. The 10ft
submarine, which was
flown in from California, had to be weighted down with
lead to
counteract the buoyancy of the salty water. Because of
constraints of
time and money, only four dives were undertaken.
To complicate matters further, the Dead Sea is a
military zone with the
border between Israel and Jordan running down the middle
of it.
Attempts by researchers to explore the most important
site nearly
sparked an international incident because it was partly
in Jordanian
waters, and military authorities ordered the submarine
out.
Mr Sanders is in little doubt that the salt-covered
mounds, found over
an area 800 yards square, are man-made structures. He
said: "I have
spoken to geologists and nobody has come up with the
suggestion that
they are natural phenomena. We don't know what else they
could be if
they are not ruins. But we need more conclusive evidence
by chipping
off the salt. That's why we need to go back."
Copyright 2000, The Sunday Telegraph
CONGRATULATIONS ON A FASCINATING STORY. WELL DONE,
MIKE!
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