Buddha, Hinduism, Mithraism, Baha'i, & etc.Cave Letters: 2000 Years OldRecent archeological research near the Dead Sea has implications for the study of the Bible. In this piece of prose-poetry, I personalize this archeological research and compare the letters in this Cave near the Dead Sea and my own collection of letters.
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ULTIMATE PERSPECTIVE
For someone like myself who has a personal archive of over 3000 letters, the archaeological research in what has come to be called the Cave of Letters, has a special interest. The first research was done in this cave near the Dead Sea in Israel in 1960/1 and the letters which were found came from 132 AD(ca). No research was done again until 1999. My own cache or cave of letters was amassed during this time(1960-2005) and can be found, not in a region of karst topography, but in a small room in a small town at the end of the Pacific rim, the last stop on the way to Antarctica. Like those ancient cave documents from the period of time of the Second Revolt of the Jews against the Romans just one century after the crucifixion of Christ which chronicle what life was like two millennia ago, my letters document the life of a modern man, an ordinary man.
These letters in the Cave of Letters from nearly 1900 years ago are part of a priceless collection of artefacts. State-of-the art archaeological technology has enabled historians to add a substantial amount of new information to the existing bases of knowledge from the second century AD. It is difficult to see how my letters can provide anything like the same function given the multitude of sources of information about our contemporary way of life or, more particularly, the way of life of an ordinary man. -Ron Price with thanks to “Lost Worlds: Ancient Refuge in the Holy Land,” SBS TV, 7:30-8:30 pm, September 4th 2005 and “2000 Excavation of The Cave of Letters,” Internet Site, 2001.
I wonder if azimuths, inclinations,
station sketches, computer programs,
cross-sectional maps, survey data,
archaeological and geophysical analyses,
digital pulseEKKOTM100 and 1000 GPR
systems and their resulting profiles using
antennae frequencies of 100 and 450 MHz
and a backpack transport system…….
..….and radar stratigraphic analysis
to investigate both lateral and vertical
geometry of reflection patterns;
archaeological probes using endoscope,
metal detector and other excavation
techniques. Two dimensional electrical
resistivity and tomography analysis----
…all of this just might reveal something
that the present generation of analysts
would not be inclined to even examine.
For the meaning of history is not so much
in the living but in retrospect as new fields
emerge, new meaning systems have their day,
and this earthly life finds its ultimate perspective.
-Ron Price
September 5th 2005
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