Subtitle by: Abraham Christen Liando
Some of the most chilling stories in the Bible
are tales of legendary cities destroyed by the hand of God.
Sodom and Gomorrah were incinerated in a hail of fire and brimstone,
and Jericho's walls came tumbling down to the sound of trumpets.
But are these stories fiction or fact?
Archaeologists have recently begun to uncover some clues.
There's undeniable evidence of catastrophic events,
but does it support the Biblical accounts or point to a more earthly explanation?
One of the oldest stories in the world
is a dramatic tale of two cities whose names are synonymous with sin and debauchery...
Sodom and Gomorrah.
The story of what happened to these cities is a powerful parable of sex and pleasure,
a moral fable about wickedness and corruption...
..and the price tag that comes with sin.
4,000 or so years ago,
the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah had an infamous reputation,
although the Bible doesn't specify exactly what they did to deserve it.
Genesis simply says.. ''The men of Sodom were evil, and great sinners before the Lord. ''
Later on, it also mentions ''abominations'',
but doesn't elaborate as to what they were.
We have very IittIe information, actuaIIy, about exactIy what was going on there.
I think that's why HoIIywood, among others,
is so fascinated by Sodom and Gomorrah.
It's open to whatever you want to think.
''What was going on there?'' ''I don't know, but it must have been bad.''
But if the Bible is vague about the sins that were committed,
it's clear about the punishment.
''Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah
brimstone and fire out of heaven. ''
The Bible later goes on to suggest that after Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed,
their people fled, leaving the cities abandoned.
lf this Biblical story really did happen, it probably happened here,
in these empty, desolate lands, next to a lifeless sea.
But this is far from certain.
Like many things in the Hebrew BibIe,
it's hard to actuaIIy pin down a Iocation for pIaces.
The Hebrew BibIe taIks about the five Cities of the PIain.
The nearest we can get today is thinking
that they're somewhere around the shores of the Dead Sea, say in modern-day Jordan,
but even that is a best guess.
Abraham was apparently the patriarch of a tribe of nomads,
who avoided towns and cities, which may be why we know so little about them.
City dweIIers were usuaIIy the peopIe who wrote the history.
Nomads, usuaIIy, are archaeoIogicaIIy invisibIe.
What we have in the OId Testament in the writings of these very Iiterate tribaI peopIe,
who eventuaIIy became city dweIIers themseIves,
is we have the nomads' side of the story.
The Bible tells us
that Abraham's tribesmen were constantly fighting with each other over pastureland.
To settle the dispute, Abraham and his nephew, Lot, agreed to part ways,
and Lot settled on the plain, near the city of Sodom.
''Lot lifted up his eyes, and saw all the plain of the Jordan,
and Lot moved his tent as far as Sodom. ''
So Sodom was already an established city when Lot moved there.
lf it was a typical Bronze-Age settlement,
about 1,000 people would have lived inside its walls.
No-one had ever looked for, or found, any evidence that this Biblical city actually existed.
Then, in 1 924, an archaeologist named William Albright made a trip to the Dead Sea.
WeII, some of the peopIe with him were certainIy Iooking for Sodom and Gomorrah,
and generaIIy the Cities of the PIain,
so they came down here, foIIowing the BibIicaI text
and they circIed around the southeast shore of the Dead Sea,
and just at the end of their survey here, they came across the site of Bab-edh-dhra.
Bab-edh-dhra was a Bronze-Age site, but there was no evidence that it was a town.
ln fact, it seemed to be a cemetery.
Albright didn't have the resources to excavate it at the time,
and nearly 50 years passed before anyone went back to the site
and began to dig.
Archaeologist Paul Lapp led that 1 967 excavation,
and Thomas Schaub was one of the people digging.
He's been back to the site many times since then,
and, over the years, he's uncovered a cemetery that was vast,
even by Bronze-Age standards.
This is the Iargest buriaI house that we've excavated at Bab-edh-dhra.
It is some 1 5 metres Iong, and seven metres across.
We've found hundreds and hundreds of pots here, and skeIetons and bones.
We found a buriaI with goId jeweIIery,
we excavated over 700 pieces of pottery
that were funerary gifts here, incIuding many smaII perfume jugIets
and many other objects, incIuding cIoth, and one unusuaI...
The remnants of wooden poIes
that were used as a paIIet to bring in the bodies to the buriaI house.
lt was an exciting discovery, a graveyard that had been in use for about 1,000 years,
around the time of Abraham and the destruction of Sodom.
But there was nothing to link the cemetery to Sodom, except this..
in about 2350 BC, the burials stopped...suddenly.
The reason why was unclear.
There are any number of reasons why a site might not be re-occupied.
Some we can put our finger on, some we can't.
Perhaps the water suppIy dried up. Perhaps the environment changed.
Perhaps the cIimate changed.
Perhaps the peopIe were annihiIated and compIeteIy kiIIed.
Over the next few seasons, the archaeologists expanded their search,
looking for signs of a lost city.
lt wasn't long before they found something..
traces of human habitation on a hillside overlooking the cemetery.
They uncovered stones and some pottery shards.
But, in their search for the Biblical city of Sodom,
the archaeologists at Bab-edh-dhra dealt mostly with vast quantities of dirt.
There is a fascination with what has once been Iost,
and yet now is found.
This is what drives some archaeoIogists,
and to a Iarger extent, the generaI pubIic,
this idea that something couId have been buiIt and then compIeteIy Iost,
and yet is there, under the earth, waiting to be found.
Unfortunately for archaeologists, lost cities are usually buried underground.
And that's where Tom Schaub and his team found traces of a Bronze-Age wall.
lt was on a hill, overlooking the cemetery at Bab-edh-dhra,
and it was the first sign they might have come across a town of some kind.
The inescapable question was.. had they found Sodom or Gomorrah?
The archaeologists began to dig,
and gradually, the outlines of a settlement emerged.
You can see the face of the western waII of the site.
That's the foundation of the waII, and you had a mud-brick superstructure above that.
The waII was much taIIer than that, as far as we can teII, with the mud brick that coIIapsed.
One discovery led to another.
This is a good view of one waII of the sanctuary,
and the other waII with the entrance way.
lt wasn't quite a city yet, but gradually, the hard work began to pay off.
Right here is an open pIaza area,
and very IikeIy, the pIace where most of the town business was carried on inside of the gates.
As the data trickled in, archaeologists realised that they'd come across something unique..
the foundations of a town from the time of Abraham, or even earlier,
just where the Bible suggests Sodom was located.
Like the cemetery, the town had been deserted suddenly,
and at about the same time.
But what exactly had been going on behind those mud-brick walls?
Was it the usual monotony of Bronze-Age life?
Or was it something else,
something sinful and corrupt?
Had the ancient inhabitants of Bab-edh-dhra engaged in behaviour so depraved
that it had to be punished from above?
Were Bab-edh-dhra and Sodom one and the same?
Not surprisingly, opinions continue to differ.
Work done in the 1 960s and '70s and in subsequent years
have reveaIed severaI sites from the time of Abraham, the earIy Bronze Age,
the Iargest of them being Bab-edh-dhra.
It wouId seem that that shouId be identified as the site of Sodom.
The sites of Bab-edh-dhra
and the other sites on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea are fabuIous sites,
but they're sites, mostIy, of the third miIIennium,
graduaIIy abandoned around 2000 BCE,
and I think we wouId aII agree that the popuIation of these sites was Canaanite.
To the writers of the Bible, Canaanite wasn't a term of endearment.
Abraham's tribe probably saw the city-dwelling Canaanites
as corrupt and promiscuous,
perfect examples of the bad things that can happen when you stop living in a tent.
This fits nicely with Sodom's reputation as a place with walls, rooms and secrets.
And Lot, one of their own,
had evidently forsaken his tent and moved into town.
Had he too been corrupted?
We have an account of Abraham Iiving near Hebron,
down in the southern part of Canaan,
and angeIs coming to visit him
with the message that they were going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.
Abraham asked God to spare the town if some of its citizens could be shown to be good men.
But how many good men were needed to avoid God's wrath?
Abraham knew his nephew, Lot, was Iiving there with his famiIy,
and so Abraham begins this diaIogue,
''For 30 righteous peopIe, wiII you stiII destroy the city?''
God says, ''WeII, find me 20 righteous men in the city of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Just find me 20,'' and Abraham says, ''WeII, how about ten?''
It's interesting that you have, in the BibIe,
you have a god who can bargain,
whose mind can be changed by a good deaIer Iike Abraham.
To count the good men of Sodom, God sent two angels to visit the town.
The angels walked through the city and prepared to spend the night on the streets.
But when they came to Lot's house, Sodom's only good man took them in.
That evening, they shared a meal with Lot, his wife and their two teenage daughters.
But Lot's hospitable nature wasn't shared by the rest of the Sodomites.
lndeed, they had something very different in mind for the angels.
They wanted Lot to hand them over,
apparently so they could be used by the townspeople for sex.
But Lot refused...to a degree.
Lot, at some point, he's trying to bargain with the townspeopIe,
''What if I give you my two daughters instead of these angeIs?''
And the townspeopIe, ''No. I want the angeIs.''
And that reaIIy becomes, in that cautionary taIe, the finaI straw for God,
and it's Iike, ''OK, Lot, you and your famiIy, get out of town. This pIace is toast.''
The debate about whether the Bible is an accurate historical record
has been going on for centuries,
and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is no exception.
Yeah, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah happened, sure.
How do we know it? We heard it from our forefathers.
We need to remember the BibIicaI stories about the IsraeIites
were probabIy not written down before the eighth or seventh century,
centuries after the period in question.
I think the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Cities of the PIain,
these muItipIe destructions of cities,
might be a teIescoping of severaI cities that were destroyed at around the same time.
There's no question that the destruction of a city would have been a memorable event,
a story that would have been passed down from generation to generation.
Throughout history several cities have been destroyed for one reason or another,
and their names have lived on.
Troy and Carthage were demolished in a war.
So were Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The wrath of nature buried Pompeii under six metres of hot ash when Vesuvius erupted.
San Francisco was levelled by an earthquake.
Hurricane Katrina battered and then submerged New Orleans.
lnsurance companies call events like these ''acts of God'',
and the people living in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't have argued with that.
When you read the BibIe,
you see their observations of a naturaI phenomenon as this mysticism,
as this fantastic power of God.
NaturaI disasters have aIways destroyed cities.
We're seeing that very weII in today's worId,
whether it's a tsunami, or it's an earthquake, or it's an overfIowing river and a torrent of mud.
Yes, naturaI disasters destroy cities,
and of course, that couId have crept into the BibIicaI narrative.
But of all the different kinds of natural disaster,
one seems especially suited to the destruction at Sodom and Gomorrah.
When we think about a rain of fire, the first thing that springs to mind is a volcano.
Over and over again, we see the power of voIcanoes
being associated with the power of God.
Sodom and Gomorrah is a perfect exampIe of a voIcanic eruption in the BibIe.
Many of the phenomena associated with volcanic eruptions
seem to appear in the Biblical account.
We have the earth shaking, we have the piIIars of fire, ash faIIing, stones faIIing,
pyrocIastic fIows consuming bodies...
..and, of course, sinners being punished by God for their sins.
Unfortunately, there's not much evidence
for erupting volcanoes near the Dead Sea in Biblical times.
But there's plenty of proof
that another kind of geological upheaval was wreaking havoc in the area,
a force that may have accounted for the famous destruction of another city,
not too far from the Dead Sea.
That city was Jericho.
According to the Bible, an lsraelite leader named Joshua conquered Jericho
after its walls mysteriously crumbled.
But there might have been a plausible natural reason for this event.
lt turns out that Jericho was built on an earthquake fault line.
There are actuaIIy quite a number of fauIts on either side of Jericho,
and virtuaIIy every century, you had one or two earthquakes,
and some centuries, even as many as six.
But it's an exceedingIy unheaIthy pIace to buiId a city,
a IittIe bit Iike San Francisco.
lf there are world records for cities, Jericho certainly deserves one.
Jericho is the oIdest known continuousIy inhabited city in the worId.
It's been inhabited for 1 0,000 years. It's stiII inhabited.
These days, the sprawling mound, where all of Jericho's previous incarnations are buried,
lies under a cable car, a prime attraction for tourists visiting the Holy Land.
It's going to be ruin upon ruin,
inexpIicabIe ruin on top of another inexpIicabIe ruin for the popuIation Iiving there,
so, of course you're going to get stories growing up
as to why that waII has tumbIed down, why that waII has faIIen.
Hidden within the mound are the ruins of City Four,
which may date from Joshua's time, give or take an important few hundred years.
Many of the walls here show signs of having been struck by an earthquake,
which may or may not support the Biblical account of how the city fell.
The Bible story begins with Joshua's army gathered on the far side of the Jordan River,
another group of herdsmen mistrustful of city dwellers.
Here is Joshua on the east side, with his nomadic tribes,
and he is waiting for a way in which he can bring his animaIs across the Jordan River.
This is not that easy.
WeII, Io and behoId, suddenIy, there is an earthquake.
What happens next is eerily reminiscent of the story of Moses'escape from Egypt..
an inexplicable parting of the waters that allows Joshua and his army to cross on a dry riverbed.
But there may have been a natural explanation for this miracle.
In the region caIIed Damia, when we get these earthquakes,
we get huge avaIanches that fIow across,
and actuaIIy bIock the fIow of the river for a day or two.
They dam the stream, and the river actuaIIy runs dry.
In fact, Damia, that province is the province after which we derive the word ''dam''.
Did a military opportunity simply present itself to Joshua and his men?
This is entirely possible,
because the Bible places the attack just after the spring harvest,
an ill-advised time for anyone to plan a siege.
If you're going to attack a city, you want to surround it and starve the peopIe off.
You don't attack a city when the crops have just been harvested
and the city is fuII of food and there's no crops in the fieId for you to harvest for your army.
What happens to Jericho next sounds miraculous.
We read in Joshua Chapter 6
that the IsraeIites waIked around the city for six days
and the seventh day, bIew the trumpets and peopIe shouted,
and the BibIe says the waIIs feII down and the IsraeIites stormed the city.
Even the sound of trumpets can be explained.
An earthquake, aImost aIways, just before it hits,
is characterised by a roar.
Very many peopIe describe it, from smaII earthquakes, for instance,
Iike a firepIace roaring.
Others say, ''No, it was more Iike a jet pIane that came by,''
or thunder that was heard in the distance.
Jericho was levelled,
and the Bible says one of the walls fell flat, so the invaders could go ''up into the city''.
That description may support some of the archaeological finds,
like the collapsed city walls at the base of the Tel.
These were very Iarge, thick, mud-brick waIIs
but one of the waIIs actuaIIy did,
at the time of the destruction of Jericho's City Four, faII outward,
and this is exactIy what we see archaeoIogicaIIy.
It formed a naturaI ramp up into the city,
where peopIe couId have waIked up a rather smooth incIine,
right into the city, with aImost no resistance.
The Bible tells us the lsraelites sacked and burned the city,
but it wasn't looted.
This seems to fit with the discovery of wheat and barley buried in City Four's ashes.
Jars fuII of grain, not haIf fuII or quarter fuII, full of grain,
cIearIy the harvest had just been taken in, in agreement with the BibIe.
WeII, why was it Ieft there at Jericho to be burned in the fire?
Again, the Bible offers an explanation.
The grain was not to be taken by the peopIe seizing the city.
It was to be Ieft there or burned or sacrificed to God by burning,
but it was not to be taken.
Most archaeologists agree that Jericho was destroyed at least once in Biblical times,
but the dates don't seem to correspond with Joshua's conquest.
Now, there is a big destruction, a vioIent destruction by fire of the city of Jericho,
which most archaeoIogists wouId date between around 1 500 and 1 475,
and they wouId attribute it to the Egyptians.
If we're trying to put Jericho into the context of the BibIicaI story,
and we're Iooking for Jericho that was buiIt in about 1 200 years BC, pIus/minus,
it didn't have waIIs.
They didn't come tumbIing down,
whether it was a trumpet being bIown at them, or something eIse, or an earthquake.
There weren't waIIs.
Here is the reaI probIem:
in the 1 3th century BC, when a Jericho might have been there,
to have been destroyed by a Joshua, there is nothing.
The mound is abandoned.
I aIways say to beIievers that if they need a miracIe,
Joshua destroyed a city that wasn't even there, a stupendous miracIe.
Whether or not Jericho was destroyed as the Bible says it was,
there's no doubt that the city was repeatedly shaken by earthquakes.
And the same seismic fault line that runs under Jericho continues on to the south,
where it would have passed under Sodom, Gomorrah and the other Cities of the Plain.
5,000 years ago, humans had no rational way to explain
the sometimes violent forces that swept over their world.
Storms, tornadoes,
floods and earthquakes seemed to happen for no apparent reason.
ln the Biblical lands, the earth underfoot constantly shifted,
sometimes transforming the landscape almost overnight.
The entire course of a river couId change dramaticaIIy,
and you wouId end up having to rebuiId your roads and your homes
in the Iifetime of an ordinary housecat.
There was no common sense to the way things operated in their universe,
a very, very chaotic universe.
One example of that chaos can be found
in the remains of an ancient city called Mashkan-Shapir, located in present-day lraq.
Some historians have even speculated that what happened to Mashkan-Shapir
inspired the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
and it's not hard to see why.
Something unusuaI happened in Mashkan-Shapir,
something so unusuaI that the city was never rebuiIt, inhabited again.
Like Sodom and Gomorrah, Mashkan-Shapir seems to have been destroyed in a rain of fire.
Mashkan-Shapir was a city that was buiIt mostIy out of mud brick,
which reaIIy is not very fIammabIe,
and yet we find a tremendous confIagration that consumed at Ieast one third of the city,
burned animaIs to the bone.
But today, we know something about Mashkan-Shapir
that the ancients couldn't have known,
and it may explain what really happened.
Mashkan-Shapir, Iike aImost any other city
buiIt in the Tigris/Euphrates region 4,000 years ago,
was over pooIs of naturaI gas and oiI,
and it's the naturaI gas that's a probIem.
If you get the right kind of earthquake,
it's going to expand, and it's going to come jetting out of the ground,
just Iike a voIcanic eruption,
just Iike, IiteraIIy, a gusher of naturaI gas.
Gas, followed by oil under pressure is a lethal combination.
All it needs is a spark from a cooking hut.
The effect wiII be Iike a giant fueI/air bomb,
detonating over and around and in the city.
And we know, from just Iooking at the Kuwait fires, how frightening that can be.
I mean, the smoke is bIack. It bIots out the sun. It bIots out the stars.
It's raining soot everywhere.
You'd just see these huge bright fIames, shooting into the sky out of the ground,
in the middIe of the city,
a tremendous waterfaII of fire Iighting up the night.
The city was destroyed by something no-one could explain,
except with words like fire and brimstone.
Could something similar have happened to Sodom and Gomorrah?
lt's certainly possible.
Not only does the area around the Dead Sea have oil and gas deposits deep underground,
but tar and sulphur exist closer to the surface,
and sulphur was what the ancients called brimstone.
Oil, gas, tar and sulphur,
in an area prone to earthquakes.
The people of Sodom and Gomorrah,
or the people of Bab-edh-dhra might have been sitting on a time bomb.
lf what happened to Mashkan-Shapir happened here,
it probably started with a tremor.
WeII, the first thing, usuaIIy, is a movement.
which is more, sort of, up and down,
and then everything starts swaying,
and it can sway for a minute,
maybe, sometimes, in very heavy earthquakes, as much as one and a haIf minutes and so on.
For most peopIe invoIved in it, it feeIs Iike an eternity.
The earthquake would have opened up pockets of natural gas,
while tar and sulphur deposits bubbled to the surface.
If the peopIe at that time were preparing food or anything Iike that,
you onIy need one firepIace and this gas coming across it,
and you wouId have very significant effects.
lt would have been a spectacular Bronze-Age disaster.
When the gas ignited, oil, tar and sulphur deposits would have been set ablaze.
Fire would have cascaded over the town.
Anyone in the area would have been incinerated.
But those at a safe distance would have witnessed something astonishing,
People like Lot and his family.
According to the Bible,
they were headed towards the city of Zoar when the hail of fire and brimstone took place.
The angels had warned them not to look back at Sodom as they fled,
but Lot's wife ignored the warning.
She turned, and whatever she saw transfixed her to the spot,
transforming her into a pillar of salt.
But, at Bab-edh-dhra, proposed by some as the site of Sodom,
there's little evidence of such a dramatic destruction by fire.
lnstead, the town seems to have fallen victim to an invading army
that tried to enter through the western gate.
Right in the centre of the gateway, we found a bIocking waII,
where they had used everything but the kitchen sink to throw in there,
which was our first cIue that the end of the site
may have been associated with some sort of miIitary encounter,
because they were bIocking the entrance to the city.
To get through the massive wooden gate, the invaders built a roaring hot fire next to it.
What we find, from the superstructure of the waII,
the coIIapse of the mud brick, which was vitrified aImost reddish,
showing the...the fIame that was up against the town waII on the outside as they attacked.
It doesn't indicate that they actuaIIy entered into the city,
but certainIy, there was some sort of attack on the city.
There's no way to know when the attack happened,
or what became of the people who lived there.
All we know is that by about 2350 BC, no-one was living in the town, or using the cemetery.
Like Lot and his two daughters, any survivors from Bab-edh-dhra were now on their own.
ln the Bible, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah doesn't have a happy ending,
even for Lot and his family, who managed to escape.
We're told that Lot went to the city of Zoar, following the destruction,
but he was afraid to live there.
So Lot and his two daughters took refuge in a cave.
Cut off from other men, and perhaps still under the corrupting influence of the city,
Lot's daughters decided to seduce their own father.
They plied Lot with wine, and then had sex with him.
Both girls became pregnant,
and the sons they bore went on to father two more tribes of Canaanites,
who the lsraelites later conquered.
The Bible locates Zoar near the modern city of Safi,
about 50km south of Bab-edh-dhra.
And in 1 989, a Greek archaeologist discovered something there
that was lost for a thousand years,
a Byzantine monastery built in front of a cave, dedicated to St Lot.
They thought that this particuIar cave, where they buiIt their church,
was the cave where Lot and his daughters Iived.
WeII, there's no way to prove that for certain, but it is interesting that inside the cave,
they did find evidence for occupation back in that time period.
This puts the occupation of Lot's cave in the early Bronze Age,
the same time as Bab-edh-dhra.
And it wasjust south of Bab-edh-dhra
that Tom Schaub and his partner practically stumbled upon a second lost city.
lt started when they noticed an odd rock formation on top of a hill.
lt turned out to be a town wall.
This is the same waII that WaIter Rest and I spied from the road
as we drove up during our 1 973 survey.
We aImost ran up the steep hiIIs of Numeira,
came aIong and waIked aIong the southern waII Iine,
began to see possibIe waII Iines of structures within the town site.
An examination of pottery shards
convinced them that they'd found another early-Bronze-Age town,
just a few miles from Bab-edh-dhra.
They called the new site Numeira.
Like Bab-edh-dhra, it was walled,
but it was much smaller, home to a few hundred people at most.
We began to reaIise that this site was contemporary with Bab-edh-dhra,
and eventuaIIy, during our excavations,
we began to reaIise it was aImost Iike a sister city.
I think it was a fairIy prosperous town,
but a kind of suburb of the Iarger city to the north, Bab-edh-dhra.
But, unlike Bab-edh-dhra, Numeira had been abandoned not long after it was built.
Numeira was occupied for a reIativeIy brief period,
perhaps no more than a century,
and, fortunateIy for archaeoIogists, never settIed again,
so nobody actuaIIy Iived on top of it, dug into the remains, reused the stones.
Two settlements, one large, and one small,
just a few hours' walk from each other.
Had they discovered Sodom's sister city, Gomorrah?
If Abraham goes way back in earIy history,
the onIy sites from that period down to the Iron Age that are waIIed towns,
that are sizeabIe, are these two sites of Bab-edh-dhra and Numeira,
so they have become, in the minds of many,
prime candidates for the ancient traditions of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Like Bab-edh-dhra, Numeira showed signs that its inhabitants had fled,
and never returned,
but not because of a war.
There's no signs of breaching of waIIs that wouId have occurred by warfare.
There are no remains of weapons.
There are no dead soIdiers, as you find,
for exampIe at a number of sites where there have been battIes.
But they did find the skeletons of two men,
crushed to death.
This is the tower.
It's in front of that tower, of course, that we found the most striking evidence
of the Iast days of the town,
because there were two skeIetons underneath the coIIapse of the tower
And these were the skeIetons of aduIt maIes,
who had obviousIy died suddenIy.
This wasn't a buriaI. This wasn't a tomb.
These were peopIe who died in an open, pubIic area,
and we think that they had died because the tower,
where they were either squatting,
or perhaps they'd been Ieft behind as guards, when everybody eIse Ieft the city,
simpIy coIIapsed on top of them.
The suspected culprit was another earthquake.
My hypothesis is that the inhabitants perhaps experienced a preIiminary tremor,
and Ieft the city for the open country, because they knew they'd be safer there,
and a few stayed behind, maybe as guards, and they were the ones who died in the city.
The ruins of Numeira also revealed something with a Biblical echo.
Unlike her sister city, Numeira was consumed by fire.
Everything that we've excavated has indicated a very heavy destruction IeveI.
We find up to 30-40cm of ashy debris,
incIuding the remains of charred wooden beams
and of occupationaI debris,
so whatever happened here, and it's pretty widespread over the site,
there was a major fire that took pIace.
There was a thick Iayer of ashes beIow the topsoiI aII over the site.
Thatched roofs and that sort of stuff,
wooden roof beams, wouId have burned very quickIy.
lf the fire had been accompanied by exploding gas, tar and sulphur deposits,
the results would have been unforgettable.
It doesn't take much to imagine
that if you had a confIagration,
the effects of bitumen and asphaIt in that wouId be spectacuIar,
and again enough, I think, to earn these cities an enduring pIace in foIk memory
for their destruction.
Afterwards, the skeletons of both towns would have sat bleaching in the sun
while a thousand years of travellers passed them by
and heard stories about how they'd died.
So, you're taIking about peopIe handing down, by word of mouth,
a story about the destruction of these two cities for more than 1 ,000 years,
and who knows what got changed in the teIIing.
You might aIso have, in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah,
and the other cities that were destroyed in either this one great disaster,
or in severaI disasters over time, that are teIescoped,
again, possibIy the nomads' side of the story.
You're picking up different strands from different periods of history,
bIending them together, creating a coherent narrative
about an event which actuaIIy didn't happen.
There's no doubt that something happened here a little over 4,000 years ago,
but whether it was invasion, earthquake, fire or some combination of all three,
we'll probably never know.
But here's something to consider..
Sodom was derived from the Hebrew word, ''s'dom'', which means ''burnt'',
while Gomorrah was derived from the Hebrew word, ''amorah'',
meaning ''buried'' or ''submerged''.
There could hardly be better words to describe Numeira and Bab-edh-dhra
in the centuries that followed their destruction.
So, perhaps the Bible was onto something after all.
I think it's very important
not to make the writers and the editors of the Hebrew BibIe Iook Iike charIatans or fooIs.
They were teIIing the truth as they understood it.
The truth as they understood it involved sex and destruction -
sin and the punishing wrath of God.
lt's a story that has already endured for thousands of years,
perhaps the greatest morality tale ever told,
a powerful lesson in the dangers of debauchery
that will continue to intrigue us for centuries to come.