Word: perrot
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...uninhabited wilderness when Abraham (a middle Bronze Age man) came to Beersheeba about 1500 B.C. One short reference puzzled them. The book of Genesis (14:6) refers to Horites (cave dwellers) who lived "by the wilderness" and were smitten by Chedorlaomer, King of Elam. But until the fall of Perrot's man, no trace of the Horites had been found...
Locked Door. Carefully and laboriously over two seasons, Perrot uncovered the Horite village. All the rooms were deep underground, reached by vertical shafts about ten feet long with steps and handholds cut in the hard dirt. Each oval habitation, some 20 feet long, was connected with others by long tunnels. Most extraordinary thing about the Horite dwellings was that they were completely furnished. The entrances were blocked up with stones (the ancient equivalent of locking the door), but everything was in as perfect order as if the inhabitants had just stepped out after tidying up after dinner. Perrot does...
...studying the well-kept cave dwellings, Perrot could form a pretty good idea of the lives and customs of the pre-Abraham Horites. They were farmers who got water from the bed of a nearby wadi and stored it in underground cisterns. They had sheep, cattle and dogs, but no horses or asses. They grew barley, wheat, lentils and peas. Two of their barley varieties are still grown today, but their wheat is a novel type not found even in ancient Egypt. The harvested grain was stored in underground chambers or in massive earthenware jars for current...
Burned Babies. Perrot could even get some idea of their religion. Its rites seem to have centered around decorated pebbles, symmetrically arranged. In the caves, he found cross-marked pebbles laid out in an oval. Pebbles painted with dots and lines were laid out in a crescent. He thinks the Horites believed that the pebbles contained the spirits of their ancestors. (They certainly cared little for the ancestors' bones; they tossed a few loose bones of their dead into disused storage bins.) Their religion must have had at least one grisly feature. The partly burned skeletons of four infants...
...Perrot's work in the land of the Horites is not finished. In the outskirts of Beersheeba, he has found seven buried cave villages, one of which has a two-storied room shaped like an hourglass. When he has explored all of them and learned by radioactive analysis just how old they are, he will be able to tell better than the Bible does what life was like "by the wilderness" before the time of Abraham...