Different slants on the Sinai pumice story

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070402-egypt-volcano.html

"Egyptian archaeologists today announced that they have unearthed traces of volcanic ash on the northern coast of Sinai that date to around 1500 B.C.—supporting accounts that a number of ancient Egyptian settlements were buried by a massive volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean.
The archaeological team, led by Mohamed Abdel Maqsoud of Egypt's Supreme Council for Antiquities, found houses, military structures, and tombs encased in ash near the ancient Egyptian fortress of Tharo, on the Horus military road. Tharo is located close to El Qantara, where the Nile Delta meets the Sinai peninsula."

See the above page for more details.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/03/news/moses.php

Whilst touring the northern Sinai area with journalists, Zahi Hawass addressed the issue of whether or not there is any evidence at the site for biblical stories: "It did not look like much - some ancient buried walls of a military fort and a few pieces of volcanic lava. The archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, often promotes mummies and tombs and pharaonic antiquities that command international attention and high ticket prices. But this bleak landscape, broken only by electric pylons, excited him because it provided physical evidence of stories told in hieroglyphics. It was proof of accounts from antiquity.
That prompted a French reporter to ask about the Exodus, and if the new evidence was linked in any way to the story of Passover. The archaeological remains roughly coincided with the timing of the Israelites' biblical flight from Egypt and the 40 years of wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land. 'Really, it's a myth,' Hawass said of the story of the Exodus, as he stood at the foot of a wall built during what is called the New Kingdom. . . . Recently, diggers found evidence of lava from a volcano in the Mediterranean Sea that erupted in 1500 B.C. and is believed to have killed 35,000 people and wiped out villages in Egypt, Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula, officials here said. The same diggers found evidence of a military fort with four rectangular towers, now considered the oldest fort on the Horus military road. But nothing was showing up that might help prove the Old Testament story of Moses and the Israelites fleeing Egypt, or wandering in the desert. Hawass said he was not surprised, given the lack of archaeological evidence to date. But even scientists can find room to hold on to beliefs."
There's a nice photograph to accompany the two-page article.

The Yahoo! website has provided a short slideshow of the site (with an emphasis on pictures of Zahi Hawass) at http://tinyurl.com/2hk6kj

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