"Archaeological Discoveries in Sodom and Gomorrah"

 
? Research and Explain the Discovery of an Archaeological Find that Occurred in the Last Twenty Years in Sodom and Gomorrah that Redefined a Historical Event, People or Culture of its Original History The biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah is one of the best known and compelling ancient stories worldwide. But is there any physical evidence of a natural catastrophe and of flourishing ancient cities in the area of the Dead Sea? Many theories placed the sites near the Southern shore of the Dead Sea or assumed that the sites might be submerged because ancient sea levels were lower than the levels up to the mid 20th century. Early archaeological expeditions, such as the excavation led by W.F.Albright in 1924, failed to locate any sites and came to the conclusion that the cities must be covered under the waters of the Dead Sea (Rast, Schaub, 2004). Further archaeological expeditions in the 1960s, however, found no trace of submerged ancient sites or sites close to the receding shoreline of the Southern Dead Sea. It should be noted that the Dead Sea is shrinking due to heavy use of the waters of the Jordan river, which feeds into the Dead Sea, for agricultural and industrial purposes but that the water levels were much higher in the 19th and 20th century AD than they were in the Bronze Age and that throughout the millennia the area has been settled the Dead Sea levels would have been subject to considerable fluctuations. In the 1960 Paul Lapp excavated a substantial cemetery site at Bab edh-Dhra but evidence of the remains of a city was not found until the 1970s by Rast and Schaub (Graves, 1995). The team discovered further sites along the Eastern shore of the Dead Sea and further burial grounds. Feifa, Safi, Numeira and Khanazir all contained evidence of similar pottery remains dating from the Early Bronze Age which dates the sites at around 3,000 to 2,000 B.C. As the original story mentions five biblical cities it was necessary to compare the archaeological findings with the descriptions from the ancient texts to exclude any error in identifying the sites correctly. Names of modern sites suggest a strong connection to Mount Sodom which is situated at the southwestern shore of the Dead Sea – the modern Hebrew version of the name is Har Sdom (Jabal Usdum in Arabic).