By Barbara Kreiger
The lifeless Sea is in contrast to the other position in the world. positioned four hundred and forty yards less than sea point, so saline it cannot help existence, surrounded via a desolate, haunting panorama, it isn't only a geologic characteristic yet a resource of puzzle and spiritual religion. In stylish and shiny prose, Barbara Kreiger re-creates and analyzes the myths and legends surrounding the location and examines either its common heritage and its sluggish and tough exploration. however the useless Sea (originally released as residing Waters in 1988) is greater than an in depth and pleasant travelogue. it's also an inquiry into the human and political drama that has swirled round this mysterious position for greater than 12,000 years. In an afterword to the hot variation, Kreiger exhibits how the ocean within the post-Peace Accord period might come to tackle a brand new symbolism: with the perpetual want for water and a thriving mineral as universal bonds, Israel and Jordan, conventional antagonists whose border bisects the ocean, may perhaps locate themselves becoming a member of forces to maintain its fragile surroundings opposed to the threats of expertise and tourism. hence the lifeless Sea, whose destiny is "inextricably sure up with the social, political, and technological lives of the 2 countries who proportion it, " might develop into the scene the place separate nationwide pursuits are joined instead of divided.
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Extra resources for The Dead Sea: Myth, History, and Politics
Example text
One of these tourists was Mark Twain, whose account of his trip is contained in The Innocents Abroad. He was not very appreciative of eastern life or people and evinced, at best, disappointment in what he encountered in the Holy Land. But for insight into the collective frame of mind of Page 11 one of these tourist-pilgrim groups, his narrative is singular. He described the reluctance with which his group, having heard rumors of tribal war in the Dead Sea valley, undertook the journey. Tempted to remain in Jerusalem, they found, to their chagrin, that a little caravan had already been assembled and was waiting for them.
Add that there are sulphur springs in places along the shore, springs sending up enough fumes so that one of the old Arab names for the Dead Sea was the Stinking Lake, and you see how the pilgrim's story might get started. To read Barbara Kreiger's The Dead Sea is to turn this vague picture into sharp reality. The motionless sea of the illuminated manuscript suddenly develops waves, and a two-lane paved road along the shore, and factories, and health resorts. But it does not lose its strangeness or its beauty.
Yet another two centuries did witness a change; travellers who claimed to have seen the lake were more likely to have done so, and among those who did see it, there was a growing inclination to report soberly. The basic pedagogical approach lingered, however, nowhere more unabashedly manifested than in Thomas Fuller's 1650 A Pisgahsight of Palestine. " Explorers were generally familiar with the accounts of travellers who preceded them, and two early works which they admired were Henry Maundrell's 1697 A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem and Richard Pococke's lengthy 1740 account, A Description of the East, and Some Other Countries.