Geoffrey Bibby

Thomas Geoffrey Bibby (14 October 1917 – 6 February 2001) was an English-born archaeologist. Quotes The Testimony of the Spade (1956) New York: Alfred A. Knopf Every archaeologist knows in his heart why he digs. He digs, in pity and humility, that the dead may live again, that what is past may not be forever lost, that something may be salvaged from the wreck of ages. Bk. 4, Ch. 28 (p. 411) Four Thousand Years Ago (1961) London: Collins We are here dealing with a thousand years. And a thousand years is, after all, but fourteen lifetimes measured by the conventional scale of threescore years and ten. Introduction (n.p.) The delta had always been more civilized than the valley to its south. It was in closer contact with the other old civilizations and with the growing Mediterranean trade; and it was more fertile and more populous. That agriculture itself, and with it many other revolutionary technical and economic innovations, had reached the southlands from the delta was forgotten long ago, but the feeling of belonging to a poorer, less urbane, yet more virile, culture (the same feeling as the Scotsman has towards the Englishman) persisted in the south. Bk. 1, Ch. 1 (p. 6) [T]he Nile runs in a narrow valley, and the farmer of 2000 B.C. can watch the floods with satisfaction, knowing that within two months the river will return of itself to its old bed, and only such water will remain as he himself dams up for his own use. The farmer of the immensely broad flat valley of the Euphrates and the Tigris sees the flood as a catastrophe. If uncontrolled, the waters will cover the land for months and never drain back to the river. For the Euphrates at least runs in a bed carved out of its own silt deposits, which often lies higher than the country around. Both rivers can very well decide to cut a completely new channel after the floods from the one they occupied before, and the change in channel can drown cultivation, or leave it high and dry, with its summer water supply miles away. Bk. 1, Ch. 1 (pp. 9–10) Attributed A puzzle remained. Why had Dilmun used the standard weights of the Indus Valley? The Babylonians and Sumerians used a completely different system... Either the first commercial impulses to have reached Dilmun must have come not from Mesopotamia but from India, or else India was a far more important commercial connection with Dilmun than was Mesopotamia. In Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak, and David Frawley, In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India (Quest Books, 2011) External links Category:1917 births Category:2001 deaths Category:Archaeologists from England Category:University of Cambridge alumni