Please Note: This program was rescheduled from March 21.

Like the swashbuckling hero in Raiders of the Lost Ark, George Washington University Professor Eric H. Cline has a taste for adventure. On campus, he’s a sought-after professor of classics and anthropology. But off campus, he travels the world unearthing clues to ancient times. An acclaimed archaeologist, Dr. Cline has led excavations across the Middle East for more than thirty years. He’s dug up daggers and bowls, discovered fragments of frescoes, and searched for evidence of biblical heroes and events. Was Abraham a real person? Did the Exodus actually happen? Dr. Cline, author of Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, will explore these mysteries and more with National Geographic Magazine’s archaeology editor, Kristin Romey, at the Center for Jewish History, March 21st at 6:30 pm. From 19th-century theologians who first headed to the Holy Land "with a bible in one hand and a trowel in another,” to the secrets 21st-century technology reveals, they’ll dig into this fascinating field and investigate the biblical mysteries archaeologists can – and can’t – solve. A copy of Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction is included with admission.

Mysteries of the Bible: Biblical Archaeology is part of Very Short Introductions: Short Talks on Big Subjects, a series produced in partnership with Oxford University Press and featuring authors of Oxford’s Very Short Introduction books.

About the Speakers

Dr. Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology, former Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and current Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. He has degrees in Classical Archaeology, Near Eastern Archaeology, and Ancient History from Dartmouth (B.A., 1982), Yale (M.A., 1984), the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D., 1991), and an honorary doctoral degree from Muhlenberg College in 2015. A Fulbright Scholar, National Geographic Explorer, and NEH Public Scholar, Dr. Cline is an active field archaeologist. He has more than 30 seasons of excavation and survey experience in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus, Greece, Crete, and the United States. He is a former co-director at Megiddo (biblical Armageddon), where he dug from 1994 through 2014, and has co-directed the excavations of a 4,000-year-old Canaanite palace at Tel Kabri in Israel since 2005. Author of numerous books on archaeology, his international best-seller, 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, was considered for a 2015 Pulitzer Prize.

Kristin Romey is the archaeology editor and writer for National Geographic. Her work has focused extensively on the archaeology of the Near East, most recently with Geographic's December 2018 cover article on the archaeology of Jewish Galilee and Jesus of Nazareth. The former executive editor of Archaeology Magazine and a fellow of the Explorers Club, Romey holds an A.B. in ancient Greek from Vassar College and an M.A. in nautical archaeology from Texas A&M University.