VAN BEEK, Gus; Marcia Bakry; George Robert Lewis.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Archive of drawings from archaeological fieldwork in Yemen and Ethiopia. A substantial archive of exceptional, apparently unpublished archaeological drawings illustrating artefacts excavated from sites investigated in the early 1960s along the ancient incense trade route in Yemen and Ethiopia. The drawings were executed by two scientific illustrators from the Smithsonian Office of Anthropology for the Smithsonian archaeologist Gus Van Beek.Trained under Wendell Phillips, in 1962-65 Van Beek carried out fieldwork in Wadi Hadhramaut and East Aden Protectorate, South Yemen. The expedition focused on mainly Neolithic flint tool fragments from the four sites Marib, Jabal ath-Thawban, Taiz, and Zufar (Zafar or Dhafar). In 1965, Van Beek also worked in Axum, Ethiopia, focused on the supposed site of the temple of the Queen of Sheba. Van Beek was an active participant in archaeological debates on the Queen of Sheba, the key disagreement within the scholarly community being whether ancient Sheba was in present-day Ethiopia or Yemen. In 1974, Van Beek co-wrote a book on the subject. One note is headed says "Drawings for Glen Cole's part of Arch Survey of Yemen Paper", referring to Cole and Albert Jamme's expedition to Hadramauth in 1961-62, where Van Beek was also present. However, these drawings are not included. The other note lists instructions for the reproduction of the plates in the negatives, which in turn reproduce book plates from a German expedition to Axum in the early 1900s

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.