bearing 110.bea.0003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Gifts could be also very large antiquities: �A large stone [from Wadi Mukhateb in Sinai] bearing Nabatean inscriptions lies in the garden of my home at Zahala... It was brought to me some time after I left the Ministry of Defense [in 1974] by a young man who worked on road construction in Sinai... I thanked him warmly, and agreed to his request not to mention his name so as not to get him into trouble with his employer. He said that the contractor �doesn�t like us to meddle with such things. If we come across antiquities we are to bury or hide or destroy them, for otherwise government officials come out and stop all work� (Dayan 1978:88-89, with photo).� In the Hebrew version of this book the man says, �if we come across antiquities we are to destroy them immediately� (Dayan 1978:80).� Dayan (1978:89) ended this story with a moral conclusion: �both they [the inscriptions] and the stone are an integral part of Sinai�.� He somehow forgot that this integral part of Sinai lies now in his Zahala garden in Tel Aviv.� This is an example of his double standards: instead of notifying the IDAM, so that a salvage excavation can be arranged (perhaps there were more antiquities in the vicinity?), Dayan received �a gift�, torn away from its integral place, and as a consequence lacking any archaeological context.