It’s hard to know what book to read next when you have a house filled with books you have never read, and sometimes your choices surprise even you.

A few days ago, I finished reading a Penguin called “The Archeology of Palestine”, written in the late 1940s by William Albright. Albright was both a biblical scholar and an archeologist, teaching for years at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and leading digs in Palestine/Israel. He was deeply involved in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls (found in 1947), and in the relationship between history as told in the Bible (Hebrew Bible and New Testament) and as found on the ground. This included, to some extent, the validation of some Biblical passages, and the relationship between ancient Judaism and pre-existing Canaanite religions.

The book was very well written and, even though somewhat dated, was well worth reading. He covered a lot of ground in a few hundred pages. For example – what you needed in order to mount an archeological expedition when they were first organized in the 19th century, everything from clothes, to tools, to personnel, to permissions, to money, and where you went to obtain them. Then there were the political issues – how much easier it was for European and American archeologists to undertake digs during the period prior to the times that countries began to become independent and you could no longer rely on easy approvals from colonial powers and had to deal with indigenous governments, and their demands. He did not state this in a way to favor the good old days…..just stating the facts.

Then he dealt with the problems stemming from expeditions before the appropriate tools were available for careful excavation and preservation of materials. And the problems with dating and identifying sites. It was interesting to me how many sites in the 19th and early 20th centuries were misidentified and incorrectly dated, and how this didn’t seem to Albright to detract from the skill of the archeologists involved, or the value of their work. It was all just part of a long learning curve, and to me seem like the work of many scientists – just because a conclusion is reversed after subsequent experiments, don’t degrade the original conclusion. Had it not been made, the reversal may never have been made.

As to dating, until carbon dating was developed in the 1920s, there was no way to really date many items found. And when you are looking at, say, pottery, sometimes the only way to determine appropriate dates is to look for similar pottery elsewhere where a date is more certain. For example, he said that archeology in Egypt was more advanced than in Palestine, and because there was so much (friendly and unfriendly) contact between the two, that you often found pottery in Palestine that you could date, because you knew that similar pottery had been found and dated in Egypt. He also talked about languages, and how they could be used as dating tools.

When I finished reading “The Archeology of Palestine”, I had to decide on my next book. I’m not finished reading it yet – in fact I am only about a quarter through the book, but there was enough of interest to mention it now.

The book is called “Both/And”, and it is the memoir of Huma Abedin, who has always interested me. Why? I knew she worked closely with Hillary Clinton, I knew (I thought I knew) that she was from Saudi Arabia, and I certainly knew she was married to the infamous Congressman Anthony Wiener, whose pictures of his private parts created quite a scandal. I have seen her subsequent to that on MSNBC (or it is CNN, or both?) and she has always impressed me. Such a strange combination of things. Who is she anyway?

Let me sketch what I have learned so far. Her parents were from India and were Muslim; both came from prominent families. They were both very well educated, thanks to her grandparents, who were also well educated for their time, especially her grandmothers, who were very progressive for Muslim women in India. Reaching back on their family tree, her ancestors on both sides came to India from the Middle East, from the Arabian peninsula and from Iraq. This was a surprise to me, because I had never connected Arabian Muslims so closely with Indian Muslims before, and I hadn’t thought much about Indian Muslims at all.

After the partition of India in 1948, educated Muslim families in India had a choice to make. Do they stay in India, their homeland, or do they move to Pakistan, a new Muslim country? Both her father’s and her mother’s parents decided to stay in India, perhaps the better choice, but a difficult one to make and to live with.

Coincidentally, both her mother and her father won Fulbright scholarships to the University of Pennsylvania and that is where they met. After a few years, they married and – when her father got an academic position at Western Michigan University – they moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan. It was in Kalamazoo that Huma was born. I did not know that – I thought she was from Saudi Arabia.

Why did I think that? I thought that because, when Huma was two years old, her father got a one year position in Jedda, and the family moved there for a short stay, which lengthened into a much, much longer stay. Huma grew up and went to school in Jedda, and didn’t leave until after high school graduation. Reading about her time in Saudi Arabia was fascinating. Her father and, eventually, her mother both had teaching jobs. Her father’s field as a sociologist was studying the treatment of minority populations in countries around the world, and he founded an institute headquartered in Jedda and London. Her father was also ill, having suffered from chronic kidney disease, which seemed to increase his determination to make the most of every minute.

Life in Saudi Arabia for a Muslim family clearly had its routines and limitations but, like everything else, they became the norm. But the Abedin family didn’t spend 12 months a year in Saudi Arabia; they traveled the world. Every year, apparently, her father would take the family to some exotic place for most of the summer – it might be England, it might be Japan, it might be somewhere in Asia. In addition, every year, they returned to the United States for a period of time, visiting relatives. (By the way, among non-Saudis in Jedda, this was not unusual – she tells of all of her friends who lived half of their lives in a very traditional and restricted Muslim society, and half playing on beaches in bikinis – they found the mix perfectly normal, apparently.)

Huma’s father died when she was a senior in high school. This was very difficult for the family but her mother insisted that Huma not give up her desire to attend college in the United States (her two older siblings had pursued their education in England), and brought her to this country to visit colleges. They didn’t visit many because Huma immediately decided she wanted to be in Washington and that George Washington University was her place. And so it was to be.

Her college time (a devout Muslim, she didn’t drink, didn’t date, and studied hard) was interesting, as it contrasted to so many of her classmates and, when she was a junior, she was selected for an internship in the White House working for someone in Hillary Clinton’s office.

She started as an assistant to an assistant to an assistant, but – presumably by competence – worked her way up to being the advance person for First Lady Clinton’s various speaking engagement around the world, a remarkable accomplishment for someone young, who had grown up thousands of miles away in a totally different society.

More to come