Nora Benjamin Kubie (January 4, 1899 - September 8, 1988) was an American writer, artist and amateur archaeologist.
Born Eleanor Gottheil, she was the daughter of Muriel H. and Paul Gotteil, an executive with the Cunard Line in New York. She graduated from the Calhoun School in New York, delivering the valedictory speech in 1916. [1] Gottheil appears on the Vassar College alumnae list. [2] and was reported by the New York Times as having graduating in 1920 from Barnard College. [3]
Gottheil was married to John J. Benjamin from 1922 until his death in 1936 and she had one son by him. [4] From 1938 to 1949 she was married to the psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie. [4]
She began her literary career writing nautical stories and juvenile novels, later focusing on Jewish historical fiction and archaeology. [5] She wrote, she said, about things, places, events, and phenomena she knew about personally. [6] Her books about Israel for example, were written after she moved there in the early 1950s, where she lived in Ein Hod, a writers' colony. She traveled throughout the Middle East as an amateur archaeologist and produced an account of the early English explorer, Sir Austen Henry Layard. [7]
As an artist, she illustrated many of her juvenile books. She lived in Westport, Connecticut in her later years and was a member of the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. She died of acute leukemia at the age of 89. [3]
The novelist Lincoln Child is a grandson. In his fantasy novel Thunderhead (1998), he modeled the character of Nora Kelly on Nora Kubie. [8]
Solomon, also called Jedidiah, was a monarch of ancient Israel and the son and successor of David, according to the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament. He is described as having been the penultimate ruler of an amalgamated Israel and Judah. The hypothesized dates of Solomon's reign are 970–931 BCE. After his death, his son and successor Rehoboam would adopt harsh policy towards the northern tribes, eventually leading to the splitting of the Israelites between the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south. Following the split, his patrilineal descendants ruled over Judah alone.
Sir Austen Henry Layard was an English Assyriologist, traveller, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, politician and diplomat. He was born to a mostly English family in Paris and largely raised in Italy. He is best known as the excavator of Nimrud and of Nineveh, where he uncovered a large proportion of the Assyrian palace reliefs known, and in 1851 the library of Ashurbanipal. Most of his finds are now in the British Museum. He made a large amount of money from his best-selling accounts of his excavations.
Hormuzd Rassam, was an Assyriologist and author.
Nora Ephron was an American journalist, writer, and filmmaker. She is best known for her romantic comedy films and was nominated three times for the Writers Guild of America Award and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Silkwood (1983), When Harry Met Sally... (1989), and Sleepless in Seattle (1993). She won the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay for When Harry Met Sally..., which the Writers Guild of America ranked as the 40th greatest screenplay of all time.
The Queen of Sheba is a figure first mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. In the original story, she brings a caravan of valuable gifts for the Israelite King Solomon. This account has undergone extensive Jewish, Islamic, Yemenite and Ethiopian elaborations, and it has become the subject of one of the most widespread and fertile cycles of legends in the Middle East.
The archaeology of Israel is the study of the archaeology of the present-day Israel, stretching from prehistory through three millennia of documented history. The ancient Land of Israel was a geographical bridge between the political and cultural centers of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Despite the importance of the country to three major religions, serious archaeological research only began in the 15th century. Although he never travelled to the Levant, or even left the Netherlands, the first major work on the antiquities of Israel is considered to be Adriaan Reland's Antiquitates Sacrae veterum Hebraeorum, published in 1708. Edward Robinson, an American theologian who visited the country in 1838, published its first topographical studies. Lady Hester Stanhope performed the first modern excavation at Ashkelon in 1815. A Frenchman, Louis Felicien de Saucy, embarked on early "modern" excavations in 1850. Today, in Israel, there are some 30,000 sites of antiquity, the vast majority of which have never been excavated.
The Cabinet of Curiosities is a thriller novel by American writers Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, released on June 3, 2002 by Grand Central Publishing. This is the third installment in the Special Agent Pendergast series.
The United Monarchy is a political entity described in the deuteronomistic history of the Hebrew Bible as, under the reigns of Saul, David, and Solomon, encompassing the territories of both the later Kingdom of Judah and Samarian Kingdom of Israel. Whether the United Monarchy actually existed is a matter of ongoing academic debate, and scholars remain divided between those who support the historicity of the biblical narrative, those who doubt or dismiss it, and those who support the kingdom's theoretical existence while maintaining that the biblical narrative is exaggerated. Proponents of the kingdom's existence traditionally date it to between c. 1047 BCE and c. 930 BCE.
Eilat Mazar was an Israeli archaeologist. She specialized in Jerusalem and Phoenician archaeology. She was also a key person in Biblical archaeology noted for her discovery of the Large Stone Structure, which she surmised to be the palace of King David.
Hershel Shanks was an American lawyer and amateur biblical archaeologist. He was the founder and long-time editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review. For more than forty years, Shanks communicated the world of biblical archaeology to general readers through magazines, books, and conferences. Shanks was "probably the world's most influential amateur Biblical archaeologist," according to The New York Times book critic Richard Bernstein.
Baruch ben Neriah was the scribe, disciple, secretary, and devoted friend of the Biblical prophet Jeremiah. He is traditionally credited with authoring the Book of Baruch.
Nadia Abu El-Haj is an American academic with a PhD in anthropology from Duke University. She is a professor of anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society is a 2001 book by Nadia Abu El Haj based on her doctoral thesis for Duke University. The book has been praised by some scholars and criticised by others.
Nina Frances Layard was an English poet, prehistorian, archaeologist and antiquarian who conducted important excavations, and by winning the respect of contemporary academics helped to establish a role for women in her field of expertise.
Thunderhead is a thriller novel by American writers Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. The book was published on July 1, 1999 by Grand Central Publishing.
Nora Gold is a Canadian author and the founder and editor of Jewish Fiction .net. Previously, she was an associate professor of social work.
Anita Florence Hemmings was known as the first African American woman to graduate from Vassar College. As she was of both African and European ancestry, she passed as white for socioeconomic benefits. After graduation, Hemmings became a librarian at the Boston Public Library.
Sally Binford was an archaeologist and feminist. A prehistorian, she contributed alongside her husband to the formation of processual archaeology.
Elizabeth Denny Pierce Blegen was an American archaeologist, educator and writer. She excavated at sites in Greece and Cyprus, contributed reports on archaeological discoveries in Greece to the American Journal of Archaeology from 1925 to 1952, and was involved in several organisations promoting women's professional advancement in Greece and the United States.
Ida Carleton Hill was an American archaeologist, classical scholar and historian. Hill had a strong interest in the relationship between history, geography, and archaeology, which was reflected in her research and publications over her fifty-year career.