Michael Baizerman Author

Coordinators from Academia.com, a site that I use extensively in my quests, offered me to launch my website under their auspices. It is called  https://independent.academia.edu/BaizermanMichael I decided to upload most of my articles published on other sites. I started with the extracts from my first book, "Dawn and Sunset: A Tale of the Oldest Cities in the Near East". Up to now, I have transmitted four chapters: The Divine Round Dance: The Sumerian Astronomical Calendar.  This is a chapter from Unit IV, Beyond the Threshold of Rain Agriculture; it  explains the importance of the introduction of the calendar in the complex society, who was in charge to keep the records, and what impact on state affairs it produced.  https://www.academia.edu/39608575/The_Divine_Round_Dance_The_Sumerian_Astronomical_Calendar   The Birth of Proto-writing. This is a chapter from Unit III, The Marvels of the Sumerian Script; it looks  into the origins of cuneiform, ...

Defeated Canaanite warriors from the painted limestone relief at Thebes Courtesy:  https://www.archaeology.org/issues/262-1707/features/5627-jaffa-egypt-canaan-colony   After completing my second book, "The Enchanting Encounter with the East", I returned for a while to the old plan and started to browse evidence concerning Early Israel in hope to find material for a short article.  In the course of my recent quest, I haven't put my finger on a particular plot but I realized that the origins of Israel are hidden much deeper than their first emergence on Merneptah Stela. I believe that the People of the Book made up an offshoot of the robust tree of the West Semites and their culture sprang up from the common Canaanite background. I was born in Moscow but my heart has driven me to the Land of Canaan. That happened years after I had repatriated to Israel, raised a family, and embarked on an ungrateful career of a high-school teacher.  My fascinat...

Image: The Map of Canaan According to the Bible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaan#/media/File:Map_Land_of_Israel.jpg After finish my second book, The Enchanting Encounter with the East, I needed to take a break, approximately from mid-May to the end of June. That was the finish of the school year, so I had plenty of time on my hands. My idea was to pick up a momentous episode from the history of early Israel. This is the topic of my fourth book.  I found so much data that it would take months, if not years, to process it. However, I became aware of what this future volume would be about.  I support the idea that early Israel was part and parcel of Canaan, a narrow land bridge stretched between Western Asia and Egypt. Surrounded by stony deserts, it belonged to the occidental leg of the Fertile Crescent. Splashed by the great wine-dark sea, this land occupied a chunk of the eastern Mediterranean.  This spatial corridor, craved by quite a few grea...