The answers to many age-old questions may be found in this portrait of the Dead Sea. Like those colorful explorers and travelers of the nineteenth century, we find ourselves explorers too of the history and culture of the Dead Sea – and of the place itself. As Noel Perrin points out in his foreword, the book does four things at once: it is a natural history from the Sea's beginnings 12,000 years ago to the present; it is a human history of the part that the Sea has played in Western civilization; it is a travel narrative; and it is a political history of the Sea and its shores, from the time of Herod and Cleopatra to present divided ownership between Israel and Jordan.