Archaeology
News and features about archaeological finds linking stories from the Torah and Prophets, or other historical events to the State of Israel
The colorful 1,600-year-old Be’er Shema mosaic includes 55 medallions decorated with scenes of hunting, animals and everyday life.
The Mamilla Pool the capital served between the fourth and seventh centuries.
Israeli archaeologists say it is the second such find at the same site within the last year.
The exhibits reflect the museum’s vision: “Connecting our ancient history and traditions with local contemporary art,” says director Suzanne Landau.
The statuettes, discovered in Tel Malhata in 2017, indicate the presence of a Christian community in southern Israel 1,500 years ago.
“When you dig here you touch the Bible with your own hands,” said Yossi Dagan, chairman of the Samaria Regional Council.
“It’s too soon to know whether he just had a brief moment or the beginning of a longer moment,” the curator and scholar Ori Soltes told JNS.
“We aim to expand people’s concept of what it means to be Jewish in America,” says Kenneth Hoffman, the museum’s executive director.
“There is no more appropriate time to reveal this find to the public than in these very days of celebrating our identity as a nation,” said IAA Director Eli Escusido.
Tel Shiqmona, on the Haifa coast, was one of the important centers for the manufacture of the rare and prestigious purple pigment.
“The mural must live because it was vandalized, and so it will live, and everything related to memory and what I have personally experienced must live,” said 93-year-old Holocaust Survivor, the subject of the piece.
Ziv Nitzan was walking on Tel Azekah near Beit Shemesh when she picked up a stone that turned out to be an ancient scarab seal from the Middle Bronze Age.
