The Great London:
Greater Middle East

Iraq's government is investigating reports that the ancient archaeological site of Khorsabad in northern Iraq is the latest to be attacked by the Islamic State militant group.

Adel Shirshab, the country's tourism and antiquities minister, told The Associated Press there are concerns the militants will remove artifacts and damage the site, located 15 kilometers (9 miles) northeast of Mosul. Saeed Mamuzini, a Kurdish official from Mosul, told the AP that the militants had already begun demolishing the Khorsabad site on Sunday, citing multiple witnesses.

On Friday, the group razed 3,000-year old Nimrud and on Saturday, they bulldozed 2,000-year old Hatra — both UNESCO world heritage sites. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has called the destruction a "war crime," and a statement by his spokesman on Sunday night said Ban was "outraged by the continuing destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq" by theIslamic State group.

Khorsabad was constructed as a new capital of Assyria by King Sargon II shortly after he came to power in 721 B.C. and abandoned after his death in 705 B.C. It features a 24-meter thick wall with a stone foundation and seven gates.

Since it was a single-era capital, few objects linked to Sargon II himself were found. However, the site is renowned for shedding light on Assyrian art and architecture.

The sculptured stone slabs that once lined the palace walls are now displayed in museums in Baghdad, Paris, London and Chicago.

The Islamic State group currently controls about a third of Iraq and Syria. The Sunni extremist group has been campaigning to purge ancient relics they say promote idolatry that violates their fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law. A video released last week shows them smashing artifacts in the Mosul museum and in January, the group burned hundreds of books from the Mosul library and Mosul University, including many rare manuscripts.

At a press conference earlier Sunday, Shirshab said they have called for an extraordinary session of the U.N. Security Council to address the crisis in Iraq.

"The world should bear the responsibility and put an end to the atrocities of the militants, otherwise I think the terrorist groups will continue with their violent acts," he said.

Author: Sameer N. Yacoub | Source: Associated Press [March 09, 2015]

A project for the deciphering of ancient papyri found in Graeco-Roman Egypt has recruited armchair archaeologists from around the world with amazing results.

The Ancient Lives project is a collaboration between the University of Oxford, the Egypt Exploration Society, the Citizen Science Alliance and others asking for anyone who can identify Greek letters to work on-line and decipher the writing on digital scans of papyri from Oxyrhynchus in Upper Egypt. Then, scholars, with the use of special online tools, carry out the translation. The latest finds were presented yesterday by Dirk Obbink, associate professor in Papyrology and Greek Literature from the University of Oxford.

The papyri, dating mainly from the 1st Century BC to the 7th Century AD, when Egypt was occupied by the Greeks and Romans, were discovered by Victorian archaeologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt in January 1897, at what turned out to be a rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus, an ancient city about 160m south-west of Cairo. The excavations yielded 700 boxes of documents which were shipped to Oxford for study, owned by the Egypt Exploration Society in London.

Transcribing them, however, was really time-consuming, allowing experts to transcribe over 5,000 out of the 500,000 documents between 1898 and 2012. That’s when the Ancient Lives project was piloted, asking citizen scientists from all over the world to help scientists decipher the writing on the papyri online. The project went fully live in 2014 and with the use of algorithms to help experts assess the accuracy of the work by volunteers, it has allowed a variety of individuals across the globe to participate.

The Oxyrhynchus fragments have revealed personal documents of various use, from tax assessments, grocery lists and mariage certificates, ancient remedies, to court records and pieces of literature by Sappho Euripides and Homer. Fragments of a lost tragedy by Sophocles, Andromeda, have also been found.

The results were announced by Dirk Obbink at a talk in London, held at the Royal Geographical Society and organised by the World Monuments Fund Britain.

For more on this story see:

• The Art Newspaper, http://theartnewspaper.com/news/news/armchair-archaeologists-reveal-details-of-life-in-ancient-egypt/ (29/02/2016) 

• The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/ancient-egypt-citizen-scientists-reveal-tales-of-tragedy-unearthed-from-centuries-old-rubbish-dump-a6905541.html (01/03/2016)

The Antiquities Ministry announced Sunday it received an ancient Egyptian wall relief that was repatriated in October by Egypt’s embassy in London.

The painted limestone wall relief was delivered to the Egyptian embassy in London after its owner, who bought it from a British antiquities collector, learnt it had been  stolen and smuggled out of Egypt, Antiquities Minister Mamdouh al Damaty said in a statement Sunday.

The artifact dates back to the reign of the 19th Dynasty Pharaoh Seti I (1290 B.C. – 1279 B.C.) Damaty said, adding that it will be displayed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

It measure approximately 43cm (17.2 inches) by 67 cm with carvings representing Pharaoh Seti I making offerings before Anubis, the mummification God and Hathor, ancient Egyptian motherhood Goddess, he added.

Originally located in an ancient Egyptian temple in Upper Egypt’s governorate of Asyut, the limestone relief was smuggled out of Egypt in 1970, the foreign ministry said in a statement last week.

Egypt’s political turmoil has led to a security lapse at archaeological sites and storerooms and museums nationwide, leaving Egypt’s treasures vulnerable to looting. The Egyptian museum and Malawi museum are among the sites that have been affected.

During the past four years, Egypt has recovered over 1,600 artifacts and is currently working on other cases in many European countries, Ministry of Antiquities Museums Sector head Ahmed Sharaf previously told The Cairo Post.

“It is impossible to provide an accurate number of the artifacts that have been stolen since the January 25 Revolution,” he said.

Author: Rany Mostafa | Source: The Cairo Post [December 13, 2015]

Islamic State fighters have looted and bulldozed the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, the Iraqi government said, in their latest assault on some of the world's greatest archaeological and cultural treasures.

A tribal source from the nearby city of Mosul told Reuters the radical Sunni Islamists, who dismiss Iraq's pre-Islamic heritage as idolatrous, had pillaged the 3,000-year-old site on the banks of the Tigris River.

The assault against Nimrud came just a week after the release of a video showing Islamic State forces smashing museum statues and carvings in Mosul, the city they seized along with much of northern Iraq last June.

"Daesh terrorist gangs continue to defy the will of the world and the feelings of humanity," Iraq's tourism and antiquities ministry said, referring to Islamic State by its Arabic acronym.

"In a new crime in their series of reckless offences they assaulted the ancient city of Nimrud and bulldozed it with heavy machinery, appropriating the archaeological attractions dating back 13 centuries BC," it said.

Nimrud, about 20 miles (30 km) south of Mosul, was built around 1250 BC. Four centuries later it became capital of the neo-Assyrian empire - at the time the most powerful state on Earth, extending to modern-day Egypt, Turkey and Iran.

Many of its most famous surviving monuments were removed years ago by archaeologists, including colossal Winged Bulls which are now in London's British Museum and hundreds of precious stones and pieces of gold which were moved to Baghdad.

But ruins of the ancient city remain at the northern Iraqi site, which has been excavated by a series of experts since the 19th century. British archaeologist Max Mallowan and his wife, crime writer Agatha Christie, worked at Nimrud in the 1950s.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he was deeply disturbed by the destruction at Nimrud.

"This crude attempt to erase the heritage of an ancient civilization will ultimately fail. No terrorist can rewrite history," he said in a statement.

A local tribal source confirmed the attack had taken place.

"Islamic State members came to the Nimrud archaeological city and looted the valuables in it and then they proceeded to level the site to the ground," the source told Reuters.

"There used to be statues and walls as well as a castle that Islamic State has destroyed completely."

Archaeologists have compared the assault on Iraq's cultural history to the Taliban's destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas in 2001. But the damage wreaked by Islamic State, not just on ancient monuments but also on rival Muslim places of worship, has been swift, relentless and more wide-ranging.

Last week's video showed them toppling statues and carvings from plinths in the Mosul museum and smashing them with sledgehammers and drills. It also showed damage to a huge statue of a bull at the Nergal Gate into the city of Nineveh.

Archaeologists said it was hard to quantify the damage, because some items appeared to be replicas, but many priceless articles had been destroyed including artifacts from Hatra, a stunning pillared city in northern Iraq dating back 2,000 years.

Islamic State, which rules a self-declared caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria, promotes a fiercely purist interpretation of Sunni Islam which seeks its inspiration from early Islamic history. It rejects religious shrines of any sort and condemns Iraq's majority Shi'ite Muslims as heretics.

In July it destroyed the tomb of the prophet Jonah in Mosul. It has also attacked Shi'ite places of worship and last year gave Mosul's Christians an ultimatum to convert to Islam, pay a religious levy or face death by the sword. It has also targeted the Yazidi minority in the Sinjar mountains west of Mosul.

Author: Dominic Evans and Saif Hameed | Source: Reuters [March 06, 2015]

A 2,200 year-old “an upright stone slab bearing a commemorative inscription” was unearthed at the Mediterranean coast, Antiquities Minister Mamdouh el-Damaty announced Thursday.

The stele, which was discovered at Taposiris Magna archaeological site on Lake Mariout, southwest of the Mediterranean city of Alexandria,  “dates to the reign of Ptolemy V Epiphanes (204B.C-180B.C) of the Ptolemaic Dynasty (332 B.C.-30 B.C) that has ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.” said Damaty in a statement on the ministry’s Facebook page.

The stele, measuring 1.05 X 0.65X0.18 meters, was discovered by an archaeology mission of the Catholic University of Santo Domingo in collaboration with Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), he added.

“It consists of two registers carved in two different scripts; the upper one features over 20 lines of hieroglyphic inscriptions bearing the cartouches [oval shapes bearing royal names only] of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes, his sister Princess Cleopatra I, his mother Queen Arsinoe III and his father King Ptolemy IV Philopator,” said Damaty adding that archaeologists are currently working on transliterating the text.

The bottom register features a 5-line demotic script that seems to be a translation of the hieroglyphic inscriptions, said Damaty.

Demotic language was used by ordinary people while hieroglyphic was used by royals, high officials, priests and the elite of the ancient Egyptian society.

The famous Rosetta stone, currently displayed in the British Museum in London, dates back to the reign of the same Greek king but was carved in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek scripts, according to Damaty.

Chief of the Dominican Egyptian archaeology mission, Dr. Kathleen Martinez said that the mission, has been working at Taposiris Magna for six years, has made a lot of significant discoveries related to the history of Alexandria. “Some of the major discoveries are tombs of Nobles, a number of statues of goddess Isis in addition to many bronze coins belonging to Queen Cleopatra VII, the famous Cleopatra of Anthony,” said Martinez.

Author: Rany Mostafa | Source: The Cairo Post [February 12, 2015]

An application has been lodged with the Culture and Tourism Ministry to conduct a surface survey to investigate the ancient city of Satala, which served as a military headquarters in the Roman Empire in the northern Turkish province of Gümüşhane’s Kelkit district.

According to historical records, the city, which is 28 kilometers from the city center, was established by the 15th Apollo Legion, a legion of the Imperial Roman army. It served as a headquarters in the ancient era and also served as an intersection of military roads passing through Anatolia and Cappadocia.

The city was controlled at various times by the Assyrian, Graeco-Macedonian, Roman and Byzantine civilizations.

A 47-arched aqueduct was built to bring water to the ancient city of Satala but only one arch survives today.

The city is believed to cover a very large area. Candles, rings, arms, pots, metal pieces and coins have all been discovered at the site and are now on display at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, while a bronze bust of Aphrodite is at London’s British Museum.

Kelkit Mayor Ünal Yılmaz said the ancient city of Satala, which is under protection as an archaeological site, had been examined by university academics.

As a result of the examination, a report was prepared by the Gümüşhane Governor’s Office, Kelkit Municipality and academics. In line with the report, an application was made to the Culture and Tourism Ministry to conduct a surface survey.

Yılmaz said no serious work had been carried out in the historical city.

“No work has been implemented here although there were discussions from time to time. Evaluations were also made but nothing was done in practice. Because it is an archaeological site, people were not able to build structures there. I hope the applications will receive a positive response and that works will be initiated,” Yılmaz said.

“Our academics are very hopeful on the issue. We think this area will add a lot to tourism for our province and district after the pre-excavation work is completed,” Yılmaz said.

Source: Hurriyet Daily News [March 15, 2016]

The Tarkhan Dress, a V-neck linen shirt currently on display in the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, has been confirmed as the world’s oldest woven garment with radiocarbon testing dating the garment to the late fourth-millennium BC.

Radiocarbon testing conducted in 2015 by the University of Oxford’s radiocarbon unit, and published this week on Antiquity’s Project Gallery, has established that the dress was made between 3482-3102 BC with 95% accuracy.

Although the dress was thought to be Egypt’s oldest garment, and the oldest surviving woven garment in the world, the precise age of the dress was uncertain as previous carbon dating proved too broad to be historically meaningful. The new results both confirm the dress’s antiquity and also suggest that it may be older than previously thought, pre-dating the First Dynasty.

The team from the University of Oxford, led by Dr Michael Dee, measured a 2.24mg sample of the dress to determine how much radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon, remained in the linen. From this they were able to provide an indicative date for when the linen was woven. Linen, from which the Tarkhan Dress is made, is especially suitable for radiocarbon dating as it is composed of flax fibres that grow over a relatively short time.

Dr Alice Stevenson, Curator at the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, said: “The survival of highly perishable textiles in the archaeological record is exceptional, the survival of complete, or almost complete, articles of clothing like the Tarkhan Dress is even more remarkable. We’ve always suspected that the dress dated from the First Dynasty but haven’t been able to confirm this as the sample previously needed for testing would have caused too much damage to the dress.

Although the result is a little less precise than is now routinely possible through radiocarbon dating, as the sample was so small, it’s clear that the linen for the dress was made at the cusp of the First Dynasty or even earlier.”

Originally excavated by Egyptologist Flinders Petrie in 1913 from a First Dynasty tomb at Tarkhan, an Egyptian cemetery located 50km south of Cairo, the dress lay undiscovered with various other textiles until 1977 when the bundle was sent to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London for conservation work.

The dress itself is made from three pieces of sturdy hand-woven linen with a natural pale grey stripe with knife-pleated sleeves and bodice. The hem is missing so it’s not possible to know the precise length of the dress, but the dimensions indicate that it fitted a young teenager or a slim woman. Although the exact context of its use remain unclear, there are visible signs of wear indicating that it was worn in life.

The Tarkhan Dress is on display at the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology.

Source: University College London [February 20, 2016]

As armed groups in Syria and Iraq destroy priceless archaeological sites, European authorities and dealers are on high alert for smaller, looted artefacts put on sale to help finance the jihadists' war.

Stolen-art expert Chris Marinello, director of Art Recovery International, said he has been shown photographs of items being offered from Syria that were "clearly looted right out of the ground".

"You could still see dirt on some of these objects," he told AFP.

They included cylinder seals, Roman bottles and vases, although Marinello said it was unclear whether the items were still in Syria, were in transit or had arrived in the key markets of Europe and the United States.

Concerns about looting during the Syrian war have increased following the advance of the Islamic State group through parts of Syria and Iraq, and recent propaganda videos showing their destruction of ancient sites such as Nimrud.

The UN Security Council in February demanded UN states act to stop the trade in cultural property from those two countries, amid warnings that they represented a significant source of funding for the militant group.

Experts say it is impossible to put a value on antiquities looted from Syria, which has been home to many civilisations through the millennia, from the Canaanites to the Ottomans.

The London-based International Association of Dealers in Ancient Art (IADAA) estimates the entire legitimate antiquities market in 2013 was worth between 150 and 200 million euros ($160-215 million).

Marinello said reputable dealers are "being very careful not to touch anything that could remotely be part of this recent wave of looting".

But Hermann Parzinger, an archaeologist and president of the Germany-based Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, said there was an "enormous market" from private buyers.

He warned that the cultural costs were huge, telling AFP: "The context which is so important to reconstruct the history of these civilisations is completely destroyed."    

Italy has proposed that world heritage body UNESCO create a military taskforce to protect cultural sites in war zones, but many experts believe little can be done to stop the current destruction.

Instead, they are forced to wait until the conflict ends and watch in horror as priceless historic sites are destroyed and the spoils gradually emerge onto the market.

Vernon Rapley, a former head of the art and antiquities squad at London's Metropolitan Police, expects many Syrian items to be held back to avoid flooding the market, as occurred after the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The looted artefacts were likely to be "hauled up in warehouses either in the country or near the country, and only linked to the art trade in small pieces and at a later stage", he told AFP.

Stephane Thefo, who leads an Interpol unit dedicated to fighting the illegal trafficking of cultural goods, agreed that many items may disappear for years -- but insisted that tackling the trade was the best way to combat looting.

The French policeman would like to see tougher national laws on trafficking of cultural goods, something Germany is currently considering.

"We have to act by seeking to narrow markets for the illicit trade, hoping that by curbing the demand, the supply would eventually decrease," Thefo said.

Identifying looted objects is no easy task, however, not least because cultural crime is rarely a police priority.

The law puts the onus on the authorities to prove an item is illegal and a long delay in an artefact being sold, or multiple owners, make it hard to establish provenance.

At a conference at the V&A museum in London this week on the destruction of cultural property in conflict areas in Iraq and Syria, Mali, Libya and Yemen, archaeologists stressed the need for proper inventories of heritage sites.

They noted that objects that have been photographed and digitally catalogued are more likely to be recovered.

Interpol is currently building a database of stolen objects, and James Ede, a London dealer and IADAA board member, urged cultural bodies to share their information with dealers.

"This material will necessarily surface on the open market sooner or later. The challenge therefore is to identify it and where possible to return it when it is safe to do so," he said.

Author: Alice Ritchie | Source: AFP [April 17, 2015]

3D reconstructions of some of Syria's most spectacular archaeological sites go online Tuesday after a big push to digitalise the war-torn country's threatened heritage.

French digital surveyors have been working with Syrian archaeologists to map some of the country's most famous monuments after Islamic State jihadists sparked international outrage by blowing up two temples in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palmyra last year.

The eighth-century Umayyad Mosque in the capital Damascus—regarded by some as the fourth holiest place in Islam—and the Krak des Chevaliers Crusader castle near the ravaged city of Homs are the two most famous buildings to have been scanned in minute detail.

Photogrammetric technology developed by the French start-up Iconem has also been used to record the Roman theatre in the coastal city of Jableh and the Phoenician site in the ancient port of Ugarit, where evidence of the world's oldest alphabet was found.

Its technicians have also been working alongside 15 specialists from the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) to digitalise some of the country's major museum collections.

Hundreds of important heritage sites have been sacked or destroyed during the five-year conflict, with the destruction of the first-century temples of Bel and Baalshamin in the ancient desert city of Palmyra causing a global outcry.

The Islamic State group has made a point of razing ancient shrines and statues it considers as idolatry and is also suspected of involvement in the illegal sale of antiquities.

Work on the "Syrian Heritage" database, the biggest 3D record of the country's monuments and treasures, began in December and includes a large number of Ottoman-era buildings in Damascus as well as its 11th-century citadel, which looms over the city.

The head of DGAM, Maamoun Abdulkarim, said the operation was essential to "avoid an irreplacable loss to humanity" given "the dramatic situation in our country".

"This solution gives our archaeological sites a real hope of renaissance and allows the memory of them to be preserved, no matter what happens," he added in a statement.

The drive, carried out with the help of the French grande ecole ENS and the research institute INRIA, is one of a number trying to catalogue sites in danger of falling into the line of fire.

The Institute for Digital Archaeology, created by Oxford and Harvard universities and Dubai's Museum of the Future, is also compiling a record of many vulnerable sites in Syria and neighbouring Iraq.

It has handed out 5,000 low-cost 3D cameras to archaeologists and NGOs with the hope of gathering a million images of threatened sites.

The Million Images Database hopes be fully online by the end of the year and will display life-size replicas of Palmyra's destroyed triumphal arch in New York's Times Square and London's Trafalgar Square in April.

The replicas of the arch, blown up by IS jihadists in October, are being made with the world's largest 3D printer.

France's culture minister had earlier floated the idea of a 3D recreation of the ancient city, known as the "Pearl of the Desert", based on photos taken by tourists over the years.

Author: Laurence Benhamou | Source: AFP [March 14, 2016]

At a sprawling Bronze Age cemetery in southern Jordan, archaeologists have developed a unique way of peering into the murky world of antiquities looting: With aerial photographs taken by a homemade drone, researchers are mapping exactly where - and roughly when - these ancient tombs were robbed.

Based on such images and conversations with some looters whose confidence they gained, archaeologists try to follow the trail of stolen pots and other artifacts to traders and buyers. They hope to get a better understanding of the black market and perhaps stop future plunder.

It's sophisticated detective work that stretches from the site, not far from the famed Dead Sea in Jordan, to collectors and buyers the world over.

The aerial photography detects spots where new looting has taken place at the 5,000-year-old Fifa graveyard, which can then sometimes be linked to Bronze Age pots turning up in shops of dealers, said Morag Kersel, an archaeologist at DePaul University in Chicago. Kersel, who heads the "Follow The Pots" project, also shares the data with Jordan's Department of Antiquities, to combat looting.

On a recent morning, team members walked across ravaged graves, their boots crunching ancient bones, as a tiny, six-bladed flying robot buzzed overhead. In recent years, drone use in archaeology has become increasingly common, replacing blimps, kites and balloons in surveying hard-to-access dig sites, experts said.

Chad Hill, an archaeologist at the University of Connecticut who built the drone, piloted it over a part of the graveyard that had not been mapped yet. The drone snapped photographs that allowed Hill to see in great detail how looting altered the landscape.

"We can see the change through time, not just of `a huge pit has been dug' but where different stones have moved," Hill said. "It's a level of resolution of spatial data collection that's never really been possible until the last couple of years."

As the drone's batteries ran low, Hill overrode the automatic pilot and guided the landing with a remote control. Flipping the drone on its back, he checked the camera, nodding approvingly at the afternoon's work.

The cemetery in Jordan's Dead Sea plain contains about 10,000 graves, part of the vast archaeological heritage of the region.

It looks like a moonscape as a result of looting, with about 3,700 craters stretching to the horizon and strewn with shards of skeletons and broken ceramics. Looters typically leave human remains and take only well preserved artifacts.

"I spend my days stepping on dead people," said Kersel, picking up a broken shell bracelet, presumably from ancient Egypt.

An underlying cause for looting is high unemployment, said Muhammed al-Zahran, director of the nearby Dead Sea Museum. "Looting happens all across the region," he said.

In Jordan, unemployment is 12 percent, and it's twice as high among the young.

Yet stolen antiquities rarely enrich local looters, said Neil Brodie, a researcher at the University of Glasgow's Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research.

Rather, the profits end up in Europe or America, Brodie said, describing high markups as the artifacts move from looter to middleman, dealer and then customer.

Brodie studied looting at another site in Jordan, the ruins of the early Bronze Age community of Bab adh-Dhra, though without the help of drones.

He estimated that diggers were paid about $10,500 for 28,084 pots that were subsequently sold in London for over $5 million, sometimes marketed as "Old Testament" artifacts.

An artifact that later sold for $275,000 was initially traded for a pig, Brodie's research showed. And he also found that a dancing Hindu deity bought for about $18 sold eventually for $372,000.

Some of the artifacts stolen from Jordan's sites, including tombstones, end up in neighboring Israel, said Eitan Klein, a deputy at the Israeli Antiquities Authority's robbery unit.

Kersel, from the "Follow the Pots" project, said looters told her they sell their goods to middlemen from the Jordanian capital of Amman or the southern town of Karak. She said the trail stops with the shadowy middlemen, but that she can sometimes pick it up on the other end, by comparing the looting timeline with what eventually ends up on the market all across the world.

In addition to monitoring the cemetery, Kersel also teaches local workshops on profiting from antiquities legally, including by making and selling replicas, to discourage robbing graves.

Yet, looting will be difficult to stop as long as demand remains high, she said.

"People don't ask the sticky questions about where artifacts come from," said Kersel, standing inside a robbed grave in Fifa. "They just want to own the piece regardless of what kind of background the artifact has, and that is what causes people on the ground to loot."

Author: Sam McNeil | Source: The Associated Press [April 03, 2015]

An extraordinary archaeological discovery was revealed in an excavation of the Israel Antiquities Authority prior to the construction of a road being built at the initiative of the Netivei Israel Company. During the excavation, carried out as part of the Jezreel Valley Railway Project between Ha-‘Emekim Junction and Yagur Junction, remains of the oldest kilns in Israel were discovered where commercial quantities of raw glass were produced. These kilns, c. 1,600 years old (dating to the Late Roman period), indicate that the Land of Israel was one of the foremost centers for glass production in the ancient world.

According to Yael Gorin-Rosen, head curator of the Israel Antiquities Authority Glass Department, “This is a very important discovery with implications regarding the history of the glass industry both in Israel and in the entire ancient world. We know from historical sources dating to the Roman period that the Valley of ‘Akko was renowned for the excellent quality sand located there, which was highly suitable for the manufacture of glass. Chemical analyses conducted on glass vessels from this period which were discovered until now at sites in Europe and in shipwrecks in the Mediterranean basin have shown that the source of the glass is from our region. Now, for the first time, the kilns have been found where the raw material was manufactured that was used to produce this glassware”.

The excavation of the kilns has caused great excitement in recent weeks among glass researchers throughout the world, some of whom have come especially to Israel in order to see this discovery first hand. According to Professor Ian Freestone of the University College London, who specializes in identifying the chemical composition of glass, "This is a sensational discovery and it is of great significance for understanding the entire system of the glass trade in antiquity. This is evidence that Israel constituted a production center on an international scale; hence its glassware was widely distributed throughout the Mediterranean and Europe”.

This enormously important site was discovered by chance last summer by archaeologist Abdel Al-Salam Sa‘id, an inspector with the Israel Antiquities Authority. While overseeing infrastructure work being conducted on the new railway line from Haifa to the east, he suddenly observed chunks of glass, a floor and an ash layer inside a trench. He halted construction work at the site and began preparations for an archaeological excavation, the important results of which are now evident.

According to Abdel Al-Salam Sa‘id, the excavation direction, “We exposed fragments of floors, pieces of vitrified bricks from the walls and ceiling of the kilns, and clean raw glass chips. We were absolutely overwhelmed with excitement when we understood the great significance of the finds”.

The kilns that were revealed consisted of two built compartments: a firebox where kindling was burnt to create a very high temperature, and a melting chamber – in which the raw materials for the glass (clean beach sand and salt) were inserted and melted together at a temperature of c. 1,200 C degrees. The glass was thus heated for a week or two until enormous chunks of raw glass were produced, some of which weighed in excess of ten tons. At the end of the manufacturing process the kilns were cooled; the large glass chunks that were manufactured were broken into smaller pieces and were sold to workshops where they were melted again in order to produce glassware.

During the Early Roman period the use of glass greatly expanded due to its characteristics: its transparency, beauty, the delicacy of the vessels and the speed with which they could be produced by blowing – an inexpensive technique adopted at the time that lowered production costs. Glass was used in almost every household from the Roman period onward, and it was also utilized in the construction of public buildings in the form of windows, mosaics and lighting fixtures. Consequently, large quantities of raw glass were required which were prepared on an industrial scale in specialized centers. The installation that was discovered in the excavation is an example of one of these ancient production facilities.

According to a price edict circulated by the Roman emperor Diocletian in the early fourth century CE, there were two kinds of glass: the first was known as Judean glass (from the Land of Israel) and the second – Alexandrian glass (from Alexandria, Egypt). Judean glass was a light green color and less expensive than Egyptian glass. The question was: Where were the centers that manufactured this Judean glass that was a branded product known throughout the Roman Empire and whose price was engraved on stone tablets so as to ensure fair trade. The current discovery completes the missing link in the research and indicates the location where the famous Judean glass was produced.

In a few months time the public will be able to see this discovery first-hand when it will be exhibited at the "Carmel Zvulun" Regional High school, in the Zevulun Regional Council.

Additional Background Information

Glass production kilns that date to the sixth or early seventh century CE were previously found at Apollonia in Herzliya and are c. 200 years later than the current discovery. The largest glass production facility from antiquity that has been found so far was exposed in the Bet Eliezer neighborhood in Hadera where it was dated to the seventh–eighth centuries CE, and the latest evidence we have of glass production in the country was revealed at Bet She‘arim (next to Khirbat ‘Asafna), dated to the late eighth and early ninth centuries CE.

The kilns that were just recently found are the earliest ones to be discovered so far in Israel. Their relatively good state of preservation will make it possible to better understand the production process. Researchers now hope that by means of its chemical composition they will be able to trace the export of the glass throughout the Roman Empire.

The raw glass industry at Khirbat ‘Asafna was part of an extensive industrial zone where there were oil presses, wine presses and a glassware workshop which was excavated in the 1960’s by an American archaeological expedition

Source: Israel Antiquities Authority [April 11, 2016]