ACCIDENTAL
ARCHAEOLOGY
Nothing in life is accidental.
He who believes in accident
does not believe in God.
(Alexander Yelchaninov)
On a recent flight home from Israel, I noticed an article in El Al’s inflight magazine ISRAELAL on the discovery and excavation of Ashkelon’s “Wine city.” The paragraph that intrigued me the most stated: “Ir Hayai’in – The Wine City – the most significant find uncovered by chance and one of the most significant archaeological finds of the last decade, was discovered by blind luck when Ashkelon contractors skimmed off two million cubic meters of sand north of Barnea as land fill, for a low-lying tract of land in the middle of the city, slated for building. Underneath the sand lay the Wine City – one of the largest and most prestigious wine-producing complexes in the ancient world: Gaza-Ashkelon Wines.”
Due to the mass immigration into Israel from the former Soviet Union, numerous areas in Israel have been hurriedly prepared for housing sites. In this case, bulldozers leveling a site three kilometers north of Ashkelon uncovered the residue of the ancient wine producing community.
As I finished the article, I pondered the words, “uncovered by chance…” and “discovered by blind luck…” I wondered just how many archaeological discoveries have been made by sheer accident. Upon returning, I put in a call to Vassilios Tzaferis back in Israel. Dr. Tzaferis is the Director of Excavations and Surveys for the Israel Antiquities Authority. It is his department that directly handles the identifying and surveying of all Archaeological sites in the country. His task is to protect sites that may be exposed during building activity, road construction and the like. For some fifteen years now the Antiquities Authority has been conducting surface surveys, and have logged over 14,000 sites into their computer.
Dr. Tzaferis told me that some 40 percent of all the sites that come to the Antiquities Authority are the result of the “accidental” discovery!
That may seem like an amazing statistic – that almost half of all the sites in Israel under archaeological survey have come to light due to sheer luck and good fortune. Perhaps more amazing is the reality that some of the monumental archaeological discoveries of the last two centuries have been the result of just such chance and good fortune. A soldier’s shovel here, a farmer’s plow there, a Bedouin shepherd roaming the barren hillside – and the results are a matter of archaeological history!
So just what has been uncovered accidentally you ask?
Well, the list is quite impressive. In fact, it reads as a sort of “who’s who” (or “what’s what”) of archaeological discovery. Consider this sampling of the highlights of the last almost two hundred years:
BSP 6:3 (Summer 1993) p. 87
In 1799, French soldiers in Napoleon’s army were digging a foundation for a fort near the, Egyptian village of Rosetta in the Nile Delta. A soldier wielding a spade struck against a black basalt slab which was soon discovered to have ancient writing inscripted upon it. The “Rosetta Stone” was comprised of a polyglot text on three panels – the first panel in a pictographic style (the ancient priestly hieroglyphic script); the second was in Demotic, a “short-hand” or cursive development of the hieroglyphic form; and the third, bottom panel was in Greek. The Greek text was easily read and revealed that the stele dated to 196 BC, and praised the reign of Pharaoh Ptolemy V. Of course the significance of the Rosetta Stone is that in 1822, the French scholar Champollion was able to decipher the ancient hieroglyphic text, thereby unlocking the secrets of ancient Egypt for generations to come.
In 1868, Anglican Church missionary Frederick Augustus Klein was shown a black basalt stone while visiting the encampment of the Bani-Hamideh Bedouins. Evidently some of their number had discovered the strange stone with writing on it near the ruins of Dhiban in the hill country of what was the Biblical land of Moab. The Moabite Stone turned out to be a stele set up by Mesha, king of Moab, to record his successful rebellion against Israel in c.830 BC. The thirty-four lines of script in Moabite (closely akin to Hebrew) mentions Mesha; Omri (King of Israel); the Moabite god Chemosh; and, most significantly, the Israelite God Yahweh!
In 1880, a young boy playing near the Old City of Jerusalem wandered into a tunnel and then slipped down into a pool of water. On the wall he noticed letters had been inscribed. Reporting his “discovery,” archaeologists were delighted to find that the inscription, which had been under water and missed by earlier excavators, was undoubtedly left by the workers who completed Hezekiah’s tunnel as referred to in Second Kings 20:20. The text, now referred to as the Siloam Inscription, expressed the laborers pride at finishing what is acclaimed to be one of the truly amazing engineering feats of the ancient world.
In 1887, a poor Egyptian peasant woman was scraping together some fertilizer in and around the ruins of Amarna, Pharaoh Akhenaton’s capital in 1365 BC. She came upon a number of small baked clay tablets with inscriptions upon them. Not knowing the value of her “find,” she disposed of them to an acquaintance for approximately 50 cents! The purchaser, knowing that Europeans were always interested in Egyptian artifacts sold them to a local antiquities dealer. The Amarna Tablets, uniquely in cuneiform script, provided an archive of the court of Akhenaton, and the diplomatic correspondence during his reign.
BSP 6:3 (Summer 1993) p. 88
In 1928, a Syrian peasant named Mahmoud Mella Azzir from the village of Bourj al-Qasab, accidently uncovered a stone marker with his plow. The stone slab covered a subterranean passage which proved to be a burial chamber. After selling the small pottery items found within the vault, the site was reported to the governor of the local territory. Renewed attention towards the nearby hill known as “Ras Shamra” ensued, and by 1933 tablets were deciphered identifying the site as ancient Ugarit. Ras Shamra yielded numerous artifacts of importance, the most significant being the royal library and the many clay tablets written in cuneiform characters dating to the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC. Interestingly, the texts were in Sumerian, Hittite, Egyptian, Hurrian, Minoan, and a hitherto unknown language which has now become known as Ugaritic. It was the Ugaritic text that proved to be of linguistic value to Old Testament scholars due to its close relationship to Hebrew and its direct testimony to Canaanite religion and customs.
In 1933, Bedouins in the Abou Kemal region of Syria were digging a grave for one of their tribesman when they unearthed an ancient statue. Amazingly they did not sell the figure on the antiquities market, but turned it over to the authorities. A French team, under the supervision of Andre’ Parrot began excavations immediately in the area of Tell Hariri, identified as the ancient city of Mari. The highly successful excavations yielded startling discoveries, such as a temple of Ishtar, the royal palace of the last king of Mari, Zimrilim, and over 20,000 cuneiform tablets inscribed with legal, economic and diplomatic texts. Mari documents have illuminated our understanding of not only Zimrilim, but of Hammurabi, king of Babylon, with whom he corresponded. They shed light, furthermore, on the history and linguistics of the ancient Near East of the first quarter of the Second Millennium, BC, as well as on the early Hebrews.
In 1947, a young Arab boy named Muhammed EdhDhib, from the Ta’amireh tribe of Bedouins, was watching his goats among the cliffs and crags on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. The story told is that he threw a rock into a cave opening and heard it clank against what sounded like pottery being shattered. Of course what unfolded in the years to come is a matter of history – suffice to say here, that the Dead Sea Scrolls contained in those earthen jars provided scholars with Hebrew manuscripts that dated a thousand years older than any others known at that time, and included all the books of the Hebrew Bible with the exception of Esther.
In the early 1960’s, a farmer plowing his field in northern Syria, near Tell Mardikh, ran his plow up against a
BSP 6:3 (Summer 1993) p. 89
large stone object. Digging it out, he discovered it led to a storage area of some sort. Archaeologists identified it as a storage bin for cereal dating to the late Nineteenth century, BC. More importantly it lead to the excavation of the area by a team headed by Paolo Matthiae, and the uncovering of the remains of a city dating to 2000 BC. In 1968, a statue was unearthed that carried 26 lines of inscription identifying the city as ancient Ebla. In 1974, 42 cuneiform tablets were discovered, and in 1975, some 15,000 tablets were recovered, and another 1,600 valuable tablets were found a year later! The texts from Ebla were in the Sumerian script and along with Sumerian logograms adapted to Akkadian, are semitic and amazingly close to Hebrew. The Ebla tablets continue to provide scholars with illuminating and controversial study.
In 1968, a Jewish tomb cut into the rock in the Jerusalem suburb of Giv’at ha-Mivtar was opened accidentally by a construction crew with the Ministry of Housing. Dr Vassilios Tzaferis was dispatched by the Department of Antiquities to investigate. Inside the tomb he found a skeleton in an ossuary. Remarkably both his heels had been punctured by a large iron spike, and his shins had been broken intentionally. The unfortunate young man who was crucified was named Yehohanan, and was put to death sometime before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. The significance of this “chance find” in Dr. Tzaferis’ estimation was that up to that point not a single victim of crucifixion had been uncovered even though literary sources mentioned the horrifying method of execution throughout the Roman Empire.
In January, 1986, two Galilee fisherman, Moshe Lufan and his brother Yuval were examining the muddy shoreline of the receding Sea of Galilee just south of their kibbutz at Ginnosar. Severe drought had caused a drop in the water level, and the brothers detected the oval outline of a boat buried in the mud. Soon the Department of Antiquities sent experts to investigate which lead to the excavation of a 2,000 year old fishing boat completely intact. Dubbed the “Jesus Boat,” this remarkable discovery is a favorite stop for tourists in its permanent home in Ginnosar.
In Egypt, towards the end of 1991, construction workers digging a foundation for a post office in Akhmim, some 300 miles south of Cairo, uncovered a large statue of Rameses II. The Egyptologists who were called in immediately discovered a second colossus nearby. Both granite statues are close to seven feet wide and some 24 feet high. Yahya el-Masri, Antiquities Director for Middle Egypt’s Sohag district, believes that a temple complex rivaling Karnack or Luxor may soon be found in the vicinity.
In November of 1990, a construction crew building a water park in Jerusalem’s Peace Forest, accidently uncovered an ancient burial site. Zvi Greenhut of the
BSP 6:3 (Summer 1993) p. 90
Antiquities Authority was dispatched, and discovered that inscriptions on two of the ossuaries identified the burial chamber as belonging to the family of Caiaphas. Indeed, one ossuary may have entombed the remains of Caiaphas himself, the high priest who questioned Jesus Christ, before turning him over to Pilate.
So here they are – a hall of fame of chance archaeological finds. We are thrilled by them, and every archaeologist and scholar is thankful for them. Zvi Greenhut, in the opening paragraph of his article on Caiaphas’ tomb in Biblical Archaeology Review, summarized the feeling of many when he wrote that, “The history of archaeology is filled with accidental discoveries. With all our scientific tools and methodologies, chance continues to be a major component of our success.”
It should go without saying that professional archaeologists are not frustrated by spending long, grueling hours searching caves and sounding tells only to have some construction crew uncover a tomb somewhere else. Benjamin Mazar, the dean of Israeli archaeologists, told me in a recent telephone interview, “It makes no difference who finds something… To make new discoveries is wonderful!”
The recent chance find of Caiaphas’ tomb is just another in a long line of “wonderful” discoveries that make the land of Israel such a marvelous and mysterious place. Who knows where the next find will turn up? In light of this, the archaeological community works… and waits, for they all know, as Veenhof wrote that “The historian is highly dependent on the success of the spade and the chance find.”
NOTES
1. Daniella Ashkenazy, “The Wine Of Antiquity,” IsraELAL 42/Mar-Apr 1992, p.48.
2. See 2 Kings 3:4
3. See 1 Kings 16:16–30
4. See 2 Kings 23:13; Jeremiah 48:13
5. It is interesting to note that during exploration of the Cave of the Letters, a team member leaned his hand against the wall near the opening of the cave and dislodged a plastered-over compartment. Reaching inside, the delighted archaeologists pulled out a bundle wrapped in straw and burlap twine and discovered a beautifully carved Roman plate dating to the time of the Second Jewish war against Rome in 135 AD. The fully preserved platter, found totally by “luck,” is now on display in the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum.
6. As has been generally understood, the vocabularies at Ebla contained such words as k-t-b, “to write” (as in Hebrew); other similarities include adamu, “man” and malikum, “king,” all of which show an affinity to Hebrew. See “Are the Ebla Tablets Relevant to Biblical Research?” by Mitchell Dahood in Biblical Archaeology Review, VI:5, September/October 1980, 54.
BSP 6:3 (Summer 1993) p. 91
7. See Biblical Archaeology Review, IV:1, March 1978, 4; Biblical Archaeology Review, VI:5, September/ October 1980, 46; Biblical Archaeology Review, VI:6, November/December 1980, 38; Biblical Archaeology Review, VII:6, November/December 1981, 54; Biblical Archaeology Review, IX:6, November/December 1983, 74.
8. See “Crucifixion – The Archaeological Evidence”, Biblical Archaeology Review, XI:1, January/February 1985, 44.
9. Zvi Greenhut, Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 1992, 29.
10. K. R. Veenhof, The World Of The Bible, Ed. A.S. Van Der Woude (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1986), 204.