Unearthed in last-ditch dig, one-of-a-kind tomb offers glimpse of Assyrian rule over Israel |
A nearly-abandoned salvage dig ahead of a road building project in northern Israel’s Jezreel Valley yielded the discovery of an opulent tomb dating back some 2,700 years, including a trove of jewelry, unique vessels and ornate artifacts, some of which have never before been seen in the Levant.
The uncovered tomb at the Horvat Tevet site just outside the modern city of Afula, also includes a rare instance of cremated remains having been found in an outlying area of the Assyrian Empire, said Omer Sergi, one of the authors of a recently published study on the discovery, offering significant insights into the ancient power’s colonial rule and socio-economic dynamics in the region.
“We are talking about unique items which have no parallels, some of them coming from the Far East, from the Assyrian heartland in Mesopotamia, and others from the Far West, from the Aegean,” Sergi, who is based at Tel Aviv University, told The Times of Israel. “Whoever was buried here was clearly important.”
The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Tel Aviv in October, was also authored by Karen Covello-Paran from the Israel Antiquities Authority and Omer Peleg from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
The excavation, co-directed by Sergi and Covello-Paran, was conducted in 2018-2019 ahead of construction work to expand a highway crossing the valley.
“We conducted a series of salvage excavations in the area to uncover any antiquity that might have been there before the new road covered them,” Sergi said.
At first, the team unearthed an administrative center dating back to the 9th century BCE. At the time, the area was part of the biblical kingdom of Israel, which was later destroyed by the Assyrian empire in events described in the biblical books of Kings and Chronicles, as well as in Assyrian sources.
“We found a royal estate made of storage houses, craft and production areas,” Sergi recalled. “In this place, [the Israelites] grew grains on a very large scale, and raised sheep and goat, supplying oil and meat secondary products to urban centers........