On a family trip to the Ramon Crater in southern Israel, an eight-year-old searching for “special things on the ground” spotted what he thought was a striped stone. He was right that it was a stone—just one carved into a figurine 1,700 years ago. The fragment, which measures only about 2.5 inches across, preserves part of a robed male figure carved from phosphorite, a sedimentary rock common in the Negev. Archaeologists identified the striped portion as carved folds of a himation, a Greek-style cloak, and dated the statuette to the Roman period. It may have depicted Dushara, the chief Nabataean […]
