Buried Treasure: The Silver Hoard from Dor

Home > Magazines > BAR > July/August 1998

At first, our discovery—an unadorned clay jar—seemed deceptively modest. For months we had been excavating an area overlooking the southern harbor of ancient Dor, south of Haifa on Israel’s Mediterranean coast. Digging conditions had been particularly arduous. To shield ourselves from the intense daytime heat—temperatures often reached triple digits, especially in the absence of a cool sea breeze—we put up a black gauze screen over the dig squares. Just beyond Dor’s southern harbor, a picturesque beach, frequently filled with bathers, proved tantalizing: Our volunteers were often distracted, longing for a refreshing dip as they perspired under the unforgiving […]

You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

See Ze’ev Yeivin, “The Mysterious Silver Hoard from Eshtemoa,” BAR 13:06.

Endnotes

Area D-2 was supervised by Ayelet Gilboa and Benjamin Avenberg.

Avner Raban, “The Harbor of the Sea Peoples at Dor,” Biblical Archaeologist 50 (1987), pp. 118–126.

Raban, “Sea Peoples.”

The cloth was analyzed by Carmela Shimoni of the Israeli Fiber Institute in Jerusalem.

The weaves were identified by Avigail Shefer.

According to Daphne Ben-Tor, “Interlocking scrolls and spiral designs are common on scarabs found at Middle Bronze Age Canaanite sites … The design found on the Dor bullae is also typical of Middle Kingdom-Middle Bronze Age patterns not found on other scarabs. A close parallel to the patterns occurring on the Dor bullae [is] found on Middle Bronze Age scarabs from Megiddo.” We may add that this same pattern occurs on scarabs from Dor and from nearby Tel Mevorakh in this same period.

Middle Bronze scarabs have been found in first-millennium contexts in Ibiza and Sicily. Indeed, a Middle Bronze Age scarab was recently found in a Late Roman tomb dating to the third to fourth centuries C.E. at Moza ‘Illit in Israel.

Ephraim Stern, “Weights and Measures,” Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 1971), vol. 16, cols. 375–392.

For further discussion of the mina, see Stern, “Weights and Measures.”

10.

The report, “Analysis by Atomic Absorption,” is by Nimrod Shay and Maurice Fontain.

11.

Samuel Wolff, “Maritime Trade at Punic Carthage” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1986).

12.

Gordon Loud, Megiddo II (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1948), pl. 229:24.

13.

R.A.S. Macalister, The Excavations of Gezer (London: Palestine Exploration Fund, 1912), vol. 2, p. 262, fig. 408.

14.

See Yohanan Aharoni, “Arad,” Revue biblique 75 (1968); and Miriam Aharoni, “A Hoard of Silver from Arad,” Qadmoniot (1980), pp. 39–40.

15.

Ze’ev Yeivin, “The Silver Hoard from Eshtemo’a,” Atiqot, Hebrew Ser., vol. 10 (1990), pp. 43–57.

16.

On three of the jugs, the Hebrew word hamesh (five) was written in red paint. The contents of one jug, found intact, weighed about 1 pound. As with the hoard found at Dor, it contained silver tokens, jewelry and some pieces of cut silver. Yigael Yadin thought that these five containers and the inscription “five” represented 500 shekels. The problem with this suggestion is that their weight does not correspond to the late Judahite shekel of 11.5 grams. Perhaps the shekel of this period, like ours, followed a different standard; if so, it was probably a lighter shekel. See E. Eran, “A Metrological Consideration of the Eshtemo’a Hoard,” ‘Atiqot, Hebrew ser., vol. 10 (1990), pp. 58–60.