Image Details

Silver and bronze jewelry, weaponry and implements. The small objects in four clusters are fragments of silver jewelry. The remaining objects, clockwise, beginning lower left, are the head of a flat axe, a spear butt, a small flat axe, a large silver pendant and the head of a shaft-hole axe, so called because at the back of the axe, behind the projection, there is a hole into which the handle was inserted. The large silver pendant is folded here; when it was opened and cleaned, a symbol of an Anatolian deity was found hammered onto its surface. Some of the silver and bronze objects from this extraordinary find are the only excavated examples of their kind discovered in Israel and provide important evidence for Anatolian or northern influence in Israel in the Middle Bronze Age. Archaeologists speculate that these artifacts may have had some ritual use in a nearby sanctuary.