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Iron Age finds from the Garden Tomb. Excavated in 1904 by Karl Beckholt, warden of the Garden Tomb, this pottery was photographed and published 20 years later by James Edward Hanauer, a Jerusalem scholar who died in the 1930s.

Hanauer called the objects the handiwork of medieval pilgrims who were filling idle hours in the Holy City. But two of these finds, the animal, middle, and the bed or couch, right bottom, closely resemble objects recently excavated in Jerusalem and Judah, objects that are securely dated to Iron Age II, eighth to seventh centuries B.C. The triangular shaped object that appears to be resting on the couch is probably medieval, and the spindle bottle, left, dates to the Hellenistic period, late first century B.C.

This photograph is all that remains of the 1904 finds. They were “so it was said…taken away by a ‘Turkish’ German officer during the First World War,” Hanauer reported.