Image Details

A Canaanite grave at Ashkelon yields its secrets after 3,500 years. An adolescent girl lies in a flexed position in a mudbrick-lined vault that had been covered with wooden boughs and coated with white plaster. At her shoulder the excavators found two toggle pins, used for fastening a garment; three Egyptian scarabs and an ivory roundel lay on her midsection. Other grave goods, still in place and visible in the photo, include a Red-Polished Syrian flask, left center; one of two bowls, beside the flask, with a food offering of a lamb or goat chop and a small bird (perhaps a dove or a partridge); and, above the bowl, two imports from Cyprus, Base-Ring juglets that may have contained opium.