'Unique items which have no parallels'

Unearthed in last-ditch dig, one-of-a-kind tomb offers glimpse of Assyrian rule over Israel

Newly published findings from salvage dig near Afula detail discovery of burial pits where high official’s remains may have been interred along with dozens of opulent and rare artifacts

A nearly-abandoned salvage dig ahead of a road building project in northern Israel’s Jezreel Valley yielded the discovery of an opulent tomb dating back some 2,700 years, including a trove of jewelry, unique vessels and ornate artifacts, some of which have never before been seen in the Levant.

The uncovered tomb at the Horvat Tevet site just outside the modern city of Afula, also includes a rare instance of cremated remains having been found in an outlying area of the Assyrian Empire, said Omer Sergi, one of the authors of a recently published study on the discovery, offering significant insights into the ancient power’s colonial rule and socio-economic dynamics in the region.

“We are talking about unique items which have no parallels, some of them coming from the Far East, from the Assyrian heartland in Mesopotamia, and others from the Far West, from the Aegean,” Sergi, who is based at Tel Aviv University, told The Times of Israel. “Whoever was buried here was clearly important.”

The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Tel Aviv in October, was also authored by Karen Covello-Paran from the Israel Antiquities Authority and Omer Peleg from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

The excavation, co-directed by Sergi and Covello-Paran, was conducted in 2018-2019 ahead of construction work to expand a highway crossing the valley.

“We conducted a series of salvage excavations in the area to uncover any antiquity that might have been there before the new road covered them,” Sergi said.

At first, the team unearthed an administrative center dating back to the 9th century BCE. At the time, the area was part of the biblical kingdom of Israel, which was later destroyed by the Assyrian empire in events described in the biblical books of Kings and Chronicles, as well as in Assyrian sources.

“We found a royal estate made of storage houses, craft and production areas,” Sergi recalled. “In this place, [the Israelites] grew grains on a very large scale, and raised sheep and goat, supplying oil and meat secondary products to urban centers across the kingdom.”

For a while, the estate, which was destroyed and abandoned in the first half of the 9th century, was all they found, even as they continued to survey the area where the road was slated to be built.

“I told Karen that we were wasting time and money and instead we should be focusing on the estate, but she insisted that the entire site needed to be checked,” Sergi said. “We were lucky that she did, because later on we discovered this unique burial assemblage.”

Digging on a southward facing slope, the archaeologists found two adjacent burial pits. Inside them were three urns filled with cremated human remains and the remains of another body lying on its side in a fetal position, placed next to each other. Overall, the tomb site included 17 pottery vessels, with 15 different pottery types, and over 100 artifacts.

Neither the human remains in the urns nor those of the adjacent body contained any material suitable for a DNA test. However, according to Sergi, the researchers concluded that the remains in the three urns belong to a single person, based on the amount of ash in each vessel and the fact that some of the pottery buried with the deceased was intentionally broken into sherds and distributed into the urns.

“Whoever buried the urns broke a jug in three pieces and placed each piece in an urn,” Sergi said.

The treasure featured an elaborate alabastron, a vase-shaped vessel, decorated with ducks flying over papyrus flowers, likely from the Aegean islands, that had never been found in the Levant before. Also inside were dozens of colorful beads made from a variety of materials, such as glass and shells, several faience amulets, including two depicting the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, and a delicate glazed Assyrian bottle.

Thanks to the pottery typology, the archaeologists were able to date the discovery to the 7th century BCE, establishing it as an Assyrian site unrelated to the nearby Israeli estate abandoned two centuries earlier.

“In the 7th century BCE, the kingdom of Israel did not exist anymore, as it had already been destroyed by the Assyrian Empire,” Sergi said. “The Assyrian Empire had taken over the Jezreel Valley and created a new administrative district called the province of Megiddo. Its capital was in Tel Megiddo, some 15 kilometers [9.3 miles] from Horvat Tevet.”

The practice of burying two bodies together, one cremated and one inhumed, has been attested in Phoenicia, along the coast further north in modern-day Lebanon, where instances of cremated remains distributed in multiple vessels have also been found. But cremation was fairly rare outside of that area, Sergi said.

“Between the 10th and 6th centuries BCE, the only region where cremation was popular was the Levantine Coast, or what is known as Phoenicia,” he said. “However, some cremation burials have been found outside Assyrian provincial centers, like in this case.”

The researchers were able to determine that the second body belonged to an adult male. He might have been wearing a necklace, since they uncovered some beads next to him.

The lack of bio-archaeological data suitable for a DNA test meant that the researchers could not conclusively determine the relationship between the two individuals, Sergi said, noting that it would be incorrect to infer information by assuming the burial at Horvat Tevet mirrored Phoenician burials.

“In Phoenicia, this kind of burial was common; here we are speaking about a unique phenomenon,” he explained.

Aside from the jewelry and pottery, one of the urns also contained an Assyrian cylinder seal, a type of object used to both produce an impression on wet clay and as a form of pendant.

“This is the only object that we can be 100 percent sure belonged to the deceased also during his life, because this is the only object that shows traces of fire, which means that it was cremated with the body,” said Sergi.

The cylinder, the glazed bottle, and a stone weight are all typical of the Assyrian culture and customs. But the eclectic nature of the objects offers a window into the buried individuals’ connections to the wider world.

“Assyrian provincial centers were huge colonial hubs, where you could find Assyrian officials, the local administration, soldiers, and more,” he said. “Some of the items we found connect the deceased to the Assyrian colonial network, others to the trade networks that flourished under the Assyrian empire.”

“We know that at the time, Horvat Tevet was not settled, and so, all these prestigious artifacts did not belong to a local from there,” he added. “This means that these objects must have come from a big urban center that had access to long-distance trade, with Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Clearly, the artifacts must have come from Tel Megiddo.”

According to Sergi, given the nature of the artifacts, the deceased could have been a high-ranking official, a merchant, or perhaps both.

“At the time, there was not necessarily such a clear distinction,” he said.

When the Israelites still ruled, the area of Horvat Tevet was likely royal land, an area managed by a centralized bureaucratic authority. Sergi believes that this was still the case two centuries later.

“The deceased must have come from Megiddo, and because of this, we have to imagine that his funeral had some kind of procession from Megiddo to Horvat Tevet,” he said. “This means that the Assyrian colonial center wanted to show that they ruled also over the fertile royal lands on the other side of the valley, stressing the connection between the Assyrian colonial hub and the fertile lands outside of it.”

Though the dig has concluded and a highway now runs through the site, the team is continuing to look for hidden gems among the discoveries unearthed there.

“Regarding the tomb, we have conducted all the research that we could carry out, but there are many more finds from the excavation to examine and publish,” Sergi said.