Archaeologists stunned by lavish Assyrian-period tomb in northern Israel
Source: Haaretz latest headlines
Nearly 2,700 years ago, someone of great importance died and was buried on a remote, uninhabited hill in the Jezreel Valley, in today’s northern Israel. The person was cremated and their remains were distributed among three urns in what must have been an elaborate funeral.
Jewelry, glazed pottery, a shower of beads and a number of rare objects from lands near and far were heaped into the urns, which were then buried in a grave cut into the bedrock.
Bizarrely, a second person, likely a man, was buried in an adjacent grave at the same time, though he was not cremated but entombed on his side, in a fetal position.
Now archaeologists have uncovered this pair of unusual and mysterious graves, and are hailing the trove of artifacts as one of the richest and most diverse burials ever found in Israel.
Dated to the 7th century B.C.E., the cremation burial contained many artifacts often associated with the Assyrian Empire and its colonial territories, the researchers reported Thursday in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University.
This leads the researchers to suggest the ashes buried in the urns may have been the remains of a high-ranking official, possibly even the governor ruling over the former lands of the biblical Kingdom of Israel, vanquished by the Assyrians a few decades earlier.
In addition to being an “unparalleled” burial treasure, the find also sheds new light on the period of Assyrian rule over the Levant and the empire’s policies to control and exploit the land, the discoverers say.
Winning the right fight
Back in 2018 and 2019, archaeologists from Tel Aviv University, on behalf of the Israeli Institute of Archaeology, and the Israel Antiquities Authority conducted a salvage excavation at Horvat Tevet, an ancient rural site in the Jezreel Valley just outside the modern Israeli city of Afula. As is often the case in Israel, the dig was needed to clear the ground of any antiquities ahead of new construction, in this case the expansion of a local road into a highway.
The terraced hill of Horvat Tevet (“Ruins of Tevet” in Hebrew) was used for different purposes over the last 3,500 years, starting in the Middle Bronze Age. The excavation there had already returned some impressive finds, including a large pillared building thought to have been the administrative hub of a royal rural estate for the northern Kingdom of Israel (as opposed to its southern neighbor, the Kingdom of Judah) back in the 9th century B.C.E.
And then, the two leading archaeologists on the team, got into an argument, as researchers are wont to do. Dr. Omer Sergi, of Tel Aviv’s Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, wanted to focus on the bevy of existing finds. Dr. Karen Covello-Paran of the IAA, the original excavator of Tevet, wanted to explore the entire site, including an area that had not yielded any finds yet.
“We were digging there, reaching bedrock and there was nothing. This went on for days,” Sergi recalls in a Zoom interview. “I told Karen: ‘I’m stopping the work. This is costing us a lot of time and money and energy and there’s nothing.’ But she insisted, and we fought over it.”
Fortunately Covello-Paran won that fight.
“I just felt that because it was a salvage excavation we had the duty to investigate the entire site, make sure there was nothing else there before the bulldozers came in,” she says. “But I wasn’t expecting this, it was completely random. Which just shows how much of what we discover is arbitrary.”
The double burial the team uncovered was unusual in many respects, even before the researchers realized how rich it was. Firstly, the pottery and artifacts found in the graves clearly put it in Assyrian times. But while Horvat Tevet did function as a cemetery in certain periods, there were no other graves from this time at the site, the archaeologists report.
A couple centuries earlier, during the Israelite monarchy, especially under the Omride dynasty, Tevet had been the hub of an important royal estate, which stored and distributed produce from the surrounding fields. But around 720 B.C.E. the northern Israelite kingdom and its capital Samaria fell to the Assyrians, while Jerusalem and Judah survived, albeit as a vassal to the empire.
Parts of Israel’s population were deported – leading to the biblical story of the ten lost tribes – and many settlements in the northern kingdom were depopulated.
Tevet was no exception. There are barely any signs of human habitation there during Assyrian times. So someone had deliberately brought these remains from somewhere else and staged this lavish burial.
The mode of the two burials was also surprising. Cremation was in use at the time in the Levant, but mostly in the coastal cemeteries of the Phoenicians and Philistines, not at inland sites like Tevet, Sergi notes. The other body, the inhumation, is a bit more in line with local customs, although at the time people were usually buried lying straight on their backs, not in a fetal position on the side, Covello-Paran notes.
Not a local
The mystery only deepened when Omer Peleg, an MA student and the lead author on the study, began to painstakingly excavate the three urns, which had been raised from the grave intact and which contained both the burnt bone fragments of the cremated body and the funerary offerings.
It was then that Peleg and colleagues realized the true opulence of the burial: dozens of beads made with multiple materials; bronze earrings and decorated brooches; exquisite pottery vessels that would have contained scented oils; amulets depicting the Egyptian deities Bes and Sekhmet; an Assyrian cylindrical seal; a stone weight and other bits and bobs.
“At the time Tevet was a remote site in the Jezreel Valley,” Sergi says. “There was no city, no settlement, and then you find this. It’s expensive, it’s rich, it’s prestigious, and it’s rare.”
Most of the ceramics in the grave were imported, many from nearby Phoenicia, but two of the vessels were particularly rare, and may offer clues to the identity of the deceased. One was a faience bottle, a small perfume container of Aegean provenance beautifully decorated with Egyptian motifs of ducks flying against a background of papyrus plants. The second was a glazed red and green bottle imported from Mesopotamia.
These exquisite vessels are generally found in the royal tombs of the Assyrian heartland, the archaeologists say. In the Levant, only one comparable example has been found in the Assyrian provincial center at Tell Tayinat, today on the Turkish-Syrian border, they say.
The Greek bottle with Egyptian motifs points to the great movement of goods and cultural exchange that was common in the Assyrian Empire, which, at its height in the 7th century B.C.E., spanned from Egypt to Mesopotamia and parts of Iran. The glazed bottle indicates a link to someone from the empire’s elite, connected to the Assyrian colonial administration, Sergi says.
The cylindrical seal is also Assyrian in origin. While it does not contain writing identifying the deceased, it depicts winged animals and astrological symbols that are typical of Assyrian iconography, Covello-Paran says. The seal must have been a close personal object, because it was the only funerary offering that exhibited signs of burning, meaning it was worn by the deceased during the cremation process, she adds.
Finally, there is the choice of cremation. While the Assyrians too preferred inhumation, there are cases of cremation burials found in the empire’s provincial centers, for example at Dur Katlimmu, or Tel Sheikh Hamad, in today’s eastern Syria, Sergi says. All of these elements point to someone closely connected to the Assyrian administration, he says.
The limited amount of human remains in the three urns fits with the interpretation that it was a single person, and dispersal of ashes of an individual among multiple vessels is known from cremation burials of the time, the archaeologists say. Perhaps the sheer amount of grave goods required the use of three urns. But who was this person?
A political tomb
Given that there was no community near Tevet that could produce or acquire the luxury goods found in the burial, the two deceased could not have been locals, the archaeologists conclude. Almost certainly, the two were brought from Megiddo, the closest urban center some 15 kilometers southwest of Tevet.
Megiddo – also known by the name Armageddon in Christian apocalyptic prophecy – had been a major city in the Kingdom of Israel. It was captured by the Assyrians in 732 B.C.E. and rebuilt into the capital of their new province of Magiddu, ruling over large parts of the former Kingdom of Israel.
But even in Megiddo itself no burial of comparable luxury has been found for this period, Sergi notes. We cannot rule out that the cremated individual buried at Tevet was a merchant, as items like the stone weight might suggest, he says. But why would a worldly merchant be buried in the isolated hinterland of the Jezreel Valley?
Furthermore, in the Assyrian period, the fields around Tevet continued to be royal lands as they had been under the Israelites, so they belonged to and served the empire. The deceased was most likely a high-ranking official in the Assyrian administration, if not the provincial governor himself, Sergi suggests. The tomb’s unusual location may have served a political purpose. In ancient times, ancestral graves were often used to claim ownership of land, so the lavish burial of an Assyrian official may have been a way to link the fertile lands of the Jezreel Valley to their new overlords.
“If you consider that the body was coming from Megiddo, then you should immediately imagine also the procession,” Sergi says. “This funeral must have been a really big event, with lots of people walking from Megiddo to Horvat Tevet, and by this also marking the connection between the two places.”
There is some debate among scholars over whether the Assyrians actually invested in the exploitation of the former Israelite lands, or whether they were content with holding the province and neglected its economy, Sergi says. The discovery and interpretation of the Tevet burial supports the view that the Assyrians had a strategic interest in controlling the region’s resources and develop the local rural economy, he concludes.
Not much can be said of the second burial at Tevet, except that the body belonged to an adult male, who was buried at the same time as the cremated individual, in a position that was also unusual for this period and place, Covello-Paran says.
But the archaeologists can live with some degree of unresolved mystery, especially since they came so close to losing this rare find.
“If it were up to me we would have never found this unique and unparalleled assemblage,” Sergi remarks. “Today you would drive your car above it and never know it’s there.”
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