Imagine finding a pebble and discovering it’s actually a 3,500-year-old artifact. That’s exactly what happened to a young girl in Israel, who suspected her find was special even before she and her mother sought expert advice.
12-year-old Dafna Filshteiner found a 3,500-year-old ancient Egyptian amulet while hiking in a suburb of Tel Aviv. The finding, outlined in a December 4 statement by the Israel Antiquities Authority, is a small stone shaped like a dung beetle and testifies to ancient Egyptian influence in what is now modern-day Israel.
“I showed it to my mother, and she said it was just an ordinary stone or a bead. But then I saw a decoration and stubbornly insisted it was more than that, so we searched on the Internet,” Filshteiner explained in the statement. “There, we identified more photos of stones similar to what we had found. We realized that it was something special and immediately called the Antiquities Authority.”
The amulet’s design features two scorpions positioned head-to-tail, the hieroglyph “nefer,” and a motif resembling a royal staff. The scorpions represent the Egyptian goddess Serket, whose divine jurisdiction included protecting pregnant women, and nefer means “good” or “chosen,” according to Yitzhak Paz, a Bronze Age expert at the Israel Antiquities Authority who examined the amulet. He dated it to around 3,500 years ago, during Egypt’s New Kingdom period when the Pharaoh’s rule reached parts of modern Israel.
Egyptians considered dung beetles sacred, and their act of laying eggs in a dung ball symbolized new life. The Egyptian word for this sacred beetle, scarab, comes from the verb meaning “to form” or “to be created,” according to the Israel Antiquities Authority.
“The scarab is indeed a distinct Egyptian characteristic, but their wide distribution also reached far beyond Egypt’s borders. It may have been dropped by an important and authoritative figure passing through the area, or it may have been deliberately buried,” Paz explained. “Since the find was discovered on the surface, it is difficult to know its exact context.”
Filshteiner discovered the scarab near Tel Qana, an archaeological site with remains dating back to the Early Bronze Age.
“This find is both exciting and significant. The scarab and its unique pictorial features, along with other finds discovered at Tel Qana with similar motifs, provide new insights into the nature of the Egyptian influence in the region in general, and the Yarkon area in particular,” said Amit Dagan from Bar-Ilan University and Ayelet Dayan from the Israel Antiquities Authority, both of whom are excavating at Tel Qana.
The Israel Antiquities Authority awarded Filshteiner and her family a certificate of excellence for good citizenship—probably for handing over the artifact instead of pocketing it—and delivered the scarab to the state archives. The public will be able to see the scarab on display at the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein National Campus for the Archaeology of Israel.
Moral of the story? If you find something neat, get it checked by a professional—it might just be an ancient treasure.
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