A little girl happened upon a 3,800-year-old amulet while she was hiking with her family outside Jerusalem, the Israel Antiquities Authority said last week.
Ziv Nitzvan, 3, discovered the amulet in the area around Beit Shemesh, a city that’s located less than an hour west of Jerusalem. It depicts a scarab, a beetle that commonly figures on ancient Egyptian antiquities, and is believed to date back to the Bronze Age.
According to Nitzvan’s sister Omer, Ziv was hiking with her family when she was looking at stones on the ground. She “bent down, and of all the stones next to her, she picked up this one,” Omer said in a statement. “When she rubbed it and removed the sand from it, we saw that something was different about it.”
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In her statement, she said she “immediately reported it to the Israel Antiquities Authority,” whose director, Eli Escozido, said he would soon make it available for public viewing in Jerusalem.
The amulet was found near the Tel Azka site, which has regularly yielded archaeological matter. Speaking to the New York Times, Oded Lipschits, a professor of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, said the amulet is not necessarily the first of its kind of be discovered, but the find is notable because the Nitzvan family didn’t keep the object for themselves.
Lipschits said in a statement that the amulet suggests that there were “close ties and cultural influences between Canaan and Egypt.”
News of the find was released to the press on Thursday, the same day that the Israel Antiquities Authority faced scrutiny in the Israeli media over the cancelation of a conference that it organized.
One of the conference’s speakers, Raphael Greenberg, has criticized Israel’s archaeological work in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, claiming that these projects are designed to disenfranchise the Palestinian people who reside there. After some right-wing groups called Greenberg to be fired from his post as archaeology professor at Tel Aviv University, Haaretz reported that Amichay Eliyahu, Israel’s heritage minister, called for the conference’s cancelation.