Apollo Bronze Statue found in Gaza Strip

Lost for centuries, a rare bronze statue of the Greek god Apollo has mysteriously resurfaced in the Gaza Strip, only to be seized by police and vanish almost immediately from view.

Word of the remarkable find has caught the imagination of the world of archaeology, but the police cannot say when the life-sized bronze might re-emerge or where it might be put on display.
A local fisherman says he scooped the 500kg (1,100lb) god from the seabed last August, and carried it home on a donkey cart, unaware of the significance of his catch.
Others soon guessed at its importance, and the statue briefly appeared on eBay with a $500,000 (£300,000) price tag - well below its true value. Police from the Islamist group Hamas, which rules the isolated Palestinian territory, swiftly seized it and say they are investigating the affair.
Archaeologists have not been able to get their hands on the Apollo – to their great frustration- and instead must pore over a few blurred photographs of the intact deity, who is laid out incongruously on a blanket emblazoned with Smurfs.
From what they can tell, it was cast sometime between the 5th and the 1st century BC, making it at least 2,000 years old.
"It's unique. In some ways I would say it is priceless. It's like people asking what is the [value] of the painting La Gioconda [the Mona Lisa] in the Louvre museum," said Jean-Michel de Tarragon, a historian with the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem.
"It's very, very rare to find a statue which is not in marble or in stone, but in metal," he told Reuters television.
The apparently pristine condition of the god suggested it was uncovered on land and not in the sea, he said, speculating that the true location of where it was unearthed was not revealed to avoid arguments over ownership.
"This wasn't found on the seashore or in the sea … it is very clean. No, it was [found] inland and dry," he said, adding that there were no signs of metal disfigurement or barnacles that one normally sees on items plucked from water.
Palestinian fisherman Joudat Ghrab tells a different tale. The 26-year-old father of two said he saw a human-like shape lying in shallow waters some 100 metres offshore, just north of the Egyptian-Gaza border.
At first he thought it was a badly burnt body, but when he dived down to take a closer look he realised it was a statue. He says it took him and his relatives four hours to drag the treasure ashore.
"I felt it was something gifted to me by God," Ghrab told Reuters. "My financial situation is very difficult and I am waiting for my reward."
His mother was less happy when she saw the naked Apollo carried into the house, demanding that his private parts be covered. "My mother said: 'What a disaster you have brought with you' as she looked at the huge statue," said Ghrab.
The discoloured green-brown figure shows the youthful, athletic god standing upright on two, muscular legs; he has one arm outstretched, with the palm of his hand held up.
He has compact, curly hair, and gazes out seriously at the world, one of his eyes apparently inlaid with a blue stone iris, the other just a vacant black slit.
Ghrab says he cut off one of the fingers to take to a metals expert, thinking it might have been made of gold. Unbeknownst to him, one of his brothers severed another finger for his own checks. This was melted down by a jeweller.
Family members belonging to a Hamas militia soon took charge of the statue, and at some stage the Apollo appeared on eBay, with the seller telling the buyer to come and collect the item from Gaza.
That would have been easier said than done, however, as Gaza is virtually sealed off from the outside world, with both Israel and Egypt imposing rigid controls on access to the impoverished enclave and its 1.8 million inhabitants.
Whether any potential buyers stepped forward is not clear, but when Hamas's civilian authorities found out about the artefact, they ordered the police to seize it.
Officials at Gaza's tourism ministry told Reuters the statue would not be shown to the public until a criminal investigation into who tried to sell it was completed.
However, Ahmed al-Bursh, the ministry's director of archaeology, said he had seen it and promised that Ghrab would receive a reward once the issue had been resolved.
"It is a precious treasure, an important archaeological discovery," said Bursh. Once the statue has been released by police, his ministry plans to repair it and put it on show in Gaza.
"International institutions have also contacted us and have offered to help with the repair process," he said, adding that a museum in Geneva and the Louvre in Paris wanted to take it on loan.
Like Ghrab, Bursh said the statue had been found at sea. The historian Tarragon said it was vital to know the true location of its discovery.
Some 5,000 years of history lie beneath the sands of the Gaza Strip, which was ruled at various times by ancient Egyptians, Philistines, Romans, Byzantines and crusaders.
Alexander the Great besieged the city and the Roman emperor Hadrian visited. However, local archaeologists have little experience to carry out any scientific digs and many sites remain buried.
Statues such as the Apollo cast would not have been held in isolation, meaning it may prove the tip of an historical iceberg, according to Tarragon.
"A statue at that time was [put] in a complex, in a temple or a palace. If it was in a temple, you should have all the other artefacts of the cult [at the site]," he said, adding that he hoped Hamas appreciated its potential importance.
"There is a feeling that they could find more and more [items] linked to the statue, more and more artefacts, so this is very sensitive," he said.

Source: http://theguardian.com

300,000 Year Old Campfire found in Israel

A newly discovered hearth full of ash and charred bone in a cave in modern-day Israel hints that early humans sat around fires as early as 300,000 years ago — before Homo sapiens arose in Africa.
In and around the hearth, archaeologists say they also found bits of stone tools that were likely used for butchering and cutting animals.

The finds could shed light on a turning point in the development of culture "in which humans first began to regularly use fire both for cooking meat and as a focal point — a sort of campfire — for social gatherings," said archaeologist Ruth Shahack-Gross of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

"They also tell us something about the impressive levels of social and cognitive development of humans living some 300,000 years ago," Shahack-Gross added in a statement.
The centrally located fire pit is about 6.5 feet (2 meters) in diameter at its widest point, and its ash layers suggest the hearth was used repeatedly over time, according to the study, which was detailed in the Journal of Archaeological Science on Jan. 25. Shahack-Gross and colleagues think these features indicate the hearth may have been used by large groups of cave dwellers. What's more, its position implies some planning went into deciding where to put the fire pit, suggesting whoever built it must have had a certain level of intelligence.

Qesem Cave was discovered more than a decade ago during the construction of a road some 7 miles (11 kilometers) east of Tel Aviv. At the site, excavators had previously uncovered other traces of fire (scattered deposits of ash and clumps of soil that had been heated to high temperatures) as well as the butchered bones of big game like deer, aurochs and horse left their by the prehistoric cave dwellers, possibly up to 400,000 years ago.

Anthropologists have debated what constitutes the earliest evidence of controlled fire use — and which hominin species was responsible for it. Ash and burnt bone in Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa suggests human ancestors used fire at least 1 million years ago. Some researchers, meanwhile, have speculated that the teeth of Homo erectus suggest this early human was adapted to eat food cooked over a fire by 1.9 million years ago. A study out last year in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal argued that fire-builders would have needed some sophisticated abilities to keep their hearths burning, such as long-term planning (gathering firewood) and group cooperation.

It's not entirely clear who was cooking at Qesem Cave. A study published about three years ago in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology described teeth found in the cave dating to between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago. The authors speculated the teeth might have belonged to modern humans (Homo sapiens), Neanderthals or perhaps a different species, though they noted they couldn't draw a solid conclusion from their evidence.
Nonetheless, study researcher Avi Gopher, an archaeologist from Tel Aviv University, said in an interview with Nature at the time, "The best match for these teeth are those from the Skhul and Qafzeh caves in northern Israel, which date later [to between 80,000 and 120,000 years ago] and which are generally thought to be modern humans of sorts."
That interpretation is at odds with the predominant view that modern humans, the only human species alive today, originated about 200,000 years ago in Africa before dispersing to other parts of the world.



Source: http://www.livescience.com/42861-early-human-campfire-found-israel.html

New Translation of Hebrew Text May Lead to Ark of the Covenant?

A newly translated Hebrew tells a tale claiming to reveal where treasures from King Solomon's temple were hidden and discusses the fate of the Ark of the Covenant itself.
But unlike the Indiana Jones movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark," the text leaves the exact location of the Ark unclear and states that it, and the other treasures, "shall not be revealed until the day of the coming of the Messiah son of David " putting it out of reach of any would-be treasure seeker. But don't put on your Indiana Jones costume just yet; the text's translator says the book is likely just early Jewish folklore.

King Solomon's Temple, also called the First Temple, was plundered and torched by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century B.C., according to the Hebrew Bible. The Ark of the Covenant is a chest that, when originally built, was said to have held tablets containing the 10 commandments. It was housed in Solomon's Temple, a place that contained many different treasures.

The newly translated text, called "Treatise of the Vessels" (Massekhet Kelim in Hebrew), says the "treasures were concealed by a number of Levites and prophets," writes James Davila, a professor at the University of St. Andrews, in an article in the book "Old Testament Pseudepigrapha More Noncanonical Scriptures Volume 1" (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2013).
"Some of these (treasures) were hidden in various locations in the Land of Israel and in Babylonia, while others were delivered into the hands of the angels Shamshiel, Michael, Gabriel and perhaps Sariel " writes Davila in his article.
The treatise is similar in some ways to the metallic "Copper Scroll," one of the Dead Sea Scrolls found near the site of Qumran in the West Bank. The Copper Scroll also discusses the location of hidden treasure, although not from Solomon's Temple.

The treatise describes the treasures in an imaginative way. One part refers to "seventy-seven tables of gold, and their gold was from the walls of the Garden of Eden that was revealed to Solomon, and they radiated like the radiance of the sun and moon, which radiate at the height of the world."
The oldest confirmed example of the treatise, which survives to present day, is from a book published in Amsterdam in 1648 called "Emek Halachah." In 1876, a scholar named Adolph Jellinek published another copy of the text, which was virtually identical to the 1648 version. Davila is the first to translate the text fully into English.

A story of legendsThe writer of the text likely was not trying to convey factual locations of the hidden treasures of Solomon's Temple, but rather was writing a work of fiction, based on different legends, Davila told LiveScience.

The structure of the story is confusing. In the prologue it states that Shimmur the Levite (he doesn't appear to be a biblical figure) and his companions hid the treasures, "but later on the text mentions the treasures being in the keeping of or hidden by Shamshiel and other angels," Davila said. "I suspect the author collected various legends without too much concern about making them consistent."

Similarities to the Copper ScrollThe Copper Scroll, which dates back around 1,900 years, and is made of copper, shows several "striking parallels" with the newly translated treatise, Davila said.
The treatise says that the treasures from Solomon's Temple were recorded "on a tablet of bronze," a metal like the Copper Scroll. Additionally, among other similarities, the Treatise of the Vessels and Copper Scroll both refer to "vessels" or "implements," including examples made of gold and silver.
These similarities could be a coincidence or part of a tradition of recording important information on metal.
"My guess is that whoever wrote the Treatise of Vessels came up with the same idea [of writing a treasure list on metal] coincidentally on their own, although it is not unthinkable that the writer knew of some ancient tradition or custom about inscribing important information on metal," wrote Davila in the email, noting that metal is a more durable material than parchment or papyrus.

An ongoing storyThe study of the treatise is ongoing, and discoveries continue to be made. For instance, in the mid-20th century a copy of it (with some variations) was discovered and recorded in Beirut, Lebanon, at the end of a series of inscribed plates that record the Book of Ezekiel.
Those plates are now at the Yad Ben Zvi Institute in Israel, although the plates containing the treatise itself are now missing. Recent research has revealed, however, these plates were created in Syria at the turn of the 20th century, about 100 years ago, suggesting the treatise was being told in an elaborate way up until relatively modern times.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/01/09/fate-ark-covenant-revealed-in-hebrew-text/