Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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Treasure From a Clay Jar.
Source: English.tau.ac.il web site (See link below)
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We’re always told that the journey is just as important as the destination. This is true in many aspects of life, but perhaps nowhere as much as in scientific research. Flexibility, curiosity, and attention to detail can lead to a treasure you weren’t even expecting to find. TAU’s scientists talk about research that began one way and ended another, thanks to a few surprises along the way...
That is the beginning of an article in the Tel Avive University News entitled Recalculating: when research starts one way and ends another. It is about surprise discoveries that change the direction of the research.
Continuing with the first story in the article...
A treasure in a pot
A team of archeologists on an excavation mission found that sometimes the appearance of a clay pot is no indication of its contents. "On one of the excavations in Megiddo, we removed the partitions separating the different sections of the dig and found a whole clay pot full of dirt," says Naama Walzer, a doctoral student in the Department of Archaeology and Early Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University.
"We packed it up and planned to send it to a molecular residue lab to find out what used to be stored inside of this pot, which we dated to around 1100 BCE." The pot was stored in an office, but after a while it became clear that preservation in that area of the excavation wasn’t up to standard, so the team decided to empty the pot, in a controlled way, and poured out its contents on the table. "We weren’t expecting to find what ended up being inside: a treasure trove of jewelry, considered one of the greatest troves found in Israel from the Biblical period!" (See photo at top of this post.)
Among other things the trove contained nine large earrings and a seal ring, over a thousand small gold beads, and silver necklaces and jewelry. "This is how we found the big treasure of area H, which is now part of the permanent exhibition, at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem," concludes Walzer.
That is the first story of several interesting stories found in that article. Below is the link for the rest of the article.
https://english.tau.ac.il/news/recalculating\
If you look at the earrings found in the over three-thousand year-old jar, could you tell that they are not modern or how old they are? They aren't really that much different from modern earrings. That is how difficult it can be to identify the age of an item by just looking at the form of the object. Those types of hooks worked then and would still work today.
Someone once said that he learned everything he knew from six fellows: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How. So here is one question - Why nine earrings. Seems an odd number - in more ways than one. Loss? Extra Earring? Only wore one at a time? Just a grouping? What? Who knows?
Written around 59AD by Paul (who, by the way, was a shipwreck survivor), 2 Corinthians 4:7-9, reads, But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. 8We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. He was evidently familiar with treasures in jars of clay and saw it as a suitable metaphor.
You might find the second story in the article interesting too. In the picture below, notice the swirly sedimentary layers. It is at the bottom of the Dead Sea (lowest place on earth that is dry land) and the swirls, it seems, were created by earthquakes hundreds of thousands of years ago.
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I was picking up some small bits of metal when I was finding cobs a few weeks ago, and said I was going to take a closer look at some of those to try to figure out what they are. Here are a couple of small encrusted bits that I'll be cleaning.
The one above seems to be as heavy as lead. I wouldn't be surprised if that is what it is.
This one is flatter and hard to compare but doesn't feel as dense.
Both have a brown/orange encrustation.
They are being cleaned now.
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| Sourcea; MagicSeaWeed.com |
As you can see, the surf will be building today up to around six feet.
Happy Valentine's Day,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net