Two interesting Finds

July 30 – Monday

We have one more week of digging at Umaryi and then the last day or so will be clean-up and preparing the various sites for final photographs.  There has been good progress on the Iron Age 1 house that has been the focus of my team, but last Friday and today we have been working on the removal of a balk that traversed one of its rooms.  A balk is one meter wide and about 2 meters deep so it contains a great deal of dirt, mud brick and other rubble.  It is not surprising therefore that we have filled, carried and sifted over 800 guffahs in the last two days of work.  The conservative weight of a guffah filled with dirt would be at least 20 pounds, so that means 100 guffahs amount to about one ton.  At a rough estimate we shifted 8 tons of dirt and that does not take into account the dozens of large bounders that weigh anywhere up to 200 pounds.

The Balk Walk

There was only a minor amount of pottery in the balk and nothing of real interest, but as several other members of the team were cleaning out the floor of the ballroom two very interesting objects were found.  One is a completely intact oil lamp that had some features that intrigued the archeologists.  By the Greek period, lamps were being made in a mold with a rather small opening at the top and usually with some decoration.  This lamp was plain and was made by hand without any decoration and had a rather large opening at the top.  These features would place it before the Greek era, in the Iron Age 2 period. 

The Iron Age 2 lamp

Another very interesting find was the broken handle of a pottery jar, notable because it showed a distinct seal towards the top of the handle.  The experts who can interpret these seals immediately recognized the seal as Egyptian from the time of Ramesses 4, and was further evidence of the trade which must have occurred along this route from Egypt through to Damascus and Mesopotamia 

  Pottery jar handle with an Egyptian seal