Strata

New Finds at Ein Gedi

There’s Still (Archaeological) Gold in Them Thar Hills

Excavators have found two folded papyri and 11 bronze coins in a desert cave within the Ein Gedi Nature Reserve, near the western shore of the Dead Sea. Three of the coins bear the name “Shimon,” Hebrew for Simon, and date to the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome (132–135 A.D.), which was led by Simon Bar-Kokhba. The artifacts were discovered last November by a team headed by Hebrew University’s Amos Frumkin and Bar Ilan University’s Hanan Eshel, inside a cave measuring just 23 feet by 13 feet.

“It is very emotional and exciting to make such a find,” Frumkin told BAR. “There has been this notion among some archaeologists for many years that the Judean Desert is clean of archaeological documents because most of the discoveries were made between 1947 and 1965 [particularly the Dead Sea Scrolls—Ed.]. They said that everything had either been looted or discovered. But when they actually looked at the archaeological literature and documentation covering what had been done in the Judean Desert, they discovered that large areas of the desert had not been explored at all.”