San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Figurine from 9th century B.C. depicts a king, but which one?
JERUSALEM — An enigmatic sculpture of a king’s head dating back nearly 3,000 years has set off a modern-day mystery caper as scholars try to figure out whose face it depicts.
The 2-inch sculpture is a rare example of figurative art from the Holy Land during the 9th century B.C. — a period associated with biblical kings. Exquisitely preserved but for a bit of missing beard, nothing quite like it has been found before.
While scholars are certain the stern figure wearing a golden crown represents royalty, they are less sure which king it symbolizes or which kingdom he may have ruled.
Archaeologists unearthed the figurine last year during excavations at a site called Abel Beth Maacah, just south of Israel’s border with Lebanon.
Nineteenth-century archaeologists identified the site, then home to a village called Abil al-Qamh, with the similarly named city mentioned in the Book of Kings.
During the 9th century B.C., the ancient town was in a zone among three regional powers: the Aramean kingdom based in Damascus to the east, the Phoenician city of Tyre to the west, and the Israelite kingdom, with its capital in Samaria to the south.
Kings 1 15:20 mentions Abel Beth Maacah in a list of cities attacked by the Aramean King Ben Hadad in a campaign against the Israelite kingdom.
“This location is very important because it suggests that the site may have shifted hands between these polities, more likely between AramDamascus and Israel,” said Hebrew University archaeologist Naama Yahalom-Mack, who has headed the joint dig with California’s Azusa Pacific University since 2013.
Eran Arie, the Israel Museum’s curator of Iron Age and Persian archaeology, said the discovery was one of a kind. “In the Iron Age, if there’s any figurative art, and there largely isn’t, it’s of very low quality. And this is of exquisite quality.”
The figurine is made of faience, a glasslike material that was popular in jewelry and small human and animal figurines in ancient Egypt and the Near East.
A crucial clue for identifying it as a Near Eastern monarch is its “very interesting hairdo,” Yahalom-Mack said.
The figure’s hair is pulled back in thick locks that cover the ears and is held in place by a striped diadem of gold. Its hairstyle looks similar to the way ancient Egyptians depicted neighboring Near Eastern peoples in art.
Because Carbon-14 dating cannot give a more exact date for the statue’s creation other than sometime in the 9th century, the field of potential candidates is large. Yahalom-Mack said it could be Kings Ben Hadad or Hazael of Damascus, Ahab or Jehu of Israel, or Ithobaal of Tyre, all characters appearing in the biblical narrative.