This gold earring, covered in ibex (wild goat) decorations, was recently discovered at Tel Megiddo in northern Israel. For thousands of years, it, along with other pieces of jewelry, lay wrapped in textiles and hidden in a dirt-filled jug. Even after archaeologists from Tel Aviv University dug up the vessel, they didn’t immediately unearth its valuable contents — first, they had to analyze the outside of the ceramic container.
The Tel, or archaeological mound, at Megiddo has very distinct strata that mark different time periods, and knowing the layer in which the jug was discovered allowed researchers to date the jewelry to around 1100 BCE, the period when Tel Megiddo was a large Canaanite city-state. Some of the jewelry’s materials and designs, however, are similar to Egyptian ones, and may have originated either in Egypt or with a craftsman who had been influenced by other Egyptian jewelry. Either explanation is possible: at the time, Egypt’s control over the area was just ending. Perhaps a Canaanite woman purchased these pieces to wear, hid them away when fleeing her home during the Egyptian withdrawal, and then never returned.
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