A 3½-year-old girl, Ziv Nitzan, discovered a 3,800-year-old Egyptian amulet while hiking near Jerusalem. The amulet, dating back to the Bronze Age, is engraved with a scarab beetle design.
Ziv noticed the amulet because of its unique shape and the "teeth" on it, later identified as the engraving. The Israel Antiquities Authority collected the artifact.
This is not the first time children have found ancient treasures in Israel. Recent examples include:
A 3½-year-old in Israel recently made an important archaeological discovery.
The child, Ziv Nitzan, was hiking with her family last month on a dirt trail about 25 miles outside Jerusalem when a small rock caught her attention. She was drawn to it, she said in an interview translated from Hebrew by her mother, because “it had teeth on it.”
Naturally, Ziv picked it up. When she rubbed off the dirt, “she noticed that it was something very special,” her mother, Sivan Nitzan, said.
The alluring pebble turned out to be a 3,800-year-old Egyptian amulet, engraved with the design of an insect known as a scarab and dating from the Bronze Age, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority, which later collected it.
It wasn’t the first time that a young hiker had stumbled upon an archaeological treasure in Israel, given its rich history.
Last year, while on a hike on Mount Carmel in Haifa, a 13-year-old boy found a Roman-era ring with an engraving of the goddess Minerva. In 2016, a 7-year-old boy on a trip with friends in the Beit She’an Valley discovered a well-preserved, 3,400-year-old carving of a nude woman. And many sharp-eyed children have unearthed coins made during periods of Roman or Hasmonean rule.
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