The Phoenician figures, accumulated over 400 years, were part of a cult to seafaring and fertility.
The Phoenician figures, accumulated over 400 years, were part of a cult to seafaring and fertility.
HAIFA, Israel — — By Lee Bullen
A trove of ancient clay figurines found off the coast of Israel in the 1970s and thought to be from a single shipwreck over 2,500 years ago was actually accumulated over several centuries.
The cache comprises a series of Phoenician offerings to the gods.
In one of the earliest finds of marine archeology, researchers discovered hundreds of figurines on the seabed off the Israeli coast in 1972. At the time, experts assumed the ancient artifacts were from a Phoenician shipwreck that had rested under the Mediterranean for 2,500 years.
The pieces were never fully analyzed, just stored away and forgotten for decades.
New research by a team led by Meir Edrey, an archeologist at the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies at the University of Haifa in Israel, has produced a new reason for the sunken treasure.
Scientists believe the artifacts were not deposited on the seabed all at once in a shipwreck, but were accumulated over 400 years, between the 7th and 3rd centuries B.C.
The artifacts were offerings, part of a cult devoted to seafaring and fertility.
“These figurines, the majority of them, display attributes related to fertility, to childbearing and to pregnancy,” said Edrey.
The Phoenicians were a seafaring merchant culture that spanned the Mediterranean that reached its height during the millennium before Carthage was defeated by Rome in 146 B.C.
A number of the Phoenician figurines began turning up in the 1970s on the black market and investigators found hundreds of figurines and clay jars at a site called Shavei Zion off the coast of Galilee. At the time, they were attributed to a shipwreck dating to the 6th century B.C.
However, Edrey’s team found that many items were different in style, suggesting they came from different time periods.
Researchers analyzed over 300 figurines and found many had symbols associated with Tanit, a goddess of the Phoenician pantheon and main goddess of Carthage by the 5th century B.C.
Other items bore fertility symbols including a pregnant woman carrying a child.
“Tanit was the mother goddess for the pantheon. She quite literally was the mum of the family of deities,” said Aaron Brody, director of the Bade Museum at the Pacific School of Religion. “The figurines are in some ways a kind of bridge between the earthly world and the divine.”
Knowledge of Tanit and Phoenician religion is limited, as most documents from that period have not survived.
(Edited by Fern Siegel and Matthew B. Hall)
