Ancient Seals in Jerusalem - Eilat Mazar

[Music] true and this is really amazing um because you don't you expect to learn about um you know where usually you find houses fortifications layers that testify about how how people lived and it's a general picture but coming and getting you know such a personal stamp or signature of a person who actually mentioned in the bible without mistakes spelling his name this is incredible so this is something archaeologists uh just can dream about but sometimes sometimes it does happen and it happened to us more than once you're talking about literally the signatures of of people that that the characters of the bible have assigned their names to seals and stamps that have are being excavated millennia later and we can now triangulate the very characters of that place with the text and so whoever wrote the bible whoever wrote that text had intimate and deep knowledge of the events and the characters of those times and this is even more astonishing because you can imagine that you'll find such a huge stone field that cannot be damaged over the thousands of years that past that for the time being but then this is not the case we're talking about uh still impressions that are in in a very little tiny one centimeter diameter that were saved because they were burnt and became hard because of the fire of destruction and after um going through a method of wet shifting uh we wet shifted all our excavation in this area this is huge work but then it's it's great beneficial because we found in this very small area more than 200 seal impressions and more than 70 are containing hebrew names and professor mazar's success ladies and gentlemen our listeners has influenced many many other archaeologists to say we should start doing that too so they love fortress professor garfinkel said we need to let this area let's do the wet sifting everybody realizes if you could estimate for us right if you found 200 seal impressions right of the how many would you have found without the the wet sifting would it have been 10 20 very few no no there is no chance that we could find it it looks like mud and it it's you can you can step on it and you wouldn't feel i mean this is little tiny mud hard mud thing so you're saying it's absolutely essential in a site like this to do wet sifting yes but you know this what they think it's it's an outcome of the uh very recent years we should thank these people that did such a big crime on the temple mount itself uh you know because they forced the situation because you know you know that the the wax the people on the in the muslim high trust yes it's they they excavated illegally a large amount of ancient fields with tractors and loaded hundreds of trucks and dumped the whatever they excavated within the temple mount outside to the garbage and then some of it was saved and professor barkai and the sahih swag they they uh initiated such a a whole program about how to sift part of the dumps that they found that was not dumped in the garbage and they could locate this part and start sifting it and in order to get it shifted faster they developed this method about wet sifting and suddenly what they realized that they could find a lot of small stuff and then we added now we're doing it a after them teaching us to do so and finding all these uh you know much many more jewelry and the bones of animals that we didn't know all these fish bones that we didn't know that people in jerusalem ate so much many fish last week we interviewed the ronnie reich on the implications of the fish trade and the fact that there were traders and it was preserved and then they got there and it means it's beyond the little village exactly so this is a very important information that we shouldn't miss but we didn't have in hand we did dry shifting but this is not the same some you cannot come to the same name results with these i'll tell you just uh more than 60 percent of our fines came from safety weight safety what a statistic more than 60 of the fines so of course you cannot shift everything you dig but then again i think that our archaeologists nowadays realize that they have to choose um the the areas and the locations the specific locations that they must withshift i i deeply appreciate what you're saying about the wet sifting i have to tell you as a layperson uh who's visited many archaeological sites there's no question that even a metallic coin when it's been buried underground for for centuries doesn't look like anything especially the older coins and the smaller coins become encrusted with dirt and with grime unless using some kind of a device it's almost impossible to see that there's any metal there at all and so the wet sifting provides you with with a way of removing much uh um crud that's accumulated on the on the surface of whatever it happens to be and you're able to see it visually where you wouldn't be able to do that without the wet sifting absolutely right and then even more than that the people at the wet shifting get the professor back in tahiti organized they are trained for some time now to do so and they train other people and now they develop a kind of system that when they receive material that needs to be shifted they are trained to see it's not just you know as a beginner that starts to sift they are very well trained for it joe farfey explained to us that and if you don't stay trained you lose it you need days and days and days of sensitivity so that you really are picking everything up