...featuring a coffin excavated from Deir el Balah...Moshe Dayan had a paw in the retrieval and collectorship of 20 of them. This design is a semi-rendition of one of the more anthropoid of the lot--anthropoid because they have human facial features.
Deir el Balah is south of Gaza on the coastal plain. The sarcophagi date to the 14-13th centuries BC, a time when when Egypt's New Kingdom empire may have extended into southern Canaan.
The identity of the residents of these effigies could be anyone's guess but a few of the usual suspects range from military officials, Egyptian civil servants and engineers, and other dignitaries.
I can assure you that the 20 coffins make a solemn assemblage of the first water each with his expressive face in a different pose or style.
Last I heard (my info is from a Biblical Archaeology Review magazine from the July/August 1986 issue...a bit outdated yet valuable as a perspective which one may hear echoing from 1986. It's a fascinating magazine/hardcopy from the past, that's what it is.)
Moshe Dayan, amateur archaeologist and Israeli general, collected many more items than you might think he should have...perhaps you do, perhaps you don't.
But the point may always be made that if Dayan had not had the means and the willpower to do this collecting, the coffins might have been decimated by bulldozers or just never discovered in that sandy old cemetery...these relics are quite older than what most people have truck with in their daily grinds unless you hang with the museum herds which are liable to be grazing about.
Back Then
Dayan's widow was paid 1 million dollars for the Collection thus keeping it intact at the time but that was 20+ years ago, people! Someone get to Googling or ixquicking, ok?
Because I wonder if the Boys are still together? ;D
Deir el Balah is south of Gaza on the coastal plain. The sarcophagi date to the 14-13th centuries BC, a time when when Egypt's New Kingdom empire may have extended into southern Canaan.
The identity of the residents of these effigies could be anyone's guess but a few of the usual suspects range from military officials, Egyptian civil servants and engineers, and other dignitaries.
I can assure you that the 20 coffins make a solemn assemblage of the first water each with his expressive face in a different pose or style.
Last I heard (my info is from a Biblical Archaeology Review magazine from the July/August 1986 issue...a bit outdated yet valuable as a perspective which one may hear echoing from 1986. It's a fascinating magazine/hardcopy from the past, that's what it is.)
Moshe Dayan, amateur archaeologist and Israeli general, collected many more items than you might think he should have...perhaps you do, perhaps you don't.
But the point may always be made that if Dayan had not had the means and the willpower to do this collecting, the coffins might have been decimated by bulldozers or just never discovered in that sandy old cemetery...these relics are quite older than what most people have truck with in their daily grinds unless you hang with the museum herds which are liable to be grazing about.
Back Then
Dayan's widow was paid 1 million dollars for the Collection thus keeping it intact at the time but that was 20+ years ago, people! Someone get to Googling or ixquicking, ok?
Because I wonder if the Boys are still together? ;D
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