Just a few of the top ten I picked out. Herod the Great’s green thumb: An unknown Egyptian city: A crucifixion foot: More Dead Sea discoveries: Philistine bananas:
King Herod—best known in the Bible for ordering the deaths of any infants who might be Jesus’ age—turns out to have had a gardening hobby. Soil samples from excavations at his Jericho palace, taken almost a half century ago, were recently analyzed, and the pollen particles revealed sophisticated horticulture.
Archaeologists announced the discovery of a previously unknown city on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor. The city appears to have been suddenly abandoned. What remains today may reveal many details of daily life in Egypt around the time of Moses.
The Roman practice of crucifixion is well known from ancient sources, including the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ death. But up until this month, the only archaeological evidence of crucifixion had been found in a burial cave in Israel in 1986. In early December, it was announced that a skeleton had been excavated from a grave at Fenstanton in Cambridgeshire, England. The remains had a nail driven into the back of the right foot. The burial dates to around A.D. 400, during the Roman occupation of England.
For archaeologists, the most amazing discovery was a 10,500-year-old basket. The basket, complete with intact lid, dates to the pre-pottery Neolithic period, making it the oldest basket in existence. It is reminiscent of the biblical baskets, such as the one that held the baby Moses in Exodus, the ones that carried the leftovers when Christ fed the multitudes in the Gospels, and the one that helped the apostle Paul escape persecution, when he was lowered over the wall of Damascus.
We know that King Solomon fed his guests beef, lamb, venison, and poultry, in addition to bread, cakes, dates, and other delicacies. But … bananas?
The amount of water needed to grow bananas makes them an unlikely fruit in ancient Israel, but a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported some unexpected remains were scraped off the teeth of Canaanites and Philistines who died in the late second millennia B.C., the period of Solomon’s reign. Teeth don’t lie: They ate bananas. Christina Warinner, a Harvard anthropologist and one of the lead investigators, said the imported fruit may have been dried, like modern-day banana chips.
