Israeli experts find ‘mystery’ Bronze Age dolmen

Israeli archeologists have unearthed a “rare
and mysterious” Bronze Age dolmen in the
Galilee hills, the Israel Antiquities Authority
said on Sunday.



Israeli archeologists have unearthed a “rare
and mysterious” Bronze Age dolmen in the
Galilee hills, the Israel Antiquities Authority
said on Sunday.
An IAA statement said that the capstone of the
basalt chamber weighed a whopping 50 tonnes
and its underside bore about 15 intricate
carved designs.
“This is the first art ever documented in a
dolmen in the Middle East,” the authority
quoted Uri Berger, one of its archaeologists, as
saying. “The engraved shapes depict a straight
line going to the centre of an arc,” Berger
said.
“No parallels exist for these shapes in the
engraved rock drawings of the Middle East,
and their significance remains a mystery.”
The statement did not say when the table-like
structure was discovered adjacent to a kibbutz
in the upper Galilee region of northern Israel,
but dated it to the Middle Bronze Age, about
4,000 years ago.
It said the object was flanked by four other
smaller dolmens and the whole was covered
by an enormous mound of rocks weighing a
total of about 400 tonnes.
“What we have here is a huge monumental
structure,” the statement added.
“It bears witness to the existence of a
significant and established governmental
system in the region” during the period.
It added that the scale of building would have
required a large amount of manpower that
must have been housed and fed during
construction, but said much remains
unknown.
“The circumstances surrounding the
construction of the dolmens, the technology
involved in it and the culture of the people
who built them are still one of the great
mysteries of the archaeology of Israel,” it
concluded.