Ancient World

Deir el-Balah sarcophagi

The Deir el-Balah anthropoid sarcophagi are pottery coffins created in the Bronze Age and discovered in the 1960s and 1970s. Around fifty anthropoid sarcophagi have been recovered from a cemetery in Deir el-Balah in the Gaza Strip that was used mainly in the 13th century BCE and perhaps a century before or after. The sarcophagi were created locally and influenced by Egyptian styles. Many of the coffins were looted by Moshe Dayan before the cemetery was excavated by Trude Dothan and Itzhaq Beit-Arieh. Some of the sarcophagi have ended up in the Israel Museum, the Hecht Museum, the Bible Lands Museum, and the Jordan Archaeological Museum.

Also on this shelf

See also

• ▸Beveled rim bowl
• ▸German submarine U-175
• ▸Caerleon Roman Fortress and Baths

Uncatalogued shelf

Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.