An enigmatic sculpture of a king's head dating back nearly 3,000 years has set off a modern-day mystery caper as scholars try to figure out whose face it depicts.
The five-centimetre sculpture is a rare example of figurative art from the Holy Land during the 9th century BC - a period associated with biblical kings.
Exquisitely preserved but for a bit of missing beard, nothing quite like it has been found before.
While scholars are certain the stern bearded figure donning a golden crown represents royalty, they are less sure which king it symbolises, or which kingdom he may have ruled.
Archaeologists unearthed the diminutive figurine in 2017 during excavations at a site called Abel Beth Maacah, located just south of Israel's border with Lebanon, near the modern-day town of Metula.
Nineteenth-century archaeologists identified the site, then home to a village called Abil al-Qamh, with the similarly named city mentioned in the Book of Kings.
During the 9th century BC, the ancient town was situated in a liminal zone between three regional powers: the Aramean kingdom based in Damascus to the east, the Phoenician city of Tyre to the west, and the Israelite kingdom, with its capital in Samaria to the south.
Kings 1 15:20 mentions Abel Beth Maacah in a list of cities attacked by the Aramean King Ben Hadad in a campaign against the Israelite kingdom.
"This location is very important because it suggests that the site may have shifted hands between these polities, more likely between Aram-Damascus and Israel," said Hebrew University archaeologist Naama Yahalom-Mack, who has headed the joint dig with California's Azusa Pacific University since 2013.
Yahalom-Mack's team was digging through the floor of a massive Iron Age structure in the summer of 2017 when a volunteer who arrived for the day struck pay dirt. The layer where the head was found dates to the 9th century B.C., the epoch associated with the rival biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
In a rare move, archaeologists and curators at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem rushed to put the piece on public display. A detailed report is set for publication in the June edition of the journal Near Eastern Archaeology.
Eran Arie, the Israel Museum's curator of Iron Age and Persian archaeology, said the discovery was one of a kind. "In the Iron Age, if there's any figurative art, and there largely isn't, it's of very low quality. And this is of exquisite quality."
