Elephant Mosaic In 5th Century Synagogue Uncovered

Posted: 08/09/2014 7:31 am EDT
Updated: 5 hours ago
The Huffington Post | By Antonia Blumberg

There are many amazing characters and creatures described in the Hebrew Bible, but elephants are not among them.

Imagine the surprise of a team of archaeologists who were in the midst of their fourth summer of excavations at an ancient synagogue in Israel’s Lower Galilee when they discovered elephants in a mosaic panel where they expected only to find biblical scenes.

There on the floor of a 5th century synagogue in the ancient Jewish village of Huqoq was an entire mosaic panel depicting non-biblical scenes, uncovered for the first time in 1,600 years. Until now, every other decoration archaeologists have discovered on an ancient synagogue has depicted scenes from the Hebrew Bible, as Director of the Huqoq excavations Jodi Magness from the the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) told HuffPost.

Three previous summers of excavations unearthed some fascinating but traditionally biblical discoveries, but during the 2014 dig season Magness and her team discovered an entire mosaic floor panel in the synagogue that depicted a three-part scene, which Magness said the creators likely intended as a story-telling decoration.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/09/galilee-elephant-mosaic_n_5658512.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

http://college.unc.edu/2014/07/02/mosaics2014/

http://huqoqexcavationproject.org/