Discovering Stone Age High Society in Israel

Excavations of an ancient village in northern Israel have uncovered hundreds of artifacts that show links between a section of the village's upper class and Mesopotamia and other distant civilizations.

Archaeologist Yair Milevski, who heads the project at the Ein Tzipori archaeological site near the city of Nazareth, told Xinhua on December 10 that the discovery will contribute to understanding of Stone Age elite society and trade activities in the region.

Stone Age artifacts discovered at Ein Zippori, including a collection of colored stones. (Source: Israel Antiquities Authority)

The artifacts date back to the Chalcolithic period, more than 7,000 years ago, and are believed to be part of the local Wadi Rabah culture.

This discovery shows that the Wadi Rabah culture had close trade relations with other distant cultures as far away as Mesopotamia and Anatolia, now part of Türkiye.

According to Milevsky, this type of trade is not unusual, "but what is special is that we have a large collection of antiquities in one place and the most likely way is that they carried out these exchanges by land. We assume that they conducted transactions by barter because they did not have money, and sometimes this form of exchange originated from very far away areas because we also found obsidian objects from Anatolia and other parts of Turkey as well as other objects from Syria and the northern Levant."

Archaeologists believe that the luxury items discovered at Ein Tzipori belonged to the upper class and that this was not a religious site or an area with prosperous trading activities./.

According to (Vietnam+) - VT