Students on field trip stumble upon 1,400-year-old lion statue in Israel, photos show

Aspen Pflughoeft
·2 min read
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Walking along a sloping hill in northern Israel, two students spotted a large gray rock. Looking closer, they realized this wasn’t just any rock.

A group of about 20 Kinneret Academic College students went on a field trip to archaeological sites in Golan Heights on March 1, college officials said in a news release. The field trip was led by Mordecai Aviam, an archaeology professor.

Aviam took the students to Ein Nashut, an archaeological site with ruins of an ancient synagogue. He told the students to spread out, see what they could find and come back in half an hour, the release said.

Two students, Tzvia Dahan and Michael Benish, stumbled upon an unusually shaped rock and thought it could be a carving, school officials said. Thinking the stone too heavy to move, the pair photographed the potential find and kept going.

“Afterward we sat together and students described what they had found,” Aviam told Haaretz. “And one student said, ‘We found something that looks like a carving of an animal.’”

“My heart stopped,” Aviam told the outlet. “I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

The group went back to get a closer look at the stone. Aviam identified the stone as “a fragment of a beautiful high-relief of a lioness nursing a cub,” the release said.

Worn from centuries of exposure, the basalt relief statue had a semi-rectangular shape with an animal on the right hand side leaning down toward the center, photos show.

The lioness statue sitting on the grass.
The lioness statue sitting on the grass.

The sculpture dates between the fifth and sixth century A.D., Aviam told McClatchy News. This dating overlaps with the Byzantine era, the Times of Israel reported.

Lions “had a place of honor in art during late Roman times and Byzantine times,” Aviam told Haaretz. “The Ein Nashut synagogue had the biggest collection of lion and lioness sculptures found so far.”

The 1,400-year-old sculpture found by the students weighed about 62 pounds, the Times of Israel reported.

Concerned that someone would steal the sculpture, the students hauled the heavy rock out of the park, the release said. They notified the Israel Antiquities Authority of their find and gave the artifact to Kinneret College for short-term holding.

The stone lioness wasn’t the only artifact uncovered by the university students. A few hours earlier, the group visited the Majduliyya excavation site where another student, Liel Maimoni, found a blue-green coin, the release said. The Roman coin dated to the third century A.D.

The front and back of the Roman coin another student found.
The front and back of the Roman coin another student found.

“The important thing is how excited the students were,” Aviam told Haaretz. “It was (a) wonderful example of what our department at the college does.”

Ein Nashut is in the Golan Heights region, about 100 miles northeast of Tel Aviv.

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