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Four 1,900-Year-Old Roman Swords Found in a Judean Desert Cave

Apparently stolen by Jewish rebels, the incredibly well-preserved weapons are ‘an extremely rare find, the likes of which have never been found in Israel’

Archaeologists have discovered four 1,900-year-old Roman swords in a cave in the Judean Desert, which experts believe were captured by the Judean rebels during the Bar Kochba revolt and placed in a narrow crevice in the rock.

“We’re talking about an extremely rare find, the likes of which have never been found in Israel,” Dr. Eitan Klein, one of the directors of the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Judean Desert Survey, said in a video accompanying the announcement of the discovery. “Four swords amazingly preserved, including the fine condition of the metal, the handles, and the scabbards.”

The preliminary article on the swords is published in the volume “New Studies in the Archaeology of the Judean Desert: Collected Papers,” which explores new archaeological finds discovered in the Judean Desert Survey Project. A conference launching the book is taking place Wednesday in Jerusalem.

The four swords were discovered shoved into a small fissure in a cave near Ein Gedi National Park, near the Dead Sea. The cave is already well-known to archaeologists, as it contains a stalactite with a fragmentary ink inscription written in ancient Hebrew script characteristic of the First Temple period.

Recently, Dr. Asaf Gayer of Ariel University, geologist Boaz Langford of Hebrew University, and Israel Antiquities Authority photographer Shai Halevi returned to the cave to photograph the stalactite with multispectral photography, which can decipher additional parts of the inscription not visible to the naked eye. While inside the cave, Gayer spotted an extremely well-preserved Roman pilum — a shafted weapon — in a deep, narrow crack in the rock. He also found pieces of carved wood in an adjacent niche that turned out to be parts of the swords’ scabbards.

The researchers reported the find to the Israel Antiquities Authority and returned to the site with the Judean Desert Archaeological Survey Team, which is conducting a multi-year comprehensive survey of more than 800 caves in the Judean Desert to find and preserve archaeological remains before they are looted.

It was then that they discovered the four swords, three of which were found with the blades still inside their scabbards. Researchers also found ornate handles made of wood and metal with leather strips nearby. The arid climate in the Judean Desert helps preserve fragile artifacts that might otherwise be lost to the ravages of time, including materials such as leather and wood, which are rarely found in wetter parts of the country.

Three of the swords are Roman spatha swords, with blades 60 to 65 centimeters (23.5 to 25.5 inches) long. The fourth weapon, a ring-pommel sword, is shorter, with a 45-centimeter (18-inch) blade. The swords likely belonged to Roman soldiers and were stolen by Judean rebels who hid them in a cave either for later use or to avoid being caught with them.

“The blades have been preserved so well, they look like they could be picked up and used right now, even 2,000 years after they were forged,” said Langford. “You just realize that you are touching history, because here you are touching a find whose story you know.”

The Bar Kochba revolt, from 132 to 135 CE, also called the Second Jewish Revolt, was a Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in Judea led by rebel leader Simon Bar Kochba. Archaeologists believe the swords were likely hidden in the crevices inside the cave sometime during the revolt, as it was dangerous for Jews to be found with Roman weapons.

“This is a very rare and unique find on an international level that will shed light on the last moments of the war between the Jewish rebels and the Roman army at the time of the Bar Kochba revolt,” said Klein.

‘A unique time capsule’

The cave survey is being undertaken by the IAA in cooperation with the Archaeology Department of the Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria, and has been funded in part by the Ministry of Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage. Each body allocated about a third of the project budget.

Earlier this year, archaeologists carrying out the Judean Desert cave surveys discovered a rare half-shekel coin minted by the Bar Kochba underground economy.

The cave survey started in 2017 and helped archaeologists discover at least 20 new caves they had not previously known. In 2021, archaeologists announced that one of the caves contained previously undiscovered fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some 60 years after the last pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.

Following the discovery of the swords, archaeologists carried out an extensive excavation of the cave, discovering artifacts from the Chalcolithic period (around 6,000 years ago) and the Roman period (around 2,000 years ago). At the entrance to the cave, researchers found a Bar Kochba bronze coin from the time of the revolt that could help pinpoint the dates when the weapons were hidden.

“This is a dramatic and exciting discovery, touching on a specific moment in time,” said Eli Escusido, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Noting that not all are aware that the dry climatic conditions in the Judean Desert enable the preservation of artifacts that do not survive in other parts of the country, Escusido called the area a “unique time capsule” where it is possible to find “fragments of scrolls, coins from the Jewish Revolt, leather sandals — and now even swords in their scabbards, sharp as if they had only just been hidden away today.”

By Melanie Lidman.

As promised the queue will be set to 50 polls for the next 24 hours

someone on reddit explained 😭

After looking through the evidence, both, but moreso the second.

Ea-Nasir's tablet is dated to 1750 BC, which is coincidentally aligns to the death of Hammurabi. For context, he lived at the end of the Isin-Larsa Period, a time in Babylonia's history where it was a collection of warring city-states. Ur and Larsa were the most powerful of these, since they were farthest south and controlled most of the trade coming up the Persian Gulf. (Isin, near where Hammurabi was from, was in the North and had lost power about 200 years before.)

Right after Hammurabi's death, all the city-states he'd conquered, including Larsa and Ur, decided that they didn't give two squats what the people in the North thought, and started a rebellion.

The tablets in Ea-Nasir's house have been translated. It's very difficult to find them, but the book is called Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period, Leemans 1960, and he makes a series of interpretations that still align with our understanding of the culture today:

Ea-Nasir was hot-headed. 3 tablets note him talking rudely to messengers and traders.

Ea-Nasir sold copper to private merchants AND the temple, which was the government of Ur. The receipt we found is in such a large quantity we can assume the government was likely his primary buyer. The complaint tablets are from notably from private merchants.

Ea-Nasir was an alik-Tilmun; or 'one who travels to Dilmun'.

Where is Dilmun? Good question! Archaeologists spent the next 40 years figuring it out! At this point, they're fairly certain it's in present-day Qatar. The city was used as a midpoint port to bring in copper from Magan and Meluhha (current-day UAE/Oman and India respectively.)

The reason we know this, is because Oman is an old, old copper-producing region. It's an ophiolite (rock from the seafloor that's been uplifted to the surface) that contained a spreading center (think Mid-Atlantic ridge) which forms deposits of copper and other metals as sulfides from the black smoker vents (copper-iron sulfur, lead sulfur, zinc sulfur, etc.)

To produce copper, you have to remove the iron and the sulfur. To remove the iron, you add "flux", which essentially bonds iron to silica, because it likes silica more than copper does. And to remove the sulfur, you add oxygen, which burns off the sulfur as gaseous SO2.

The copper is heavier than the iron and silica, and sinks to the bottom of the furnace. The iron and silica, slag, flow out the side. The resulting ingot looks like the bowl below. And a lot of times, holes remained from gas getting trapped at the bottom.

They measured copper by weight though, so this wasn't too much of a problem. However, if there weren't enough flux, or the fire wasn't hot enough, iron would also get trapped in the copper ingot, making "black copper"; if a merchant wanted the 97% pure copper that could be made using this process, a lot of iron would definitely be considered 'bad copper'.

Switching back to the culture!

Around 1800 BC, the same time as this was going on, the culture of Oman underwent a noticeable decline. Many of their coastal mines stopped producing copper and people moved inland. They also stopped making bronze with tin. This is notable, because tin was scarce in the Bronze Age and insinuates they might've been left out of the trade route. At the very least, they had stopped being Mesopotamia's primary supplier and started doing their best to keep up with the times.

(At this point, I'll point a finger to Cyprus, which was firing up its smelters at the same time. Cyprus is very interesting, but it pertains less to Ea-Nasir, so I'll just wave enthusiastically at their oxhide ingot copper and tin trade domination.)

So we can't know if Ea-Nasir wasn't a chronic scammer, but I think all the evidence outlines a different story.

Ur, a powerful city-state rebelling against a conqueror within Ea-Nasir's lifetime. Ea-Nasir, selling large amounts of copper to the government, and smaller sales to private merchants who complained about being given scraps; a man who was still traveling to trade copper in a state that had lost their monopoly on the copper trade and was possibly producing some less-than-ideal quality.

He mostly sounds like a person with strong ties to his city and culture. Maybe not the best copper merchant, but certainly a passionate one.

References below the cut: