North of Nahal Zohar in Israel’s Judean Desert, teams from the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Ministry of Heritage are stripping back rubble.
A desert puzzle above Nahal Zohar
The work is led by Dr. Eitan Klein, deputy director of the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Robbery Prevention Unit. His research focuses on protecting and studying the archaeology of the Judean Desert caves.
Seen from a distance, the structure looks like a simple mound. Up close it becomes a pyramid built from blocks so large that each one weighs hundreds of pounds.
The site belongs to the Hellenistic period, an era when Greek-style kingdoms ruled much of the eastern Mediterranean.
Bronze coins from Ptolemaic kings and from the later ruler Antiochus IV anchor its dates in the third and early second centuries BCE.
Beneath the pyramid, archaeologists have identified a way station where travelers once stopped in the shade of the hilltop structure.
Volunteers working in the first days of the dig uncovered Greek texts, bronze vessels, weapons, textiles, and small personal items.
Clues written on metal and papyrus
Some of the most fragile discoveries are pieces of papyrus, a writing material made from pressed reeds that usually rots away in damp climates.
In the dry air of the southern Judean Desert, these scraps have survived long enough to preserve names, payments, and tax notes.
Metal finds tell their own story. Excavators have collected a tight cluster of bronze and copper coins that track the move from Ptolemaic to Seleucid control.
The mix of weapons, furniture fragments, and finely woven cloth suggests that people lived and worked here, not just watched from afar.
“This pyramidal structure we discovered is huge, and made of hand-hewn stones, each one weighing hundreds of kilograms,” said Dr. Klein.
For many volunteers, the appeal is as much emotional, as it is scientific. They spend days under shade cloths, brushing sand from floors and carrying buckets, aware that the last residents left more than two millennia ago.
Rescue archaeology on the cliff edge
The Nahal Zohar excavation is part of a national campaign of rescue archaeology, urgent digs carried out to save sites before they are damaged or robbed.
In the cliffs along the Dead Sea, the threat is real, because antiquities theft has targeted caves since Dead Sea Scrolls first reached dealers.
Over the last eight years, specialist teams from the Israel Antiquities Authority have surveyed 100 miles of cliffs and located about 900 caves.
They have retrieved thousands of artifacts that might otherwise have vanished into private collections.
Many of those items are organic objects that almost never survive elsewhere, including scraps of scrolls, wooden utensils, leather sandals, and coin hoards.
One phase of this wider project brought new fragments of biblical scrolls and a 10,500-year-old woven basket to light in nearby caves.
These finds underscored how much material was still sealed in the rock. The same effort hardened official attitudes toward theft, pairing excavation seasons with enforcement so that potential looters knew experts were already on the cliffs.
Academic reports from the Judean Desert Caves Archaeological Project describe a hybrid operation that mixes police work with painstaking survey and mapping.
Archaeologists climb into remote ravines with rope gear, document every surface, and then decide which niches hold enough promise to justify full excavation.
Trade, taxes, and unanswered questions
All of this effort circles back to an economic story. The Dead Sea supplied salt and bitumen, a natural tar used to seal buildings and boats, so control of those resources meant wealth.
Chemical studies of archaeological bitumen show that material from the Dead Sea traveled to Egypt and beyond. There it became part of embalming mixtures and waterproof coatings.
Control of that trade in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods helped pay for armies, garrisons, and fortified posts along desert tracks.
That background makes a fortified post above Nahal Zohar, watching caravans that carried salt and bitumen toward Mediterranean ports, a very plausible idea.
That context explains why scholars think the Nahal Zohar hilltop was more than a random monument.
Some researchers argue that the pyramid and its way station formed a post that protected caravans carrying salt and bitumen toward Mediterranean ports.
Others think the visible pyramid may have become a monumental grave in Roman times after its original function faded.
“The Judean Desert survey is one of the most important archaeological operations ever undertaken in the State of Israel’s history,” said Eli Escusido, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority.
