“This discovery opened a window into the world of pilgrims.”
Archaeologists have discovered “intriguing” stone carvings in Gaza that were made by Christians 1,500 years ago. As archaeologists have found, Christian pilgrims of the 15th century, who traveled to other places in modern Israel and Palestine, left an “intriguing” drawing on the port facility in Gaza.
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The sketches, believed to be around 1,500 years old, show a two-masted ship with no sails but a small flag waving at the top. Although the ship is an ancient symbol of Christianity, archaeologists believe that this is an authentic image of the ship on which the pilgrims traveled.
According to the Daily Mail, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) has discovered carvings in the ancient Rahat Church, where archaeologists have been excavating since 2019.
It is believed that Christians traveling to the Holy Land first stopped in Gaza on their way to Jerusalem, Bethlehem and other monasteries in the Negav Hills.
Archaeologists have reported that the site of the church where the paintings were discovered is adjacent to an ancient Roman road leading from the port of Gaza along the Mediterranean coast to Beersheba, the main city Negawa.
This was the most likely route for pilgrims to reach Israel's holy sites, the IAA noted in a post on social media.
«It is logical that their first stop after disembarking from the ships in the port of Gaza was this church , discovered during our excavations south of Rahat,” said the team involved in the excavations, adding: “The site is only half a day’s walk from the port.”
The church in which the drawings were kept dates back to the Byzantine era, which was the beginning of the early Middle Ages, leading researchers to believe that the artwork dates from that time period.
«This is a greeting from Christian pilgrims arriving by ship to the port of Gaza,» said excavation leaders Oren Shmueli, Dr. Elena Kogan-Zehavi and Dr. Noe David Michael.
“Pilgrims visited the church and left their personal mark in the form of drawings of ships on its walls,” the team continued. The ship is indeed an ancient Christian symbol, but in this case it appears to be a true graphic representation of the actual ships on which pilgrims sailed to the Holy Land.'
The first image shows a line drawing with a slightly pointed bow and oars on either side of the ship, giving the impression that this is a bird's eye view of the ship.
However, “it seems that the artist was trying to create a three-dimensional drawing,” says Professor Deborah Zwickel from the University of Haifa's Faculty of Marine Civilizations: “Perhaps the lines under this image represent the path made by oars through the water. Ships or crosses left by Christian pilgrims as witnesses to their visit can also be found in Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
According to the IAA, the second drawing indicated that the artist was familiar with marine life because the foremast is slanted towards the bow and does not have a sail, known as an artemon, which was used to steer the ship.
Both stones were found upside down, which may have meant that the person who set the stone during the construction of the church either didn't know there was a design on the slab or didn't care, says the IAA.
«This surprising and intriguing discovery of ship paintings in a Byzantine-period church in the Northern Negev gives us a window into the world of Christian pilgrims who visited Holy Land 1,500 years ago,» said Israel Antiquities Authority director Eli Escusido.
The find «provides first-hand evidence of the ships they traveled on and the maritime world of that time,» he added.