A 2,700-year-old mother-of-pearl seal has been found in a rubbish pit in ancient Israel

“At first, I found it hard to believe – I didn’t know of any other examples,” says Dr Ido Koch, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University who led the research.

The seal is over 2,700 years old. It had been lying in the ground since the 7th century BC — an era when one of the most powerful empires of the ancient world ruled these lands.

The study has been published in the journal Levant.

Details

Tel Hadid is an ancient hill overlooking Israel’s central coastal plain. In the 7th century BC, the Kingdom of Israel was absorbed by the Assyrian Empire — a great power stretching from modern-day Iraq to Egypt. The Assyrians practised mass deportations: conquered peoples were forcibly resettled in other parts of the empire, mixing the population to prevent uprisings.

Cuneiform tablets found at Tel Hadid indicate that some of the inhabitants of this place were precisely such settlers — people torn from their homeland and cast into a foreign city. The seal most likely belonged to one of them. This is a hypothesis, but a well-founded one.

Seals in the ancient world were roughly the equivalent of what a signature or personal seal is today. They were used to authenticate documents and mark property. But the line between a seal and an ornament was blurred: they were worn on rings or strung on necklaces. This seal could well have been both a personal amulet and a status symbol at the same time.

The material is particularly noteworthy. Mother-of-pearl is not local: the shell from which it was carved does not originate from this region. How it ended up here is a mystery in itself. ‘Why mother-of-pearl? The honest answer is: we don’t know,’ says Koch. Perhaps the owner simply liked its colour and sheen. The iridescent seal would clearly have set its owner apart from others.

Scientists examined the seal under powerful microscopes and carried out chemical analysis. The hole for the cord is neatly drilled — a well-known ancient technique for working with shells. The engraving, however, is uneven. The lines vary in depth; in places, you can see where the craftsman slipped whilst trying to work with the fragile material without cracking it. Mother-of-pearl is a capricious stone: press a little too hard and the surface will split.

The seal depicts a crescent moon above a triangle, a figure in prayer with a triangular body, and an altar. The authors suggest that the craftsman first engraved the two triangles and added the remaining elements later. The symbol of the moon resembles the emblem of the moon god of Harran — one of the principal religious symbols of the Assyrian Empire. This suggests that the people of Tell Hadid deliberately incorporated Assyrian symbolism into local artefacts — either adopting the culture of the conquerors or simply living within the broader imperial sphere.

Why this matters

Finds like this bring history back down to a human scale. The Assyrian deportations are just a dry entry in history textbooks. A mother-of-pearl seal in a rubbish pit represents someone’s life: a person torn from their home, who brought a precious shell object with them, wore it as jewellery or a talisman, and then somehow ended up in the rubbish.

The technical aspect is also important for science. Traces of the craftsman’s mistakes offer a rare opportunity to reconstruct the specific tools and techniques used to work with mother-of-pearl in the 7th century BC. It is a fragment of knowledge about the crafts of an era for which almost no documents have survived.

“This seal reminds us that the movement of materials, ideas and people over long distances was a normal part of life,” says Koch.

Background

Tel Hadid has been studied by a team from Tel Aviv University for many years. The site preserves layers of history from the Late Bronze Age to the present day — including a village destroyed in 1948. Work on the excavations continues, although the regional conflict has forced some of Koch’s colleagues to stay away from the site for three years now. The excavations are being carried out by local volunteers and visiting students.

The Iron Age in the Middle East was an era of great empires, mass migrations and cultural mixing. The Assyrian Empire was one of the first in history to use systematic deportations as a tool of state governance. Biblical texts, cuneiform chronicles and now this small mother-of-pearl seal – all these are fragments of the same picture.

Source

Ido Koch et al., ‘A unique mother-of-pearl stamp seal from Late Iron Age Tel Ḥadid, Israel’, Levant (2026).