UW student finds precious gem at Israeli dig

A 2,300-year-old gemstone delicately carved with a portrait of Alexander the Great was discovered by a University of Washington student on an archaeological dig in Israel, a professor at the school says.

"This is an incredibly rare find," said Sarah Stroup, a UW associate professor of classics who led a group of 20 Washington students who took part in the summer dig. "The carving is of the highest quality that could have been done in that period."

The carnelian stone, less than a half-inch long, was found at the Tel Dor archaeological site on Israel's northwest coast. It is believed to date from shortly after 332 B.C., when Alexander conquered the region.

The carving shows Alexander "as young and forceful, with a strong chin, straight nose and long curly hair held in place by a diadem," Ayelet Gilboa, chairman of the archaeology department at Israel's University of Haifa, said in a news release.

The find was announced Tuesday by Gilboa and Ilan Sharon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the leaders of the dig at Tel Dor, a 4,000-year-old village that once a major port on the Mediterranean. The gemstone has been cleaned and is on display at an Israeli museum.

Stroup told The Seattle Times the stone likely was set in a ring and worn by a wealthy resident as a status symbol. She said its discovery challenges the assumption that the region was populated by simple people unacquainted with Greek aesthetics.

Stroup said the gemstone was found in mid-July by Megan Webb, who majored in ceramics at Philadelphia University and was earning some summer credits at the UW's Tel Dor Field School while applying to graduate schools. The UW team returned to the U.S. early last month.

"Never in all my years excavating have I ever seen anything like this come up from the ground, and I don't ever expect to again," Stroup said.

While coins bearing Alexander's image are relatively common, University of California at Berkeley professor Andrew Stewart, an expert on the Greek king, said there are only two or three dozen carved stones with his likeness dating from pre-Roman times.

The gem, he said, is priceless.

"This is a very nice discovery, and one that's very hard to make, given that this kind of thing can escape very easily," he said, referring to the stone's tiny size. "It's a very useful addition to our corpus of Alexander images."

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On the Net:

University of Haifa: http://www.haifa.ac.il/index(underscore)eng.html

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Information from: The Seattle Times, http://www.seattletimes.com