Uncovered: Oldest Artefact Ever Found in Jerusalem

A Neolithic arrowhead uncovered on Mount Zion is the oldest and smallest complete object of its kind ever found in Jerusalem.

For the first time ever, or at least since the 1920s, an artefact from the Neolithic period, at least 7000 years old, has been found in ancient Jerusalem.

The artefact is an arrowhead about the size of one’s pinkie nail, fashioned from white flint with delicate pink veins.

Slightly more than 1.5 centimetres long, it is also one of the most complete artefacts of its kind ever found in the Old City area, says Professor Shimon Gibson of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is one of the directors of the Mount Zion excavation project, together with professors Rafael Lewis and James Tabor. Gibson and the team are currently working on sorting through millions of artefacts uncovered from the excavations.

The arrowhead's only imperfection is a slightly blunted tip, but its sides remain razor-sharp. In the Neolithic, this miniature weapon would have been deadly, the archaeologists excavating Mount Zion assured Haaretz.

It was spotted by eagle-eyed North Carolina graduate student William Stumpff while using the flotation technique to weed out miniature archaeological goodies from boxfuls of soil samples excavated from the site.

The real conundrum is why such Neolithic tools have not been found before in and around the Old City of Jerusalem. Or maybe they were: In the 1920s, while excavating a cave near Jerusalem’s Gihon spring in the area of the later City of David, Robert Stewart Macalister and Reverend John Garrow Duncan found flint implements which they thought to be Neolithic – but they never published their discovery. 

The earliest tools definitively identified hitherto have been from the later Chalcolithic period. 

Uncovered: Oldest Artefact Ever Found in Jerusalem (Haaretz)