BY  :  Anugrah Kumar, Christian Post Contributor

A team of Israeli and German archaeologists has found the skeletal remains of up to 89 individuals, most of them infants and young children, inside a repurposed ancient cistern at Tel Azekah, a site about 19 miles southwest of Jerusalem, in what researchers say is the first discovery of its kind in Israel.

The find was excavated between 2012 and 2014 by the Lautenschläger Azekah Expedition and has now been published in the journal Palestine Exploration Quarterly. It dates to the early Persian period, about 2,500 years ago, according to Ancient Origins.

Osteological analysis found that about 90% of the individuals were under age 5, and more than 70% were under age 2, according to the study, co-authored by Oded Lipschits, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University who leads the expedition, and Hila May, a physical anthropologist at the same institution.

Between two and eight individuals were identified as older children or young adults, Haaretz reported. Radiocarbon dating, pottery typology and stratigraphy — the study of soil and rock layers — placed the burials in the fifth century B.C., when Tel Azekah was part of the Persian province of Yehud, the name the Persian Empire gave to the province of Judah after conquering the region.

The cistern was originally carved by the Canaanites to store water and remained in use through the Iron Age. It went out of use around 586 B.C., when the Babylonians conquered Judah and destroyed Jerusalem. After several decades of abandonment, the dry cistern was put to a new use once the region fell under Persian rule, according to the researchers.

No evidence of trauma, burning or cut marks was found on the bones, making violence, ritual sacrifice and infanticide unlikely causes of death. The varied ages of the children and the layered stratigraphy of the deposits also indicated the cistern was used over about a century, ruling out a single catastrophic event such as a plague or massacre, noted The Times of Israel.

The research team proposed that the burial site was reserved for infants who died before being weaned from breastfeeding, a stage that in ancient societies typically lasted until age 2 or 3.

The researchers suggested that children who died before reaching this milestone may not have been regarded as fully formed social persons and therefore were not accorded individual graves.

Lipschits used biblical texts to support the hypothesis, citing the story of Hannah in 1 Samuel, in which the prophet Samuel’s mother keeps her son with her until he is weaned before presenting him at the temple, and the account in Genesis 21 of Abraham holding a feast to mark Isaac’s weaning.

Lipschits was quoted as saying that Samuel “did not have his own identity” before weaning.
The children were not interred without any acknowledgment. Alongside the remains, archaeologists found pottery jars, stone and mortar hammers, and small pieces of jewelry, including beads, copper earrings and rings. These modest offerings differed markedly from the individual pit graves or cist tombs typical of adult burials in the Persian-period southern Levant.

Lipschits said the discovery may help resolve a longstanding puzzle in the archaeology of the region. Excavations of cemeteries from the Iron Age and Persian period had rarely turned up infant remains, a gap researchers had struggled to explain.

A comparable phenomenon has been documented elsewhere in the ancient world.
A cemetery on the Greek island of Astypalaia held more than 2,400 infant burials and no adults, most dating to the 6th and 5th centuries B.C.

Hundreds of infants and fetuses from the second century B.C. were also found in wells outside the main squares of Athens and Messene in the Peloponnese.

The Azekah team distinguished these mass infant burials from cases of deliberate newborn disposal, such as remains found in a sewer beneath a Roman-era brothel in Ashkelon and cremated bones of children sacrificed in Carthaginian ritual sites known as tophets.

Anthropologist May told Haaretz the discovery pointed to a social rather than emotional reality.

“I think this burial custom is more a social question, it’s about their role in society and at what age someone was considered a full member of society,” she said.

DNA extraction from several individuals is ongoing.

Researchers hope the results will clarify the ethnicity, sex and familial relationships of the buried children. The few older individuals found among the remains are harder to explain. The team has tentatively suggested they may have been people of low social status, individuals who died far from their family tomb, or young mothers who died in childbirth and were buried alongside stillborn children .

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