Israeli archaeologists have discovered four Roman-era swords with their wooden and leather hilts and scabbards and steel blades exquisitely preserved after 1,900 years in a desert cave near the Dead Sea.
The find was part of the antiquities authority’s Judean Desert Survey, which aims to document and excavate caves near the Dead Sea and secure scrolls and other precious artifacts before looters have a chance to plunder them.
Archaeologists returned to this particular cave near the desert oasis of Ein Gedi to document an inscription found decades earlier. But though the swords were found on the eastern edge of the Roman Empire, they were likely crafted in a distant European province and brought to the province of Judaea by soldiers in the military, said Guy Stiebel, a Tel Aviv University archaeologist specializing in Roman military history.
“Each one of them can tell you an entire story,” he said. Future research will focus on studying its manufacture and the origin of the materials in order to tease out the history of the objects and the people it belonged to — Roman soldiers and Jewish rebels.
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