Archaeologists excavating the Bronze Age acropolis at Tel Shimron in northern Israel have been digging a massive and extremely enigmatic building this summer. With walls up to four meters thick, the huge mud-brick construction housed no room or other large space within, but only a single tight passageway only wide enough to let one person through at a time.
Eager to discover what it led to, the archaeologists freed the corridor of thousands of years of sediment that had filled it, and progressively followed the passageway deeper and deeper underground.
Last month they hit paydirt. Well, at least some kind of paydirt. After a sharp left turn at the rear of this mysterious building, the corridor broadens to a monumental arch, perfectly preserved after nearly 4,000 years despite being made of fragile sun-dried mudbricks.
The joint expedition by Wheaton College and Tel Aviv University is hailing the arch as a rare find, one of few examples of this architectural feature to have survived this long in the Levant.
Source: www.haaretz.com
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