Abstract
BETH-PHELET.—The chief work in Palestine of the British School of Archæology in Egypt during the past season is described by Sir Flinders Petrie in Ancient Egypt for June. The expedition has been at work on Tell Fara, 9 miles south of Gerar and 18 miles from Gaza. The thickness of the stone walling showed its importance. Overlooking the chief water supply on the road to Egypt, it became a place of escape from the desert and from the Bedawy, as its name signifies. Last season's workreached as far as eighteenth-dynasty levels. Other levels remain for future excavation. The tombs, where most of the digging was done, go back through the Jewish occupation. It was probably the town of the Pelethites, David's bodyguard. The hill is accessible only on the west, where it was guarded by a brick wall of fifteen feet thick. The bricks are of the date of Rameses III. Towards the south there was a Jewish fort. In the plain to the north were the cemeteries. All had been attacked anciently; but one tomb held a bronze bed of Mesopo-tamian type and a silver bowl with a ladle, also of silver, of which the handle was a girl swimming. Many beads were found, and numerous scarabs indicated the Egyptian connexion. A bronze figure of a bear and a calendar board with pegs for thirty days were among the other objects found. Much pottery, including painted Philistine ware of the twentieth-twenty-first dynasties, was in perfect condition.
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Research Items. Nature 122, 253–255 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/122253a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/122253a0