Randy Jones, a warehouse worker for Goodwill Industries in Seattle, was on a loading dock last spring sorting through the usual boxes of donated dishes, cookware, costume jewelry, clothing and bric-a-brac when his eye was caught by some handwritten words in faded ink on an old camera carton:
1500 BC
Pitcher from
Armageddon
Palestine
from Oriental Institute
Univ of Chic
When Jones opened the carton, there it was, a 4-inch juglet with a single handle packed carefully in cotton. As he later learned, it came from the ruins of Megiddo, an ancient city for which the Hebrew name is Armageddon–the place where, in Revelation, it is prophesied that on Judgment Day the final struggle will take place between the forces of good and evil.
Though sorters like Jones occasionally come across something of exceptional value–recently, for example, an $8,000 Tiffany bracelet and a Native American blanket that sold for $15,000–it’s quite another matter to find amongst other people’s castoffs an object of true antiquity.
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In this case, something 3,500 years old.
Oddly enough, the story of how the little jug first got to the Oriental Institute in 1926, surviving along the way the battles of Old Testament armies, Roman legions and even modern war, is better known than the rest of its journey:
That is, what happened to the artifact between the time the Institute loaned it out to a patron in 1943 to raise money during financial hard times, and the moment it landed on the loading dock in Washington state.
Exactly where the jug has spent the last 55 years is a question likely never to be answered, but the museum doesn’t seem to mind. The important thing is that it survived once again and is back in the hands of museum scientists who may glean from it enough information to add a brushstroke or two to still-sketchy pictures of early human civilization.
That the jug had that kind of potential value certainly wasn’t evident when Jones found it in the box in Seattle.
Made of roughly textured brown clay, it looked much like a cheap, unadorned knick-knack from Mexico, except for what seemed to be a coded number painted in neat black lettering on the bottom of the jug: A14020.
“Obviously this wasn’t something I was going to send out for resale in one of our stores,” Jones said. Instead, he sent it on to one of his bosses, Dennsi Grosek.
Grosek called the Oriental Institute and eventually found museum registrar Ray Tindel.
“When he described it to me and mentioned the coded number on the bottom,” Tindel said, “I was certain that it was ours.
“All I had to do was find a registration card in our files with that number. That took about two minutes, and some of the mystery was solved.”
The registration card described the object precisely: a brown earthenware juglet, 96 millimeters high (slightly less than four inches).
P.L.O. Guy, a freelance British archeologist working on June 27, 1926, found in the Institute’s dig at the ancient ruins of Megiddo, a mound of debris covering 13 acres a few miles southeast of Haifa in what was then Palestine.
Megiddo is the archeological site that many believe author James Michener used as his model for his novel on Middle Eastern history, “The Source.”
First occupied by humans about 4500 B.C., Megiddo is a place that is mentioned often in the Old Testament. Its prominence was born of its position at the crossroads of two of the oldest roads in the world, trade and military routes leading from Egypt to Mesopotamia and from cities on the Phoenician coast to those in the Jordan River Valley.
As such, it was fought over frequently, rising many times from simple village to town to walled city, peopled by a succession of cultures, only to be looted and repeatedly crushed into dust. It fell for the last time around the time of Christ and was never inhabited again.
The little juglet was uncovered in the second year of an extraordinary 15-year Oriental Institute project to dig through the ruins of Megiddo.
The juglet was manufactured during the late bronze age at a time when Megiddo prospered under a local prince who had a palace in the city.
“We aren’t sure what the juglet was used for,” Tindel said. “We found from that period lots of large storage jars right down to small pieces like this one. There is some thought that the small ones were used to dip out contents from the big ones, which were too big to pour from, whether it was oil, wine or whatever.”
The juglet may have been preserved for posterity when it fell into a protective niche as the city around it was smashed into desolation by the armies of the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III about 1468 B.C. The place remained unoccupied for several decades after that.
The Megiddo excavations took place in the Oriental Institute’s golden years under its director and founder, James Henry Breasted, famed for coining the term “fertile crescent,” the Middle Eastern region that gave rise to man’s first civilization. In the 1920s and 1930s he oversaw a dozen major excavations in ruins in Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Iran, probably history’s largest single archeological enterprise by one institution.
Nearly all of it was funded, at a cost of $300,000 a year, by Breasted’s friend, John D. Rockefeller Jr.
In those days, the best artifacts remained in the country in which they were found, but some lesser artifacts were allowed to go to the institutions that uncovered them. In the case of Megiddo, the Oriental Institute brought back pottery, iron and bronze weapons, paving stones, carved ivory, beads, jewelry and religious artifacts.
“You can’t bring out stuff like that anymore,” Tindel said, “so this is a highly treasured collection.”
When Breasted died in 1935, the Rockefellers cut off funding, and in the depths of the Depression and World War II, the Institute fell into dire financial straits. To make a little money, it lent out duplicate pieces from its collection to wealthy donors on “permanent loan.”
In that manner, on May 7, 1943, the juglet was sent off to professor Forest C. Dana at Iowa State College, Ames, Iowa. A native of Seattle, Dana had a distinguished career as an inventor and professor of industrial engineering at Iowa State. An accomplished, widely traveled amateur photographer, he had spent a lot of time in the Middle East.
“He probably gave us $25 or $50, and this item was sent to him,” Tindel said.
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“The hope was people would enjoy having pieces like this for their curios or mantlepieces, then eventually would turn them back to us.” But he said it’s easy to understand how such pieces could have a different fate.
“The benefactor would forget about it, eventually die, and the heirs would be totally in the dark about the object,” he speculated.
Dana died in 1966 in Phoenix, where he had lived in retirement. What happened to the juglet is unknown, until it was sent off with other castoffs to Goodwill.
Even now, the juglet isn’t worth much, Tindel said, maybe $100. But by using technology never dreamed of in 1943, archeologists now may be able to find traces of what the juglet once contained, thus giving the world a little clearer view on life as it was lived in Armageddon 3,500 years ago.