Scriptural Mormonism: Discovery of an Egyptian Curved Sword from the Late Bronze Age at Tel Hreis (Chreiz)

Sunday, February 23, 2025

Discovery of an Egyptian Curved Sword from the Late Bronze Age at Tel Hreis (Chreiz)

Commenting on the discoveries at Tel Hreis (Chreiz), Avner Raban and Ehud Galilli reported that:

there is a carving depicting a turtle or a beetle. [Egyptian scarab with the hieroglyphic value of Hafr (=life).] Both the shape and the bi-conical hole (Fig. 5) are characteristic of Syrian or Cypriot stone anchors of the Late Bronze Age (Frost, 1979; and a personal communication in her letter to E. Galili, 1981). Some 5 m off this anchor a typical Egyptian sickle sword was found with the wooden cheeks of the handle still preserved (Fig. 6). Other Egyptian bronze objects were salvaged there in the 1960s. A bronze plaque with a rather long Egyptian inscription on it was sold off by treasure hunters before being documented. Recently a group of 8 tin ingots was salvaged by our divers at the site. They are of bar shape and one of them bears badly eroded script signs of undefined character. While these ingots were shaped in a secondary refining, two other hemispheric ingots may very well represent the original smelting form. One of them was sawed and cut in half in antiquity. It is 36 kg in weight (see Figs 7, 8).

Five smaller ingots are of lead and each bears an incised sign on its convex side (Fig. 9). The best estimated date for these metal items and the stone anchors is 14-13th century BCE and their provenence is most likely to be in the Nile valley. This is the third and the largest group of Late Bronze Age metal ingots to include tin. Of the other two one included an ox-hide copper ingot and was found less than 1 km south (Galili & Shmueli, 1983) and the third probably comprised broken pieces of copper and lead ingots. It was found a few miles down the coast (Wachsmann & Raveh, 1980:257; 1984a). This site is being studied by E. Galili, with the scientific assistance of Professor B. Rothenberg. (Avner Raban and Ehud Galilli, “Recent maritime archaeological research in Israel–A preliminary report,” The International Journal for Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration 14, no. 4 [1985]: 327, 329)

While the entire article should be read, here is figure 6, the Egyptian sickle sword, showing that curved swords before Lehi et al. (cf. Book of Mormon cimeter) are not an anachronism in the text: