Toddler’s Family Hike Ends With a 3,800-Year-Old Scarab Amulet Discovery
The hill had been dug by archaeologists for nearly 15 years before a three-and-a-half-year-old girl found something they hadn’t. In March 2025, Ziv Nitzan was walking with her family along a gravel-scattered trail at Tel Azekah, a Bronze Age mound in Israel’s Judean foothills, when she bent down and picked up one small stone out of thousands. She rubbed the sand off it and called her sister over. Her older sister Omer looked at it and called their parents. What they were holding was not a stone.
The Israel Antiquities Authority later confirmed the object as a Canaanite scarab amulet, carved approximately 3,800 years ago during the Middle Bronze Age. The same site where Ziv made her scarab amulet discovery is referenced in 1 Samuel 17:1 as the backdrop for the biblical battle between David and Goliath – a detail that would make the find remarkable even without the extraordinary circumstances of how it was found. But the circumstances are the point. Professional excavators with 15 years of systematic digging at Tel Azekah had documented the site meticulously. A toddler on a family outing simply picked the artifact up off the path.
Tel Azekah sits approximately 50 miles southeast of Tel Aviv, and Ziv’s find was believed to belong to Canaanite communities whose culture thrived there nearly four millennia ago, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority. The discovery raises a question that archaeologists themselves are still working through: what else is lying just beneath the surface at one of the most consequential ancient sites in the region?
A Toddler Found What Trained Excavators Hadn’t
In early March 2025, three-and-a-half-year-old Ziv Nitzan from Moshav Ramot Meir stumbled upon an ancient scarab amulet dating back approximately 3,800 years during a family trip to Tel Azekah near Beit Shemesh. The find was purely accidental. According to her sister Omer, the family was walking along the path when Ziv bent down and, out of all the stones around her, picked up one particular stone. When she rubbed it and removed the sand, they saw something was different about it.
That reaction – the realization that something ordinary had turned out to be extraordinary – led the family to do exactly what Israel’s antiquities laws require. They immediately reported the find to the Israel Antiquities Authority. What could have been pocketed as a souvenir was instead turned over to the professionals who could properly identify and preserve it. The IAA confirmed it was a legitimate archaeological artifact, not a random curiosity, and the story went from a family hike to an international news event.
Nitzan uncovered the amulet in a section of Tel Azekah where historical artifacts have previously been found, archaeologists noted. The object hadn’t been missed by prior excavations so much as it had been lying in an unsecured surface trail rather than within a documented excavation layer. Because the object was not recovered from a documented room or soil layer, its age came from comparison with similar artifacts – a process archaeologists call typological dating, which means identifying an object by comparing its form, decoration, and manufacturing style with securely dated examples.
Semyon Gendler, Judah Region District Archaeologist on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, commended the family for their prompt reporting and awarded Ziv a certificate of appreciation for her good citizenship. The IAA also announced plans to highlight the scarab during an upcoming exhibition at the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein National Campus for the Archaeology of Israel, placing it alongside other Egyptian and Canaanite artifacts, many of which have never been displayed before.
The Scarab Amulet Discovery and What It Actually Was
The stone Ziv had found was a 3,800-year-old Canaanite scarab seal from the Middle Bronze Age – an ornate object that originated in ancient Egypt, where the dung beetle carried deep symbolic and sacred meaning. To understand why a carved beetle-shaped stone mattered so much to the ancient world, you have to understand how Egyptians saw the insect itself.
The scarab, in ancient Egyptian religion, was an important symbol in the form of the dung beetle, which lays its eggs in dung balls fashioned through rolling. The beetle was associated with the divine manifestation of the early morning sun, Khepri, whose name was written with the scarab hieroglyph and who was believed to roll the disk of the morning sun over the eastern horizon at daybreak. Its name in Egyptian derives from the verb “to come into being,” or “to be created” – because the Egyptians saw the scarab as a symbol of the incarnation of God the Creator. That layered meaning made the beetle’s image one of the most repeated forms in all of ancient material culture.
Dr. Daphna Ben-Tor, Curator of Egyptian Archaeology at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, identified the seal as a Canaanite scarab from the Middle Bronze Age. “Scarabs were used in this period as seals and as amulets,” Ben-Tor said. “They were found in graves, in public buildings and in private homes. Sometimes they bear symbols and messages that reflect religious beliefs or status.” The Israel Museum holds one of the world’s significant scarab collections, and Ben-Tor’s scholarly work focuses specifically on Egyptian-Levantine relations in the second millennium BC, based primarily on scarab evidence from both regions.
The materials used to craft these objects were also carefully chosen. Ancient artisans made scarabs from materials like steatite (soapstone), faience, ivory, and semi-precious stones. Steatite – a soft stone also known as soapstone – could be carved easily and then hardened with a glazed coating, giving the finished object durability despite its initially soft state. Faience, a manufactured material, was made from crushed quartz melted and reground into a glassy paste, then finished with a bright, glasslike surface that often gave these amulets their characteristic blue-green color. The scarab shape originated in Egypt, but not every example found in Canaan was imported from the Nile Valley – local craftspeople also made Canaanite scarabs, borrowing Egyptian forms and symbols while producing objects for communities in the Levant.
Tel Azekah: A Site That Keeps Revealing Its Past
Located in the heart of the Judean Lowlands, Tel Azekah is an important site that was occupied for some 3,500 years, from the Early Bronze Age to the Byzantine period. It’s a “tell” – an archaeological mound formed from the layered debris of settlements built one on top of another over millennia. The city flourished during the Middle Bronze Age (around 2000 – 1550 BCE) and maintained a level of autonomy from Canaan’s Egyptian overlords during the Late Bronze Age (around 1550 – 1200 BCE).
The site has strong biblical connections that make each discovery there carry added weight. The tell is the location of the ancient town of Azekah, which is referenced in 1 Samuel 17:1 during the biblical battle between David and Goliath. Sitting high above the Elah Valley, it commanded a strategic junction of ancient roads that connected the Mediterranean coastal plain to the Judean highlands. Tel Azekah also gains archaeological importance from its destruction by the Assyrian King Sennacherib in 701 BCE – an event documented in both biblical texts and Assyrian royal inscriptions, making it one of the few sites in Israel that can be cross-referenced across multiple ancient written sources.
Professor Oded Lipschits, director of the Tel Aviv University excavation at Tel Azekah, noted that after nearly 15 years of excavations, findings confirm that during the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, Tel Azekah was one of the most significant cities in the Judean foothills. Ziv’s scarab is just one of the many Egyptian and Canaanite artifacts discovered at Tel Azekah, which collectively attest to the close ties and cultural influences between Canaan and Egypt during that period. Lipschits personally traveled to the site to meet Ziv and her family after the discovery – a gesture that speaks to how seriously the professional archaeological community took the find.
Despite limited excavations in the early 20th century, very little was known about the site’s archaeology until the launch of the Lautenschläger Azekah Expedition, co-directed by Lipschits and Professor Manfred Oeming of the Faculty of Theology at Heidelberg University. Since 2012, the expedition has been uncovering the historical and archaeological record that Tel Azekah holds, according to the Biblical Archaeology Society. Ziv’s chance find now joins that formal record.
The Nitzan family did something genuinely uncommon: they found something extraordinary, recognized it, and gave it up. The impulse to pocket a small, beautiful stone from a hiking trail is natural enough. Instead, they contacted the authorities, handed the object over, and let the archaeological process take it from there. Unreported surface finds disappear into private collections with regularity, and the contextual information that makes them historically valuable – where exactly they were found, in what orientation, alongside what other objects – is lost permanently.
For their efforts, the IAA thanked the Nitzans by presenting Ziv with a certificate of appreciation for good citizenship, and the agency announced the scarab would be highlighted during an upcoming exhibition at the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein National Campus for the Archaeology of Israel. A three-and-a-half-year-old who called a 3,800-year-old artifact a “beautiful stone” is getting her own piece of that history – a detail that, in its own way, says something about how the past keeps finding its way into the present.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.
