A trove of ancient artefacts, some dating back to the Bronze Age, has been unearthed in Tel Aviv’s Jaffa port, Haaretz reports.
According to the newspaper, the discoveries were made during salvage digs across five locations in the ancient town – and the findings were catalogued by the Israel Antiquities Authority last month.
The oldest artefact is known as "the burial of an infant," and is thought to date back to the Middle Bronze Age. The remains are interred in a jar, which was apparently "a common form of burial for infants in this and earlier times throughout Canaan and the Near East."
Another discovery is a mosaic that likely adorned the entrance to a cemetery during the city's Byzantine period. It reads "Be of good courage, all who are buried here. This is it!"
The excavations also yielded items harking back to the Islamic period of the city, including "fragments of an inscribed jug from the ninth or 10th century," alongside a partially preserved text reading "a dry powder for the treatment of headache." Several cannonballs, which archaeologists believe were "probably fired as part of internal Ottoman conflict or the Egyptian-Turkish war of the 1830s," were also dug up.