Who carved the man in the stone?

Sculptor Yuval Lufan, of Kibbutz Ginosar, has been making basalt sculptures for a few years. Ground-clearing work carried out on the kibbutz last summer to make room for banana groves supplied an abundance of sculpting material as the tractors unearthed large chunks of stone in the fields. When Lufan went to the area to choose some suitable stones, he was surprised to find traces of etching on one of them.

Lufan and his brother Moshe are veteran archaeology buffs. In 1986, when Lake Kinneret was at an all-time low, they found a 2,000-year-old boat submerged in the muddy lake bed, which had been preserved practically whole. The boat was reconstructed and is on display in the nearby Yigal Allon Center. Many Christian tourists come to see what has been dubbed "the Jesus boat."

The stone with the engravings, however, is a remnant from artists from a much earlier era, the likes of which Yuval had never seen. Stones engraved with the images of animals and people have been discovered along the desert routes of the southern Negev and Sinai. In northern Israel, this phenomenon was unknown.

Antiquities Authority archaeologist Yotam Tepper, who examined the etchings, found that they show a man holding a pole, riding in a standing position on a horse or donkey. On his right is a depiction of a square object or building, capped with a dome. Below the building and the riding man is an animal, to the left of which are two more animals, one with its tail raised, the other with its tail lowered. Tepper suggests that the picture portrays a leopard attacking another animal.

The field in which the stone was found is at the source of the Amud River, known for its prehistoric sites. Still, Tepper says that it is difficult to connect the stone Lufan found with any prehistoric period.

Scenes of a leopard attacking an animal are known from the Neolithic era, the fifth millennium B.C.E., and from much later periods. It is therefore difficult to tell exactly when the images were carved in the stone found in Ginosar. A few hundred meters from the site at which the stone was found there are ancient ruins on which the caliphs from the Moslem Umayyad period - the seventh and eighth centuries C.E. - built a magnificent palace with many domes that could be seen from a distance. Tepper thinks that the square domed building was carved in the stone by a man who lived in the area during that period, immortalizing the palace.

The stone picture found by Lufan did not remain a solitary find in the north for long. Recently other stone etchings have been discovered near Poriya and further north, near Kfar Hanasi. The stones and the etchings are still being examined to determine their age and their meaning.