About Us
Founded in 1944, the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science develops philanthropic support for the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and advances its mission of science for the future of humanity.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/illuminating-jewish-life-in-a-muslim-empire/
Jan 14, 2013...
Prof. Haggai Ben-Shammai of the National Library of Israel, which obtained 29 handwritten texts from the 11th century. Jim Hollander/European Pressphoto Agency
JERUSALEM — A batch of 1,000-year-old manuscripts from the mountainous northern reaches of war-torn Afghanistan, reportedly found in a cave inhabited by foxes, has revealed previously unknown details about the cultural, economic and religious life of a thriving but little understood Jewish society in a Persian part of the Muslim empire of the 11th century.
Oct 19, 2016...
An excavated area at Tel Megiddo from 2014 shows a stone-paved floor that has fire-blackened sediment. The wall consists of collapsed red and yellowish mud bricks. Credit: Ruth Shahack-Gross
About 3,000 years ago, a fire destroyed the Near East city of Tel Megiddo, leaving ash and burned mud-brick buildings in its wake. And according to a new study, the blaze may have leveled the entire city in a mere 2 to 3 hours.
Jul 26, 2017...
The structure in which shattered jugs were found during the summer 2017 Israel Antiquities Authority dig, attesting to the destruction. (Eliyahu Yanai, Courtesy of the City of David Archive)
New finds in the City of David confirm the veracity of the biblical account of the Babylonian capture and conquest of First Temple period Jerusalem. The event is commemorated next Tuesday on the Hebrew date Tisha B’av (August 1) in a day of fasting and mourning, Israeli experts said.According to Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Dr. Joe Uziel, co-director of the current excavations at the City of David, findings discovered in the site’s eastern slope, including a row of 2,600-year-old rooms and their contents — all covered with visible layers of charcoal ash — aid in understanding the days leading up to and the act of the destruction.Within the collapsed rooms were uncovered rare artifacts, including a unique, apparently Egyptian, ivory statue of a nude woman, and smashed pottery jars with a rosette seal which was in royal use during the final decade before the fall of the First Temple, according to co-director Ortal Chalaf.“These seals are characteristic of the end of the First Temple period and were used for the administrative system that developed towards the end of the Judean dynasty. Classifying objects facilitated controlling, overseeing, collecting, marketing and storing crop yields. The rosette, in essence, replaced the ‘For the King’ seal used in the earlier administrative system,” said Chalaf.Additionally, charred remains of wood, grape seeds, and fish scales and bones will be carbon dated by members of the interdisciplinary cooperative team of Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologists and Weizmann Institute scientists Elisabetta Boaretto and her postdoctoral fellow Johanna Regev, who were present at the dig site.According to biblical descriptions, in 586 BCE, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar vanquished the Judaean king Zedekiah and razed his capital city, Jerusalem. The Babylonian captain of the guard Nebuzaradan was dispatched into the city, where, as told in the Book of Jeremiah, he “burned the house of the Lord, and the king’s house; and all the houses of Jerusalem, even every great man’s house, burned he with fire.”At the dig site, the rampant destruction caused by a fiery inferno is clearly seen. Burnt charcoal layers of destruction preserved flooring and utensils in situ, giving a stark picture of the immediacy of the blaze.
Nov 30, 2010...
Fabled as a site of biblical battles and spectacular palaces, Tel Megiddo today is a dusty mound overlooking Israel’s Jezreel valley. It is also host to one of the hottest debates in archaeology — a controversy over the historical truth of the Bible’s account of the first united Kingdom of Israel.
Ancient Megiddo is said to have been a key administrative and military centre in the kingdom ruled by King David and his son Solomon during the eleventh and tenth centuries BC. But the biblical narrative is challenged by archaeologists such as Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, who believe that David and Solomon did not rule over an Iron Age empire. Instead, they suggest, David and Solomon commanded a small and not terribly influential kingdom, and Megiddo’s peak came nearly a century after the united kingdom had divided.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/pigs-in-israel-originated-in-europe-researchers-say/
Nov 04, 2013...
JERUSALEM — Israel may not be the most obvious place to study pigs, given that religious strictures in both Judaism and Islam forbid their consumption.
But Israeli researchers involved in a lengthy project whose goal is to reconstruct ancient Israel have now established that the pigs here are of European stock, unlike their Middle Eastern counterparts elsewhere in the region, and that they probably arrived with the non-kosher Philistines about 3,000 years ago.
Jun 07, 2018...
Dr. Elisabetta Boaretto, Head of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s D-REAMS Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory (courtesy)
Archaeologists’ evidence of Israelite settlement in the Land of Canaan and the foundation of a magnificent biblical Kingdom of David is being called into question.
According to a new Cornell University study of radiocarbon testing in the southern Levant, what little organic material researchers have unearthed that was believed by scientists to have originated at the dawn of the Israelite settlement, may not have been dated properly.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/300-000-year-old-hearth-found/
Jan 27, 2014... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—January 27, 2014—Humans, by most estimates, discovered fire over a million years ago. But when did they really begin to control fire and use it for their daily needs? That question — one which is central to the subject of the rise of human culture — is still hotly debated. A team of Israeli scientists recently discovered in the Qesem Cave, an archaeological site near present-day Rosh Ha’ayin in the Central District of Israel, the earliest evidence — dating to around 300,000 years ago — of unequivocal repeated fire building over a continuous period. These findings not only help answer the question, they hint that prehistoric humans already had a highly advanced social structure and intellectual capacity.
Jul 29, 2013...
A hungry dinosaur at the Clore Garden of Science, Weizmann Institute of Science. Photo by Daniel Chechik
The dinosaur exhibition at the Weizmann Institute of Science does not ignore the circus attraction of the huge, lost creatures, but it is meticulously faithful to scientific knowledge.
When the principal curator of the Natural History Museum in London was asked to guess how long it took to set up the exhibition "Dinosaurs — the Giants of the Past, the Science of the Future" in the Clore Garden of Science at the Weizmann Institute, she was somewhat hesitant. Finally she told her Israeli colleague, Dr. Naama Charit-Yaari, that from her familiarity with Israeli purposefulness she guessed that setting up such a complicated project took only two years in Israel.
Dec 28, 2017...
Manot Cave in northern Israel.
Archaeologists have discovered that prehistoric tools and artwork from western Europe owe their existence to an even earlier culture in the Middle East. Carbon dating of a cave in Israel supports a theory that the Ahmarian culture of the Levant predated the Aurignacian culture of Europe by thousands of years, according to Haaretz.
The Ahmarian and Aurignacian cultures were the first two modern human cultures, according to Haaretz. They did coexist, but it’s been unclear if one was borne from the other. Now, archaeologists have dated the Ahmarian-inhabited Manot Cave, in northern Israel near the Lebanon border, which shows that Ahmarians lived in the region around 42,000 to 46,000 years ago—earlier than Aurignacians are known to exist.
Jun 03, 2020...
A revolutionary radiocarbon-dating technique can now securely pinpoint when monumental structures in Jerusalem’s Old City — including the famed Wilson’s Arch — were constructed.
By meticulously collecting organic material in each excavated stratified layer and carbon-dating minuscule samples taken from ancient mortar, an interdisciplinary team from the Weizmann Institute and the Israel Antiquities Authority can now lay to rest abiding debates on when ancient Jerusalem structures were constructed. For a change, scientists are stepping out of the laboratory and into the field.
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