The Mystery of Sharks’ Teeth in the City of David

The mystery of the City of David and the sharks’ teeth. Grabbed you? I certainly took the bait and had fun.

Excavators at a 2900 year old site in the City of David uncovered a cache of sharks’ teeth. At first, there seemed to be nothing too exciting. The teeth were found with fish bones in other food waste, along with a variety of infill material such as pottery shards.

Not All Is As It First Appears

But when the researchers submitted their paper for publication, one reviewer pointed out the teeth came from a shark that had been extinct for 66 million years. So they were fossils, not refuse from a shark steak meal. Analysis of the teeth confirmed this. Sometimes it takes a village to draw accurate conclusions.

One Man’s Garbage…

So perhaps they’d been buried in the bedrock and got mixed in somehow? Nope. You have to travel 80 kilometers away into the Negev desert to find fossilized shark teeth. Someone in the Iron Age had to value the fossils, dig them out, and transport them to the excavation site. Interestingly, also in this seeming “garbage” deposit, one of more residents of the city had thrown hundreds of bullae, plugs of clay with a seal on it used to sign confidential letters or to protect goods from hidden theft. That puts the fossils in the company of materials cast off by high status, administrative class people.

My Precious . . . Sharks’ Teeth?

So what did an Iron Age person, possibly a scribe or court official, see as valuable about the sharks’ teeth? People through time collect sharks’ teeth for various reasons. The sharp points made them good for tools, but the ones found at this site have no working marks on them, so not that. The Roman naturalist Pliny apparently had a theory the triangular objects dropped to earth during lunar eclipses, and I guess he thought they were remarkable for that reason. Royalty and nobility wore them as significant jewelry in various places and times from Hawaii to Italy. Renaissance nobles attributed them to dragon or snake tongues turned to stone and believed they held anti-venom properties, so they wore them as jewelry to ward off snake bites and bring good luck.

But what did someone in the Judaean court—where other imported riches were common—treasure about these shark teeth? We can only guess. Why they might have ended up in a seeming cast-off area is another puzzle. A fad gone bad? Did a nobleman buy them for some perceived power or protection and then after a time he lost faith in his expensive talisman? I’m not having trouble imagining something along those lines. People don’t change all that much. Think of all the gizmos or special items you’ve bought to bring health and happiness. But in the end, it’s mostly the people we surround ourselves with that bring us those precious essentials, isn’t it?

Click here to read Archaeology News Network, “The City Of David And The Sharks’ Teeth Mystery.”

For another post about archaeology in Jerusalem.