Courtesy of the Sea

by Lili Eylon

It appears to be a deserted building without a roof. Built by Baron Edmund de Rothschild as part of the nearby Zichron Ya'akov winery, it had housed a bottle factory between 1891 and 1896, and was indeed abandoned for the next 80 years. The building was reopened in 1976 by Kurt Raveh, an immigrant from Holland, who turned it into a unique museum.

Raveh had been a pilot in the country of his birth, but when he came to Israel and became a member of Kibbutz Nachsholim, he decided to spend his leisure hours plunging into the blue waters of the natural harbor shared by his kibbutz and nearby Moshav Dor. On the seabed, preserved by crusts of salt, sand and shells, he found objects of bronze, gold, stone and wood from the shipwrecks of past eras.

Dor has a history of some 4,000 years. Here the Cana'anites of the Late Bronze Age were followed by the Sea People and the Israelites of the Iron Age; then came Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mameluks and Ottomans. The town is mentioned in the Book of Joshua; it was the most important harbor in the area until King Herod built Caesaria a few kilometers to the south, and it appears on the Byzantine Madaba map.

Raveh, who has since earned a doctorate in archeology, founded the underwater archeological museum at Kibbutz Nachsholim (between Haifa and Tel Aviv), which houses ancient oil lamps, Phoenician goddesses made of clay, Roman stone and metal anchors, gold and silver jewelry, delicate perfume bottles and all sorts of tools. There are also footprints of later periods - cannons, bayonets, muskets and even gunpowder which belonged to Napoleon's army. After his defeat at Acre, Napoleon came to Dor, where he expected to find French ships to take him and his troops home, but the French fleet had been sunk by the British. Burdened with sick and wounded soldiers, the great commander ordered that all arms and equipment be thrown into the sea so that all available means of transportation could be used to evacuate the wounded to Egypt.

"Right here, in our backyard," says Yisrael Hirshberg, the director of this underwater archeological museum, "lie thousands of shipwrecks containing secrets, and riches which it will take another 500 years to uncover."

Under the auspices of the University of Chicago and led by Professor Shelly Waxman, teams of students come to Kibbutz Nachsholim each winter to dive in the harbor and discover more morsels of history. In a small room at the museum, cluttered with broken vessels - each a puzzle until restored - volunteers, Israelis as well as foreigners, piece together the fragments of the treasures from times long gone. Their restoration work includes finds from nearby Tel Dor (which has been excavated for many seasons under the direction of Professor Efraim Stern of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem).

A unique recent find at Dor was a workshop which produced the purple dye of the ancient Phoenicians (the etymology of whose name comes from the word "purple"). The "royal purple" and "royal blue", extracted from the murex trunculus snails, was so rare that it took 10,000 snails to produce 2 grams of color (in modern terms, one liter of the dye would be worth as much as 8 kilograms of gold). Because of its lucrative nature, purple and blue dyeing eventually came under Roman imperial control; only imperial dye houses were permitted to manufacture dyed material and only members of the royalty could wear them. The Jews, who had been using the blue dye - called tehelet - as prescribed for fringed garments (prayer shawls), could no longer do so. Only in recent years has the tehelet dyeing process been renewed in Israel, after considerable research in which Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog, father of Israel's sixth president, Chaim Herzog, was prominently involved.

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