![[image]](images/gem.gif)
(Courtesy Sarah Stroup)
There was some beginner's luck this field season at the Hellenistic port of Tel Dor, 19 miles south of Haifa, Israel. On her first dig, Megan Webb, a 28-year-old potter from Philadelphia, was cleaning an area of a large public building with her trowel when this tiny gemstone etched with Alexander the Great's portrait, emerged. Less than half an inch long, it might once have been mounted on a signet ring.
"It is one of perhaps 20 to 30 gemstones--with identifiable portraits of Alexander--that exist in the world," says University of Washington archaeologist Sarah Stroup, director of the Tel Dor field school. "And it's one of the first discovered in a controlled excavation. Many such stones ended up in museums via the black market."
