Ephraim Stern

At Tel Mevorakh, near the coast of Israel, Ephraim Stern found imported Cypriot Black-on-Red pottery in the level he called Stratum VII and dated it to the tenth century BC. He directed the excavation from 1973 to 1976 and published the Iron Age levels in 1978, suggesting that, if his dating of the next level was right, about four hundred years separated it from Stratum VII. Stratum VII was used from then on as a well-defined tenth-century level, and in 2001 Nicola Schreiber, who credited the report's detailed discussion of the pottery for that standing, argued that it was undermined by internal inconsistencies, that the four-hundred-year gap might be illusory, and that Black-on-Red had come to be seen as characteristic of the tenth century largely because of the prominence his report gave it.⁶ Stern also published a group of Cypriot limestone sculptures from the Gaza region in Levant in 1975.⁵

He was born in Haifa on 15 January 1934 and studied archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He taught at Tel Aviv University, took his doctorate in 1968, and returned to the Hebrew University as a professor in 1971 at the invitation of Yigael Yadin. He worked on the late First Temple, Babylonian and Persian periods and on the Phoenicians, and directed twenty seasons at Tel Dor between 1980 and 2000. He chaired the Hebrew University's Institute of Archaeology and the board of the Israel Exploration Society, edited Qadmoniot, and received the EMET Prize in 2005. He died on 23 March 2018.¹