Print Article Life and Death on the Israel-Lebanon Border Excavation Yields Thousands of Seal Impressions By Andrea Berlin and Sharon Herbert Clara Amit / Israel Antiquities Authority The profile of an official decorates a bulla, or clay seal impression, found at Kedesh, in northern Israel (see map above). The hoard of thousands of bullae (plural) discovered there dates to the second century B.C.E. and is the largest collection of such impressions yet found in Israel. The diminutive seals (only about 1.5 inches high) impressed in the bullae—unlike others found from the Iron Age (tenth-sixth centuries B.C.E.)—are in the main anepigraphic, meaning that they contain no words. The presence of so many seal impressions, some of them representations of Seleucid monarchs, others of Phoenician design , prove that Kedesh was a major administrative center in the mid-second-century B.C.E. Yet the city disappeared from history soon after. In the accompanying article, Andrea Berlin and Sharon Herbert, the site’s excavators, describe the rise and sudden demise of Kedesh. When you look at a map, the first things you notice are borders. But what did borders mean in ancient times? In the mid-1990s, we became curious about that very question. Both of us had been excavating in Israel for more than 25 years—and during those years we’d always taken the importance of borders as a given. We began wondering, however, if we might not be imposing a modern sense of definiteness onto our view of life in antiquity. Just what did it mean to live on a border in, say, 200 B.C.E.? In archaeology, it’s easier to come up with an interesting question than to identify a site that might provide an answer. Our first challenge was to find a site on an ancient border—one that clearly occupied a border position according to ancient sources (as opposed to a site whose border position is surmised on account of archaeological evidence, such as Beth-Shemesh). That way, we’d avoid a circular “proof” in our interpretation of the evidence that we would find. Our second challenge was to find a site occupied in the classical periods in which we worked (Persian, Hellenistic and Roman). We especially wanted to investigate the nature and rhythms of everyday life on the border.