Ancient intact and magnificent marble statues, 1700 years old,were discovered adjacent to Binyamina

At the entrance to Binyamina, excavators uncovered two marble busts — roughly 1,700 years old — depicting bearded figures from the Greco-Roman world. One is even inscribed with a name: Lykourgos. The location is what makes this discovery so wild: they were tucked inside the wine collection pit of a Roman-Byzantine winepress.

Think about that for a second. Sometime in antiquity, someone deliberately hid these statues at the bottom of a winepress — possibly to protect them, possibly to repurpose the marble, possibly for reasons we’ll never fully know. And there they sat, undisturbed, for nearly two millennia, until archaeologists stumbled onto them.

This is part of what makes digging in Israel so extraordinary. You can be excavating an agricultural site — a winepress, of all things — and end up face to face with two Roman-era busts that haven’t seen daylight since the Byzantine period.

Every layer of this land has a story buried in it. Sometimes literally.Archaeologists weren’t expecting to find this hiding in a wine pit.