Aegean-style painted plaster fragments from Tel Kabri

During the 2008 and 2009 excavations at Tel Kabri, more than 100 new fragments of wall and floor plaster were uncovered. Approximately 60 are painted, probably belonging to a second Aegean-style wall fresco with figural representations and a second Aegean-style painted floor. 

Suggested reconstruction of the various fragments found at Tel Kabri, Israel [Credit: Eric H. Cline et al]

A date within the Middle Bronze II period, probably in the 17th century B.C.E., may be suggested for the Kabri frescoes, which makes them significantly earlier than the Tell el-Dab’a and Qatna frescoes and roughly contemporary with the Alalakh Minoan-style frescoes. 

Minoan wall painting of a naval procession, West House, Akrotiri, Santorini

That there are at least four Aegean-style frescoes found to date at Kabri (two painted floors and two wall paintings) may hint that either the palace was decorated with a single Aegean pictorial plan in mind—an ambitious undertaking by a unique Canaanite ruler—or that different paintings were commissioned in different episodes and executed by different Aegean (or Aegean-trained) artisans. 

Stone foundation to the north wall of the palace at Tel Kabri [Credit: Eric H. Cline et al]

Whichever the case, the close resemblance of the Kabri miniature fresco found by Kempinski and Niemeier to that in the West House at Akrotiri on Santorini, and the resemblance of the new figurative fresco to various Aegean paintings, provides hints as to the origin of the artisans (or single worker) at Kabri, who may have been an itinerant recruited in the Cyclades through Cypriot middlemen trading with Kabri.

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Source: American Journal of Archaeology [April 2011]