It was the last day of the dig. The diggers were clearing the stone pit of an ancient winepress near the town of Binyamina, in northern Israel — routine work ahead of a new railway line — when the soil gave up something that made everyone stop. Two faces. Carved in pale marble, and turned deliberately downward, as if someone, centuries ago, had laid them to rest where no one would ever look.

For roughly 1,700 years, those two faces had been staring into the earth. Now they were staring back at the people who found them. One of the excavation directors later admitted he was “still struggling to find the right words.” The Israel Antiquities Authority called the moment simply wondrous.

A discovery on the final day

The find came not from a grand temple dig but from a salvage excavation — the kind carried out quickly, ahead of construction, to rescue whatever the bulldozers might otherwise destroy. Here the construction was a major national project to expand Israel’s coastal railway, and the dig at the entrance to Binyamina had already uncovered something substantial: a sprawling Byzantine-era wine-production complex, complete with grape-treading floors, filtration basins, and the deep pits where pressed juice was collected to ferment.

It was in one of those collection pits that the two busts were waiting. Each stands about 55 centimetres tall and weighs roughly 60 kilograms — heavy, solid, and remarkably intact after so long underground. And both had been placed the same way: face-down, side by side, heads turned to the earth. This was not the chaos of an accident. Someone had buried them, carefully and on purpose.

Two faces, carved in marble

Statues like these were never meant to be hidden in the dirt. They are protomes — sculpted busts of the head and upper chest — the kind that once crowned columns or decorated grand interiors. In the Roman world, marble figures of this quality were displayed in public buildings and in the homes of the wealthy, by people who wanted to tie themselves to the cultural and spiritual prestige of antiquity.

The detail survives astonishingly well: the modelling of the features, the fall of the hair, the quiet authority in each face. These were expensive objects, made by skilled hands, and clearly treasured. Which makes the way they ended up — upside down in a winepress — all the stranger.

The name in the stone: “Lycurgus”

The greatest puzzle is an inscription. One of the busts carries, carved in Greek, a single name that historians of the period know well: Lycurgus.

But knowing the name only deepens the mystery, because there is more than one famous Lycurgus. The most legendary is Lycurgus of Sparta, the half-mythical lawgiver credited with creating the harsh code of education and military discipline that made Sparta a byword for toughness. “That’s a complicated thesis,” cautioned excavation director Eliran Oren, “because historians only began mentioning him hundreds of years after he supposedly lived — so we don’t even know whether he was a real or fictional character.”

The other strong candidate is Lycurgus of Athens, a very real statesman and orator of the 4th century BCE, remembered for restoring Athens’ finances and public buildings. For now, researchers are careful not to choose. The study, Oren stressed, “is still in its early stages.” The name is certain; the man behind it is not.

The inscription gives us a name. It does not give us a face we can be sure of — only two candidates, separated by centuries and by the line between history and legend.

Already ancient when they were buried

Here the timeline does something dizzying. Researchers have dated the busts themselves to the 2nd or 3rd century CE, the height of Roman rule in the region. But the winepress that hid them appears to have been built much later — most likely in the Byzantine period, somewhere between the 5th and 7th centuries CE.

In other words, by the time the statues were lowered into that pit, they were already antiques, perhaps three or four hundred years old. “These were probably valuable statues that were dear to their owners and preserved for several generations,” Oren explained. They may have been heirlooms — beautiful, prestigious, passed down — long before they became something to hide.

Where had they come from? One leading guess points to Caesarea, the great Roman port city not far down the coast, where statues like these were common in public squares and luxury villas. Near the Binyamina dig, archaeologists had previously found the remains of a bathhouse — a hint, perhaps, that a wealthy Caesarea family once kept a grand residence here, and that these two faces had decorated it.

The winepress that became a hiding place

The pit that swallowed the busts was no random hole. It belonged to a working industrial site — a substantial wine-production complex of a kind that flourished across this part of the eastern Mediterranean in Byzantine times, when local wine was pressed, stored and shipped out as a serious export. The grapes were trodden on broad plaster floors; the juice ran through filtration basins; and it settled in deep collection pits to begin fermenting. This was the everyday machinery of a prosperous farming economy.

That is what makes the scene so quietly strange. The marble faces belonged to an older, pagan world — gods, heroes or sages of Greece and Rome. They ended up sealed into the floor of a thoroughly later, Christian-era industry, their elegant features pressed against the same stone that once ran with new wine. Whoever did it may simply have used what was at hand: a familiar, defensible structure on land they controlled, where two heavy statues could disappear without a trace and, with luck, be dug up again one day.

Why hide a god’s face?

That leaves the hardest question of all: why bury them at all — and why face-down?

The deliberate positioning suggests this was concealment, not disposal. And late antiquity gave people plenty of reasons to hide beautiful pagan things. As Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire, many pagan temples and monuments were vandalised or torn down, and Greco-Roman statues — the carved faces of an old order — became frequent targets.

“We don’t know yet if it was due to fear of war, or theft, or conflicts that were being fought at the time between the Christian world and the pagan world,” Oren said. Perhaps the owners, watching the world turn against such images, buried their treasures in the floor of the winepress and planned to come back for them “when the situation got quieter.”

They never did. The statues stayed exactly where they were left, face-down in the dark, for some seventeen centuries — until a salvage crew on its final day lifted them back into the light.

Why two silent faces still matter

It is easy to be moved by gold and tombs. Two weathered marble heads in a wine pit ask for something quieter. But sit with them and they tell a very human story: people who loved beautiful things, who held onto them across generations, and who — in a moment of fear we can only guess at — hid what they treasured and hoped to return.

The story isn’t finished. Scientists may yet use more precise dating methods, and the long debate over which Lycurgus is carved in that marble has only just begun. For now, two faces that spent 1,700 years looking into the earth have a great deal still to say.

So here’s the question worth carrying away: if a treasure this fine could be buried by someone certain they’d come back — and then simply vanish from history — how many other faces are still down there, waiting, just under the fields we walk across every day?