Lead slingstone bullet inscribed with sardonic joke discovered at Hippos
Haaretz
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08:39 AM • March 23 2026 IST
08:39 AM • March 23 2026 IST
A crudely fashioned slingstone projectile about an inch long, made of lead and inscribed with the word "Learn," was discovered in the necropolis outside the Greco-Roman clifftop city of Hippos.
The small but deadly "bullet" was found in late 2025 with the help of a metal detector about a quarter-kilometer outside the city wall, near the bed of the Sussita stream. It dates to more than 2,000 years ago, say Michael Eisenberg and Arleta Kowaleska of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, the archaeologists leading the excavation of the once-sparkling city overlooking the Sea of Galilee.
Its shape was elliptical, but a metal bullet didn't need to have precise proportions to damage the target. That was more a function of the user's skill and power. Whoever shot it may have hit somebody or something. Part of the bullet is missing, likely because of impact.
Lead bullets were not a rare object in this perennially war-torn region. At Hippos alone, 69 lead slingshot bullets have been found so far – no great feat if one has a metal detector. "They buzz like crazy, like when they find lead fishing weights," Eisenberg says.
Most of the lead bullets found at Hippos were unadorned, as lead bullets from antiquity tend to be. But perhaps in the spirit of World War II fighter planes bearing nose art, some ancient bullets were decorated with terror-inducing images such as a lightning bolt, trident or scorpion.
In fact, one bearing that very arthropod was discovered in the last dig.
A small number of the lead slingshot pellets were inscribed with a word or two in Greek: a personal or city name, or a brief sardonic joke, such as "Catch!"
Sarcasm on projectiles was a thing; slingshot bullets associated with the wars of Diodotus in the second century B.C.E. carry sarcastic inscriptions such as "have a taste" or "take this."
None before have been found bearing the admonishment "learn," Eisenberg and Kowalewka report together with the epigraphist Gregor Staab of the University of Cologne, Germany in the journal Palestine Exploration Quarterly.
"Learn" isn't as funny as "Catch!" and may even be a tad preachy – learn what? Our lesson. Which is? Nothing. If the projectile did its job, the catcher would be learning no more. It represents sardonic humor on the part of the city's defenders, who shot the bullet at would-be invaders and not the other way around, Eisenberg and Kowaleska postulate.
That is mainly because the projectile was found outside the city wall, not inside, near the road built along the path of Sussita Stream. The city of Hippos (called Sussita in Aramaic) was built atop a steep-sloped saddle ridge. Storming it is tricky, and the streambed was the best place from which to mount an attack on the city's main gate to the east, Eisenberg previously concluded together with Michael Pažout. So a townsperson fired the lead pellet at alien soldiers massing below, exhorting them to "Learn."
Lead seems to have been among the earliest metals that people learned to wrest from its home in rock and utilize in some fashion. Beads made of lead were found in the Turkish proto-city of Catalhoyuk over 9,000 years ago, but note that the metal hadn't been smelted; the beads were made of lead-rich ore hammered into the desired shape and perforated. The earliest smelting we know of involved copper and was nearby, in the Balkans, about 7,500 years ago. Evidence of smelting in Israel was somewhat later, about 6,500 years ago.
Metals would take their sweet time to replace stone in the annals of human industry. At first it would have been difficult and costly to make, involving specialist knowledge. The "Copper Age" followed by the "Bronze Age" doesn't mean that the unwashed masses abandoned stone tools for orange metal ones that were soft and would quickly turn green. Nor was stone abandoned as a key source of material in the "Iron Age," despite the discoveries of steel's charms.
But by the time we reach the great sprawling Hellenistic and Roman armies and empires, the manufacture and use of lead was very common – in their pipelines, industry and even in their cosmetics and foods. Trivial, even. The townspeople could have made their own lead bullets for their slings and may well have done so, Eisenberg suggests.
Using what? Israel has no lead. We have some copper ore down in the southern desert and also some mighty high-quality sand, as we can conclude from the Romans using it (and no other sand) to make their famed glass. That's about it resource-wise. To make their bullets, the townsfolk of Hippos would have had to use imported lead, shipped over from Europe in the form of ingots.
We know there was a brisk metal trading in the ancient world. Archaeologists have found many a shipwreck laden with lead ingots, which is sad. Just one example is four ingots that originated in Sardinia, isotopic analysis concluded. The ore was smelted into ingots that bore Minoan markings. The ingots were found at the bottom of the sea, in a ship that almost made it to Canaan, but not quite.
In short, lead wasn't an exotic import; it was a cheap industrial product. It could also be that the townspeople didn't shell out for an ingot or two, but melted down some of their lead infrastructure to make the slingshot bullets. Lead has a relatively low melting point, Eisenberg says. He suspects that even in the heat of battle, lead may have been melted down and poured into molds on the spot. And in some cases, somebody troubled to go the extra mile and decorate the mold with the image of a noxious animal, a name or a brief joke.
Supporting his thesis of battlefield manufacture, Eisenberg points out that a slingshot projectile doesn't have to be perfectly shaped – it isn't a ballistic projectile like an arrow. Its hue is unimportant, unlike silver and gold. It could be of any weight within a reasonable range – "We see huge differences in the mass of bullets, from about 20 grams to over 50," he says.
To cause more damage at a short distance, one wants the 50-gram item; if you want to sling it 250 meters, you choose the smaller one.
In the case of the "Learn" bullet, Kowalewska and Eisenberg suspect it was ammunition – which, by the way, weighed 38 grams – that was fired by the city defenders from the city walls toward the foul enemy, which reached a distance of about 260 meters away. Absent the discovery of a lead bullet workshop, they suspect they were made on the spot. Also, they did find molds for such objects.
The structure of the word "Learn" is unusual, but boils down to an imperative, the team adds.
But after all that, wouldn't it have been cheaper and simpler to bend over, pick up a stone and project it with the slingshot as David reportedly did unto Goliath in the Iron Age? Maybe, but look at it this way: Smelted lead is much denser than any of the local rocks, once it came into common use, stone projectiles seem to have been abandoned, and it seems that since inventing the lead bullet, which was so very effective, the warrior classes stopped slinging stones at one another and would indeed go to the trouble.
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