Time to Rock

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This vitrine displays special stones collected on study hikes in Israel. The stones are different from each other in terms of the types of minerals from which they are composed, and the process in which they were created.

The stone that sparkles from afar is called muscovite, a stone made of a very common mineral from the Micas group that is composed of layers of sheets. The name muscovite comes from the name of the city Moscow, because this mineral was very common as a substitute for glass in the windows of Russian churches in the nineteenth century.

The bright, beautiful balls that are split in half are called geodes, or in Hebrew - Elijah’s Watermelons. Their external side is made of limestone, while quartz crystals formed in their centers.

A folk legend relates that one day, in the midst of a heat wave, the prophet Elijah saw a farmer working in his watermelon patch. He asked him for one watermelon to quench his thirst, but when the farmer refused, Elijah got angry and turned his watermelon patch into a field of stones.  To this day, they can be found on the slopes of Mount Carmel.

A conglomerate is a clastic kurkar rock, meaning a sedimentary rock composed of small, broken particles of different rocks. The particles were carried away by the wind or water currents and sunk in the seawater, lakes, and riverbanks, where they underwent a process of unification and petrifaction. Inside this conglomerate, we can also see fossils that are trapped inside of it. The word conglomerate is also familiar from the world of economics and stock market reports, and it means a corporation, or a group of several companies under shared management.

Next to the stones are several ancient stone tools that were made by humans: prehistoric flint items, catapult stones, weights, and a pestle chiseled out of basalt.

The three catapult stones in front of us were essentially cannon balls made of stone, and they were used to attack fortified cities. Metal cannon balls appeared in our country only at the end of the eighteenth century, during Napoleon’s conquest campaign in the land of Israel.

These weights look like thick rings and are made of light stone.  They were apparently used for weaving and spinning thread. They were hung in a row on the lower part of the fabric when it was being woven in order to keep the fabric evenly taut. In ancient times, every family made its own threads and fabrics, and weights like these could be found in every home. The small black weights were also used for spinning.