Deir el-Balah sarcophagi

The Deir el-Balah anthropoid sarcophagi are pottery coffins created in the Bronze Age and discovered in the 1960s and 1970s. Around fifty anthropoid sarcophagi have been recovered from a cemetery in Deir el-Balah in the Gaza Strip that was used mainly in the 13th century BCE and perhaps a century before or after. The sarcophagi were created locally and influenced by Egyptian styles. Many of the coffins were looted by Moshe Dayan before the cemetery was excavated by Trude Dothan and Itzhaq Beit-Arieh. Some of the sarcophagi have ended up in the Israel Museum, the Hecht Museum, and the Bible Lands Museum.