Boy who smashed ancient Bronze Age jar returns to museum

Ariel Geller’s family was invited for a guided tour of Haifa’s Hecht Museum in Israel, a few days after the four-year-old smashed a rare, 3,500-year-old jar in the museum.

The museum told the BBC the crockery dated back to the Bronze Age between 2200 and 1500BC – and was a rare artefact because it was so intact.

The jar was one of the artefacts kept out in the open, part of the museum’s vision of allowing visitors explore the past without any glass or barriers.

The jar was most likely originally intended to be used to carry local supplies, such as wine and olive oil. It predates the time of the Biblical King David and King Solomon and is characteristic of the Canaan region on the eastern Mediterranean coast.