BEIRUT: Archaeologists have unearthed several Bronze Age graves, including that of an ancient warrior interred with his axe, in the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon, an excavation team said.

“The excavations are among the most important archaeological projects in Lebanon as they are taking place in the centre of the city of modern Sidon,” team director Claude Doumet Serhal said.

They said the warrior’s grave dated back to the Middle Bronze Age, around the second millennium B.C., and included an unusually well preserved bronze duck-bill axe with a wooden handle.

The team from the British Museum also discovered four Middle Bronze Age children buried in jars, two of them with Egyptian scarabs.

The archaeologists, in their fourth season of excavations at Sidon, said a Byzantine grave marker with an engraved cross showed that the city was still occupied in modern times.

They said they also found a Phoenician inscription on a piece of pottery, the first such inscription found in Sidon from the ancient seafarers.

The archaeologists said the Sidon dig was the first urban excavation in Lebanon since the city of Beirut was excavated in the 1990s. Archaeologists digging in central Beirut, during rebuilding after the country’s 15-year civil war, unearthed traces of successive civilizations going back 5,000 years.—Reuters