Her Ashkelon team uncovers a large headless marble statue, described as the first Greco-Roman artifact ever intentionally excavated in the Holy Land.
On 19 May 1815, during the excavation at Ashkelon, Lady Hester Stanhope's workmen uncovered a large, headless marble statue of Greco-Roman style, buried within the ruins of the ancient port city. This find is identified by later scholarship, including analysis by archaeologist and historian Neil Asher Silberman, as the first Greco-Roman artifact ever intentionally excavated in the Holy Land—that is, unearthed as the deliberate object of a planned archaeological search rather than accidentally discovered.
The discovery was a landmark moment: it demonstrated that systematic digging guided by textual clues and careful planning could yield significant ancient remains, in contrast to the incidental finds that had previously characterized Western encounters with antiquities in the region. The statue, though damaged and headless, represented tangible evidence of the classical and Roman-era occupation of Ashkelon, a city with a history stretching back millennia.
Stanhope's approach to this find—prioritizing careful documentation of its context over commercial or acquisitive interests—distinguished her expedition from the plunder-driven antiquarianism common among European travelers and diplomats of the period. The find and Stanhope's subsequent handling of it would become a subject of debate among later historians assessing her legacy as an early, if unconventional, archaeologist.