For Ran Feinstein and Ofer Ra’anan, two friends on a diving trip off of the Israeli coast, what began as a typical Mediterranean excursion took a stunning turn. 

The two men spied a castaway sculpture sitting amid the rocks and silt on the seabed. This was no average oceanic detritus. The figure, it started to dawn on the divers, must have been ancient. Indeed, according to the archaeologists, it’s the largest cache of Roman objects to be found in Israel in 30 years.