Happy July everyone! This is my first post in a new month and that’s a cause for celebration. I haven’t been with you all for a while, which means this entry will either be really long to catch up or really short because I can’t remember anything. Anyway, I’m writing from the Galilee for now (Saturday), though I can’t actually post until tomorrow because we have to pay for internet here and I probably won’t finish tonight anyway. ALSOTHISISHOWENGLISHWOULDLOOKIFITWEREWRITTENTHESAMEWAYASANCIENTGREEK.
No, seriously, it’s all one big word. Also, the inscription in that picture is upside down, but since none of you can read Greek anyway, I figured it wouldn’t matter. That’s from the Roman/Byzantine town of Zippori (Sepphorus), but we’ll get to that later.
So last entry was on Tuesday, so I’ve got two days of digging to try and cover. There isn’t a whole lot of exciting stuff going on in my squares on the micro level. Well, there might be coming up this week, but we’ll see. We’ve been steadily lowering all the areas of our squares and revealing more courses of walls. We clarified the wall that runs on the eastern side of F8, the one we used to think connected to the wall on the eastern side of F7, but it looks like it might in fact be a doorway instead of a continuous wall that was robbed out in antiquity. This doesn’t explain the apparent presence of a robber’s trench, though, where the dirt feels like it has been dug out and replaced. It makes sense, though, since some of the tumble we cleared up in F7, had it fit on the wall where we think it did, would make a nice flat finish, as if it were an intentional opening in the wall.
We had some interesting material finds in the last week. I don’t really remember which find was which day.
This is a large piece of tibun in situ. Tibun just means “oven” and it was a thick ceramic dome with a fire underneath that is used to cook bread. We find pieces of these all the time, this just happens to be an especially nice chunk. We didn’t even save it, but it looked nice, so we cleaned it up and took some pictures for ourselves. Ian pulled some little disc out of the F8 extension, which I guess they’ve decided, is a game piece and are displaying it with a game board another square turned up.
The most exciting thing we’ve got is in the northwest corner of F8. Phil and I were just doing a pass there and I noticed a few carbonized olive pits. Phil also pulled out a large piece of some cooking ware. Olive pits are good for carbon dating because the lab can crack them open and get uncontaminated samples. Also, it’s unlikely an olive would be around for a significant number of years, so the date we get would be relative.
Normally we don’t save olive pits because as a one-time deal they’re probably just an anomaly in fill. Steve told me not to bother unless I found five to ten of them, so I pulled out somewhere around forty from an area of about a meter squared. I’m hoping this means that we might be getting close to a significant layer, so we’ll see what this upcoming week brings.
Thursday afternoon was a pretty awesome time. Some folks hadn’t gotten a chance to check out the crusader castle yet or the monastery, so we made a trip out there after pottery washing. There’s this white dog that has been hanging around the town, probably stray, for the last few days. She has this habit of picking fights with other animals, and is a female dog, so Eric and I christened her Bitch. Sinéad decided her name would be Jemima. British people are weird. Bitch followed us throughout our whole trip that afternoon, which was kinda neat, even though she’s a bitch.
The monastery is really lovely.
It’s a very quiet, peaceful place with a bunch of French monks. The sanctuary was really neat.
We also wanted to hit up the gift shop since the monastery is famous for making its own wine, honey, olive oil, and brandy. They had several different varieties of wine at really reasonable prices. I bought a bottle of wine for 25 nis (New Israeli Sheckel), or about eight dollars. With all our shopping done we headed back up the hill to the crusader castle.
I already described the castle in an earlier post (June 12th) so I am not going to do it again. I do have a couple pictures though since I didn’t have my camera last time. Most of them will be on Facebook, but here’s a teaser:
That’s a view of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam across the valley through a window in the castle and another shot of the monastery from higher up on the hill. We explored more, showed the new folks around the stuff we’d already discovered, and headed back in to town to get clean before the big party.
We had Friday off this past week, so Thursday night was our 4th of July party. It was a good time. We ate cookout food on the lawn and had a kind of talent show. Apparently this kind of show is a tradition at digs and at the Idallion dig in Cyprus it actually counts towards your grade! Yikes. The best thing about this party was that the hotel was providing free beer! Leave it to a bunch of Baptists to make me feel like a heavy drinker.
The rest of the tables:
Our table:
That’s Eric there on the left. He drank all of those by himself. But seriously, doesn’t anyone know how to have a good time these days? The talent show was fairly entertaining. Someone did some fantastic impressions of the directors and stuff. There were a couple songs rewritten to be Tel Gezer related. Our square went last and we read the whole group Good Night Moon by Mary Wise Brown. I thought it was pretty silly. Everyone else thought it was pretty weird, but I had enough beer in me by the time we went up there that I didn’t care.
Even though we had to get up at 7:30 for our trip up north, everyone was in a party room, so we took it to the girls’ porch (girls being Becca, Annie, Caroline, and Sinéad). We ended up with a lot of people up there drinking and singing along to oldies. Sam Wolff, dig director extraordinaire, showed up with a bottle of whiskey he said he was not going to leave with. The best part of the whole affair, though, was that this entire party took place among Jon and Laurie Byron’s drying laundry because they were borrowing the girls’ clothesline. That was funny.
After most folks left we decided to go for a walk. Luckily we didn’t get far and only got up to the parking lot where we wash pottery. There were some guys from Neve Shalom hanging out around there drinking vodka and Red Bull and smoking hash out of some sketchy homemade water bottle bong. We hung out with them for a bit, then another guy and his girlfriend showed up with their dog Mary and we all had a jolly good time until Mary and Bitch got into some really loud dogfight. That Bitch is such a bitch. The guys said she was abandoned in the town a week ago. Sad, but seriously, that dog sucks.
Around this time I went to bed. Despite it being a later night out, I think I hit the hay around 12:45 at the latest. Funny the way that worked out. I had to get up early and was avoiding some of the super intoxicated people I was with so I didn’t have to be responsible for carrying them down to their rooms. Mission: successful.
Friday began like the other tour days. Early to rise, dine, then hit the road. We had to pack for a two-night stay in the Galilee, which is why none of you have heard from me for so long. We had a bunch of sites to hit before everything shut down for the Sabbath at 3:00. I have to consult the photographic record to remember what order we did everything.
AHA! First on the list was the city of Caesarea. King Herod built it in order to funnel wealth into the Levant by constructed a massive artificial breakwater, creating a harbor where there hadn’t been on and then lowering the taxes to encourage traders to port there. It’s a pretty neat spot. It hosts a large Roman theater as well as a hippodrome, an arena for racing horses.
The theater:
The Hippodrome:
Unfortunately, a series of earthquakes has destroyed the breakwater so it no longer functions. Caesarea changed hands several times after the Romans, particularly during the crusades. Once the harbor disintegrated, though, its value dropped significantly.
On our way out we stopped by an old aqueduct that used to run to Caesarea. The city didn’t have many reliable sources of fresh water, so they trucked it in.
The next stop on our journey was Tel Megiddo. Megiddo is special for a number of reasons, one of them being that it has been occupied since at least the Calcolithic, if not as far back as the Paleolithic. That’s at least 6000 years ago. Megiddo is also one of the three sites that Solomon supposedly fortified, along with Gezer and Hazor, and lo and behold, a six-chambered gate, just like the one at Tel Gezer!
There wasn’t a fantastic place to get a picture of the whole gate like at Gezer, but I did my best. The gate is very big. There were some other notable features at Megiddo that we’ve seen for years in slides at Lycoming. First is a giant round altar that dates to the Bronze Age. We’re guessing Middle Bronze, but I’m too lazy to look it up.
The second was the water system. I’ll post more pictures on Facebook in the next few days (there’s like 300-400 of them) but here’s a taster:
This thing was huge. There was a huge hole, then a deep cavern (pictured) and then a loooong tunnel that led to a spring. It was super cool, though I felt a little naked without a hardhat for safety. We walked the whole thing and then popped out on the side of the tel to get whisked off to the next site.
Our next stop was Sepphoris, a Roman/Byzantine city full of mosaics. That’s where the Greek mosaic up top comes from. The Byzantine street was still intact and we walked along it to a covered area with a large mosaic in it.
This is the “Nile Mosaic” that has a ton of scenes on it. It’s one of many mosaics in just one small area, the rest of which will be posted on Facebook. This one shows a number of different scenes all celebrating the Nile and how freaking awesome it is, but there were lots of other ones showing different gods and Amazon’s fighting and stuff. It was very sweet.
We went to an old synagogue too that had this mosaic on the floor:
Can you guess what it is? It’s a zodiac! Pretty wild, right? There is a few other cases of zodiacs in synagogues, but they are extremely rare. In fact, and image in a synagogue at all is rare (second commandment, bros). That was pretty neat. I wasn’t really listening to the tour guide about anything important at this site since we all know CE stands for current events, and who bothers with those?
After Sepphoris we heading to Ein Gev, a kibbutz with a lovely little resort right on the Sea of Galilee, which is actually a lake. We went for a swim almost immediately and after dinner all convened on the beach with wine we brought from the monastery.
Here’s a view of Tiberius, the city across the Galilee. After we all drank to our hearts content, or until we ran out of wine, we called it a night. We still had to wake up at 7:30 the next morning to hit up more sites.
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