GO ‘MER’CA! Happy July Fourth to everyone. I hope you all did fun things on the river or in Maine or wherever you might be. I left you last at the end of our first night in the Galilee, so I have two more days of touring to cover in addition to today’s digging.
We ate breakfast in the hotel dining room. It was pretty much the same as at Neve Shalom, but this place has these awesome cheese crepes with chocolate sauce. It made for a hearty and delicious pre-tour meal. Our first stop on the road was Hazor.
Hazor is famous for a lot of things. As far as sites go, it’s a huge deal. Also, it’s really big.
That whole field is part of the tel. Hazor is said to have housed something like 40,000 people at one time, which is a ridiculously large settlement by ancient standards. The Bible also contains several reverences to Hazor. In one, Joshua knocks it over. I was listening to the 1812 Overture and during the finale our tour guide starting reading the story of the destruction, which was kinda funny. Like Megiddo and Gezer, Hazor is listed as the third city fortified by Solomon, and here we find a third six chambered gate.
It’s hard to get a good aerial show at Hazor because it’s so flat, but compare to Megiddo
and Tel Gezer.
You might have to take my word for it that these gates are all strikingly similar. In any case, it’s a pretty neat instance of archaeology coinciding with biblical history. Whether or not some fourth Iron Age gate has been found that matches these is unknown to me, so I think we should be cautious and assume everything the Bible says is 100% true.
Hazor also had an impressive preserved Canaanite palace. It had two large wooden pillars out front, but those were not original. Wood doesn’t last very long relative to the rest of the building materials the ancients used. There was a lot of original mud-brick in the walls of the palace, though. You could even see individual blocks in some sections.
There used to be a large pillared building sitting atop the six-chambered gate. Archaeologists and conservationists ended up moving the whole thing over in order to excavate the gate and keep the pillared building intact. It was placed right next to another building that contained an olive press.
The olives are placed under a basket like think and pressed from above by a weighted shaft. The juice runs into a ring carved in the press and pours into a vat of some sort. The oil that floats to the top is your extra virgin olive oil. In the picture you can see the ring and on the right side a cut where the juice could flow out. The basalt basin you can barely see in the bottom left was probably the vat they used to separate the oil.
Speaking of basalt, it’s important to note that the northern sites had a lot of it. Basalt is an igneous rock, so it’s formed primarily in volcanoes. Down south, there isn’t any basalt, but a lot of limestone. This means if you find a basalt structure down south the stone is almost assuredly imported. Fun facts.
Our next stop was Tel Dan. Tel Dan was much different from the other sites we visited in that instead of being a barren wasteland of brown stones and dirt it was covered in a lush nature preserve. There were lots of green plants and running water all around, so we had a pleasant walk. Tel Dan is home to number of incredible finds, like the inscription below.
That’s a zoomed in photo of a picture on a sign. The inscription depicted was found in 1993 at Tel Dan and it says, in Aramaic, DVD TYB (remember, reading right to left), or bet david which translates to the house of David. While this seems rather bland, it was in fact one of the most significant discovered ever in Biblical archaeology. Any guesses why? Scroll down for the answer.
It’s the first and possibly only extra-biblical reference to King David. This is important because, well, frankly, a lot of folks we starting to think that he was only a thing of legend, which is a tough pill to swallow for the Jews. Biblical Minimalists hold David’s mythic status as one of their core beliefs and this inscription punches them in the face, steals their children, eats their Hot Pockets, and then uses their credit card to buy its gas home. Some of them try to maintain is has something to do with some place name or something, but those people are shitheads (pronounced shi-theedz). I don’t agree with the Biblical minimalist position at all, so it’s fun to see their entire theory being unraveled piece by piece. They argue that the entirety of Israel’s history is some legendary farce concocted in the Hellenistic Period (3000 BCE), a theory that goes against all reason, as I see it.
But enough about those turds, check out this other sick-nasty stuff at Tel Dan:
That’s the Abrahamic gate, so called because that’s how freaking old it is. While it looks kinda meager in comparison to something like the “Solomonic Gate” at Tel Gezer, appreciate for a moment the fact that it’s even older and has a preserved mud-brick arch. That arch you see in the picture has been there for millennia, and furthermore it’s nearly one of a kind in terms of its preservation. You just don’t find stuff like that; it just doesn’t happen. Well, it does, but you get the picture. Eric and I were gonna cause trouble and storm the gate, but be thought better of it.
Up at the top of the tel was presumably where the holy site was. there was a large steel frame marking the outline of a horned altar, but is unclear what evidence they had for it being there or for being as large as it was (it was taller than a grown man-person). Up top was also this neat phenomenon:
A tree was growing around a part of the ancient architecture and slowly destroying it. Steve Ortiz informed us a similar situation was discovered around the gate at Gezer. The problem is that all these sites are also national parks, and so removing trees means climbing over, under, or merely cutting a bunch of red tape. In the case of Gezer, the archaeologists won. At Tel Dan, the treehuggers (Ortiz’s word, not mine) got their way. Some people just really like trees.
We stopped for lunch after Tel Dan. Everyone seemed much more enthused about this than I was.
Yes, they’ve invaded the holy land on a crusade to bring shitty food to all the heathens. They were charging a fortune too, something like the equivalent of $15 for a hamburger. I went next door and got some of the best falafel I’ve had so far for the modest price of 15 nis (less than $5). It had these awesome onions with pepper on it; very tasty.
After foods, we hit up Banias (also spelled Baniass, but that encourages too many middle school style jokes). It had a big temple to Pan among other Greek deities. What made this cooler than other old temples were the arches that were cut directly into the cliff face. This made for a very neat effect.
The next stop was probably the best place all weekend if I had to pick one.
That was taken facing south on the northern tower of the Nimrod Castle. They say it’s a crusader castle, but that’s kind of a misnomer because while it was built during the crusader period, it was actually build by Arabs to defend against a crusader push from the north. This is about as north as Israel goes; we could see Syria from the tower, maybe Lebanon too. I know we could see Lebanon from a couple spots this weekend. The castle was awesome and totally open to be explored. We found this spiral staircase that was pitch dark, so naturally we went down it. It went through two levels, both of which could be escaped through holes in the wall directly onto the slopes of the mountain the castle was on. That was a lot of fun. There was also several fantastic views, some old inscriptions, and a dirty looking water system (always a water system somewhere). Sam, Eric, and I had a blast romping around, occasionally joined by others.
This was another hole we could have climbed through to escape the castle, but we would have fallen to our deaths. Castle Nimrod was our last site for Saturday so we headed back to Ein Gev for the rest of the night.
A bunch of people when swimming when we got back. I decided to chill in my room and blog instead, even though there wasn’t any kind of internet connection. After dinner a bunch of us went to the hotel bar for happy our and got a couple drinks before going down to the beach again. Some other folks had more to drink, but I was taking it easy because I’m a responsible adult. A bunch of us went swimming in the dark, which maybe is an argument against my responsible adulthood, but no one died, so everything worked out. Unfortunately it was too dark for pictures to come out. They decided since we work so hard during the week they were going to let us get up for a 7:00 breakfast instead of 7:30. hurray.
Sunday was our last day up north so we packed up our things and loaded the bus. We only drove a few minutes down the road to the Ein Gev harbor where we boarded a boat to ride across the lake. The ride was pleasant enough, though they did some weird things. First they played our national anthem while they raided the US flag. That was weird. Then they decided that the music of choice was going to be a healthy mix of terrible Christian music, terrible Gospel music, and some excellent Jewish selections. I suggested Lady Gaga, but that got shot down (no one believes I really like her!). Other than the almost humorous soundtrack, the ride was awesome and very relaxing.
Our destination was a town on the other side of the lake that has a first century boat that was dug up in the Sea of Galilee.
We weren’t really supposed to take pictures, but we all were anyway, and then they just told us to go ahead. Good times. Aside from being cool, the boat also brings to mind the stories about Jesus and the Galilee (or it brings that to the minds of people not me) and other stuff like that. I just thought it was a neat boat.
We went to a Catholic holy place next, a sanctuary dedicated to Peter, supposedly right near the site where Jesus appeared après crucifixion to help Peter catch dinner. That was pretty cool, I guess. Also, the church housed the rock on which Jesus allegedly served 5000 from five loaves and two fish. I guess people’s appetites back then were really small. It was interesting to be in a site that had to remind people not to carry guns into it. The same was true of the next site.
The next place was Capharnum “The City of Jesus.” Now everyone knows he was Jesus of Nazareth but there is evidence to suggest that Capharnum was in fact that city in which Jesus resided much of the time. The fact is, little is known of his life between 12 and 30, so it’s a lot of guesswork. St. Peter also lived in Capharnum, and there are ruins of a Byzantine church where his house used to be. There was a large synagogue and a stray kitty too, but when we asked to keep the cat is sounded like the plan was going to be to eat it, so we decided its chances were better on its own.
Lunch was a delightful affair. I am just gonna cut right to it:
It’s called St. Peter’s Fish and the dig paid for it and it was delicious.
There were also two courses before it, but they were incredibly lame by comparison, though still delicious. I don’t know what else to say other than I may have eaten it’s brain and people looked at me like I was crazy when I washed my hands with the lime. I also learned if you cover your hands in lime juice and go into the sun the acid cooks and give you chemical burns (this happened to Sam’s brother, I’m fine).
Our last stop for the weekend was Bet She’an, which means House of She’an (has everyone figured out the word for house yet?). It was really hot there, like 104˚ F hot.
It’s a large Roman/Byzantine city that has had some earthquake problems. It was really cool though. The cardo, the main street with covered sidewalks, was excellently preserved and still had shops with intact mosaic floors alongside it. It also had an impressive theater, though not as big as the one at Caesarea.
Their hallways were made for short people and I hit my head really hard on the ceiling. One of the other notable features of the site was a very well preserved bathhouse with a complex system for heating and cooling rooms, though I haven’t any idea why they’d have wanted that place hotter.
That was basically it for the weekend. Sunday night was uneventful. AJ was introduced to the Bible for the first time. She was taking the whole genealogy thing a little too seriously, so we told her it only got worse after that.
Today was July 4th and nothing changed. We did do some cool stuff in our squares, though. We’re finally starting to sort out this Dever fustercluck (I know I say that every week, but it’s a little truer each time). We were digging in all three areas we have in our section (F7, F8, and F8 ext.). We discovered a trench running along the west side of F7 that might continue into F8. Our theory is that Dever trenched along a wall, so we were hoping to figure out what he saw. At the end of the day, we turned this up by accidentally crumbling our balk on purpose:
So this looks like what Dever may have seen. It is in line with a wall in F8 and in F6, to the south and north respectively. I am curious to know if he trenched just on the east side or if we also dug on the west. In Robin’s square, to the west, E7, there are a lot of large rocks that seem to be from some sort of tumble or destruction. They’ve smashed some pots underneath, even. Now, our big rock in that picture looks a lot like a pillar to me, but toppled. If Dever did not go far enough west, the tumble in Robin’s square could very well have fallen on this pillar and make it look like a wall from one side. This is kind of my going theory because it’s exciting, but it’s likely we won’t ever know until we take down the balk, which we won’t this season.
Other than that find, Phil and Sam found another rock of supposedly the same wall we found in F7 in F8. Matt and Beth turned up deeper courses for the walls in the F8 extension, so it looks like those are all pretty old. The wall one the west side of the F8 extension abuts the casemate wall; it’s not integrated into it, which suggests it was built afterward, not at the same time. I forget it I said that before. Dever also describes and opening from our square into the casemate, but it doesn’t seem like that’s the case. Who knows? I hope that wasn’t too technical a description.
Until next time. I hope everyone eats a lot of hot dogs today.
No comments:
Post a Comment