At the bottom lay the rock tomb from the first century. When he found it, he dragged a spindly 25-foot ladder out of the Jeep and pushed the ladder into the quarry. Figs were often planted near tombs to give mourners nourishment. But the cave, at the bottom of a Byzantine quarry in a scrub of high desert, is not visible.Ī rugged man in his 40s, Zissu had to find a lonely fig tree that marked the site. Zissu wants to show Stern a cave he'd discovered - and not seen since 1998 - after finding a bit of tomb graffiti while surveying for the Israeli antiquities department. This area is honeycombed with tombs, too. An archaeologist at Bar-Ilan University, he drives his battered Jeep out to the Judean foothills south of Jerusalem. Israeli archaeologist Boaz Zissu is another fan of this "micro-archaeology." He, too, thinks tomb graffiti has been neglected and is eager to work with Stern. "They recorded their personal lives, their public lives empires recorded themselves. "These cultures wrote everything," he says. Price describes the graffiti as "a spontaneous verbal outburst" that adds intimacy to the historical record of the ancient Levant and Mesopotamia. They will include many languages, such as Hebrew and Aramaic dialects like Syriac, Nabatean and Samaritan. Over the next decade, Price and a group of scholars plan to publish many volumes of inscriptions from walls, pots, glass - everything but books - dating from the time of Alexander the Great to that of the Prophet Muhammad. "They were grapho-maniacal," Jonathan Price, head of the classics department at Tel Aviv University, says of the ancient Jews who were entombed here in the first and second centuries. One gets the sense of a giant Facebook page of the ancient world. In the dark, the effect - particularly in these tiny messages - is to hear the dead speaking. Those seem to have been ignored, as only the graffiti and heavy stone coffins are left. There are also curses in Aramaic that threaten a bad fate to the tomb robber. Tiny menorahs are scattered as engravings throughout the tomb, a symbol of the Temple in Jerusalem and a symbol of the endurance of the Jewish faith. "Of course, resurrection is not in the Jewish tradition," says Emma Maayan Fanar, a professor of Byzantine art at the University of Haifa, who has teamed up with Stern. She reads aloud the other inscription: "Good luck on your resurrection." One says, "Take courage, Holy Parents of Pharcitae, udes adonitas - no one is immortal." Stern explains that the dead who are being brought into the catacombs shouldn't feel that they are weak just because they've passed on. They are tiny and clustered near niches once holding oil lamps. It's in the Cave of Coffins that Stern points to two inscriptions in ancient Greek. Christian and pagan influences also are mingled in here. Sarcophagi are not a Jewish tradition, she notes, but in Roman times Jews believed if they copied the Romans, talked like the Romans, behaved like the Romans, they might have a better life. Weiss leads the way to a particularly large and rich tomb called the Cave of the Coffins. Beit She'arim, established by a fabled Jewish rabbinical prince, Judah, became a refuge for him and his followers. Jews were exiled from Jerusalem after a revolt in A.D. "We have a burial place from the Lebanon community, from Syria - the farthest one is from Yemen," Weiss says. Jewish people came to live or be buried here from all over the ancient world, according to Beit She'arim manager, Revital Weiss. "It's amazing that what can seem like hills and fields is standing over the largest concentration of burials from the Roman and Byzantine periods in the entire region," Stern says, while standing on the hillside. There are more than 30 excavated tombs here. It is both national park and necropolis a city of the dead dating back to the first century. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem.Īn expedition to the Southern Galilee a few hours north ends at the site of one of the country's richest burial sites: Beit She'arim. In this, Stern seems to be supported by scholars: She is completing a yearlong fellowship at the W.F. "Whereas I think it is intimate, vocal and spontaneous, and adds to the historical record." Graffiti has been "published, but sort of disregarded," she says. Her passion is the tomb graffiti of the ancient Jews in what was then Roman Palestine. Stern, 35, is an archaeologist and an assistant professor in the history department at Brooklyn College. I always call it the little black dress of Semitic languages." You can read Hebrew, you can read Phoenician. "Once you understand Aramaic," says Karen Stern, "you can read anything. Aramaic is the lingua franca of the ancient Middle East, the linguistic root of modern day Hebrew and Arabic.
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