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Rare Archaeological Discovery Changes Perceptions About Roman Art in Israel

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Archaeologists discovered remains of frescos from the Roman period in Zippori National Park last month, the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology announced last Thursday

Archaeologists discovered remains of frescos from the Roman period in Zippori National Park last month, the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology announced last Thursday. The wall paintings reveal new information about the life and art in the thriving Jewish-Roman city during the second century.

“The importance of the discovery is not only the novelty of the finding itself, but also its chronological placement,” Professor Zeev Weiss, who heads the excavations at Zippori, told Tazpit Press Service (TPS). “I have been conducting excavations in Zippori for 25 years and this is the first time we have evidence of figurative images in wall paintings found at the site.”

According to Prof. Weiss, archaeologists and historians traditionally dated the appearance of figurative art forms to later dates. The discovery of the mural fragments, however, shows that such art already existed in the early years of the second century CE.

Hundreds of fragments were found in Zippori that depict flowers and colored wall panels. More importantly, archaeologists also found extremely intricate drawings of animals, and at least one fragment which depicts a human figure holding a weapon.

The frescos decorated a monumental building that was erected in the early second century CE north of the Decomenos, a colonnaded street that cut across the city from east to west and continued to the foot of the Zippori acropolis.

“So far we only unearthed a portion of this building,” said Prof. Weiss. “It was definitely a public facility of some sorts, but we have yet to discover its exact purpose.”

Zippori is a national park and archaeological site located in the Lower Galilee region of Israel. The site has provided rich and diverse historical and archaeological findings that span from as far back as the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods to as relatively recent as the early Ottoman period.

Zippori was a Galilee center of Jewish life during the Hellenic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. According to contemporary and modern historians, the city of Zippori thrived between the first and seventh centuries CE as a center of learning with a diverse, multiethnic, and multireligious population of some 30,000 living in relatively peaceful coexistence.

During the second century CE, the city was renamed Diocaesarea and was granted a status of polis [a free city] by the Roman empire, likely due to the fact that the residents of Zippori refused to take part in the revolts against Rome.

“This discovery serves to illustrate the multicultural climate which characterized Zippori during that period,” Prof. Weiss explained. “While its population was always predominantly Jewish, we know that the Jewish majority lived peacefully side by side with Roman and pagan residents.”

Most of the archaeological work conducted in Zippori since 1990 has been led by the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Discoveries include a Roman temple, several bath houses, a theater, two churches, and a synagogue. Over 60 mosaics dating from the third to fifth centuries CE have also been unearthed to date in Zippori.

Michael Zeff
(TPS)

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