Todd Bolen, Author at BiblePlaces.com

The Low-Level Aqueduct and Sultan’s Pool

One of the most impressive building projects of King Herod and others of his period is the aqueduct system that brought water to Jerusalem from the area south of Bethlehem. Most people aren’t familiar with this project, or if they are, they really can’t fathom how remarkable the system is. This is because unless you get out and hike around for at least a few hours, it is difficult to get a sense for the obstacles that were overcome.

Several aqueducts brought water to a series of three massive pools known today as “Solomon’s Pools.” Two aqueducts then transported the water to Jerusalem. The upper-level aqueduct led to the area of Herod’s Palace on the Western Hill and the lower-level aqueduct fed the pools and cisterns around the Temple Mount.

The relationship and date of Sultan’s Pool (photo below) to the low-level aqueduct has never been clear. The pool is located in the Hinnom Valley on the western side of Jerusalem, and recent excavations suggest that it was only constructed in the Byzantine period.

The Israel Antiquities Authority announced today that they have discovered a channel that diverted water from the low-level aqueduct into Sultan’s Pool. Built in the Byzantine period (330-640), the channel was repaired multiple times in the Ottoman period (1517-1917).

The IAA has issued a press release and two high-resolution aerial photos (zip). Arutz-7 has the story (“Jerusalem’s Secret Revealed”) and includes low-res photos in the article.

From the press release:

The Israel Antiquities Authority uncovered the main aqueduct that conveyed water to the Sultan’s Pool during an excavation prior to the construction of the Montefiore Museum in Mishkenot Sha’ananim by the Jerusalem Foundation. The ancient aqueduct supplied pilgrims and residents with water for drinking and purification.
Most Jerusalemites identify the Sultan’s Pool as a venue where large cultural events are held; however, for hundreds of years it was one of the city’s most important water reservoirs.
In an archaeological excavation the Israel Antiquities Authority recently conducted prior to the construction of the Montefiore Museum, which the Jerusalem Foundation plans to build in Mishkenot Sha’ananim, an aqueduct was uncovered that conveyed water to the Temple Mount and also served as the principal water supply to the Sultan’s Pool. The excavation, directed by Gideon Solimany and Dr. Ron Beeri of the Israel Antiquities Authority, focused on a section along the course of the Low-level Aqueduct, on the western side of Ben Hinnoam Valley above the Derekh Hebron bridge.
According to Dr. Ron Beeri, excavation director on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, “We are dealing with a very impressive aqueduct that reached a height of three meters. Naturally, one of the first things Sultan Suleiman I hastened to do in Jerusalem (along with the construction of the city wall as we know it today) was to repair the aqueduct that was already there which supplied the large numbers of pilgrims who arrived in Jerusalem with water for drinking and purification. Suleiman attached a small tower to the aqueduct, inside of which a ceramic pipe was inserted. The pipe diverted the aqueduct’s water to the Sultan’s Pool and the impressive sabil (a Muslim public fountain for drinking water), which he built for the pilgrims who crossed the Derekh Hebron bridge and is still preserved there today”. Dr. Beeri said, “It is evident that the location of the aqueduct was extremely successful and efficient: we found four phases of different aqueducts that were constructed in exactly the same spot, one, Byzantine, from the sixth-seventh centuries CE and three that are Ottoman which were built beginning in the sixteenth century CE. The last three encircle a large subterranean water reservoir that was apparently built before the Ottoman period”.

Sultan’s Pool in the Hinnom Valley, September 1943
Library of Congress, matpc-12447

From the forthcoming photo CD: The American Colony and Eric Matson Collection: Jerusalem

Tagged Discoveries, Excavations, Jerusalem

Baghdad National Museum, Virtually

You can now visit the Baghdad National Museum online. The Italian creators have done a terrific job. Ansa.it has the story:

The treasures of Baghdad’s National Museum went online for the first time Tuesday as Italy inaugurated the Virtual Museum of Iraq as part of an ongoing cultural collaboration between the two countries.
Looted during the United States-led invasion in 2003, the Baghdad Museum partially reopened in February after six years but the website is designed to make its most important artefacts accessible to everyone.
The site (www.virtualmuseumiraq.cnr.it), in Arabic, English and Italian, offers visitors the chance to walk through eight virtual halls and admire works from the prehistoric to the Islamic period, while videoclips reconstruct the history of the country’s main cities.
”It’s not a simple container of the objects in the museum but a real virtual journey, created for the general public and the scientific community, across 6,000 years of Mesopotamian history,” said Italy’s National Research Council Director Roberto De Mattei.
Among the artefacts on display in the Sumerian hall of the virtual museum is the famous Warka Mask, a marble head of a woman from Uruk dated to 3,400-3,100 BC, which, as with many of the works, visitors can rotate to get an almost 360 degree view.
In the Assyrian hall visitors can also admire colossal limestone statues of human-headed, winged bulls called lamassu, dated to the eight and ninth centuries BC, that guarded the ancient cities of Nimrud on the River Tigris and Dur Sharrukin, modern-day Khorsabad.

The story continues here.

HT: Explorator

Tagged Museums

Great Deal: Context of Scripture, 3 volumes

The best reference for ancient Near Eastern texts related to the Bible is the The Context of Scripture, edited by Hallo and Younger. This three-volume work is superior to Pritchard’s ANET in many ways. Unfortunately, it is published by Brill and thus is very expensive.

Eisenbrauns has an outstanding deal on the complete set in paperback. Instead of $310, it is available this weekend only for $124 (plus shipping).

If you miss the sale, each volume is available at Amazon for $200-300 each (1, 2, 3). Or you can get the set in Libronix (electronic) format for $299.95.

If anyone has volume 1 in hardback and wants to sell or trade, send me an email (tbolen91 at bibleplaces dot com).

Tagged Resources

James Ossuary Forgery Trial: New Year, Same Story

It must be a slow news day if the Jerusalem Post is reporting on the James Ossuary forgery trial without apparently any new developments in the last 8 months. The judge rebuked the prosecution last October, saying “Not every case ends in the way you think it will when it starts. Maybe we can save ourselves the rest.” Shuka Dorfman therefore seems determined to convict the accused in the court of public opinion if he cannot do it after four years of trial. “I believe we have revealed only the tip of the iceberg. This industry encircles the world, involves millions of dollars,” said Dorfman.

That may well be true, and those who love the ancient world will be happy to see the forgery business destroyed, but this does not mean that Oded Golan forged the James Ossuary. From the JPost:

Golan and his co-defendants went on trial in the summer of 2005, but after more than 70 prosecution witnesses and 8,000 pages of testimony, Judge Aharon Farkash warned the prosecution that he was not convinced they had proved their case and advised them to consider halting the trial.
“After all the evidence we have heard, including the testimony of the prime defendant, is the picture still the same as the one you had when he was charged?” Judge Farkash pointedly asked the prosecution in October 2008. “Not every case ends in the way you think it will when it starts. Maybe we can save ourselves the rest.”
“Have you really proved beyond a reasonable doubt that these artifacts are fakes as charged in the indictment?” Judge Farkash said. “The experts disagreed among themselves. Where is the definitive proof needed to show that the accused faked the ossuary? You need to ask yourselves those questions very seriously.”
In an exclusive interview with The Media Line at his Tel Aviv home, Golan said he was confident that new scientific research undertaken by defense experts would finally exonerate him. Prosecution scientists had accused Golan of faking patina – a thin layer of biological material covering ancient items – in order to make the inscriptions on the artifacts seem old.
“No, I never faked any antiquity,” Golan told The Media Line. “During the last several years there were several tests and examinations of those items by prominent experts from different countries in different laboratories and I think we succeeded to prove that these inscriptions could not have been inscribed in the last century. There is a thin layer of patina – it’s a thin layer of crust made actually by a micro-organism that was developed inside the grooves of the inscription and this product made by the micro-organism could not have been developed in less than a hundred years.”

More here.

UPDATE: As Jim notes in the comments, the above report is related to a video produced by The Media Line in which Joe Zias claims that he saw the ossuary with part of the inscription in an antiquities shop in the 1990s.

Maybe it was the way that the producers edited the video, but I didn’t hear Zias make an unqualified assertion that he saw this exact ossuary and declare precisely what was inscribed at the time. (Zias’s words on video: “I remember that I seen a thing in an antiquities dealer in the 1990s, so it couldn’t have been in the hands of Golan.”) Of course, he need not make such a claim to the media. But one supposes that in the trial he would have made the strongest statements possible while under oath.

Apparently that, combined with the other evidence, was unconvincing to the judge.

As someone has noted in a comment on this blog before, exoneration in a criminal court will not prove that the ossuary’s inscription is authentic. But it should serve to silence the mouths of the (failed) prosecuting parties and allow the matter to be discussed by the experts on the merits of the evidence.

Tagged Forgery

ASOR 2008 and Biblical Archaeology

The annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) was held last November, but with 287 papers being presented, it is likely that you didn’t catch everything that went on, whether you were present or not.

Brian Janeway has posted a summary of some key presentations related to biblical archaeology. He notes:

Though the term ‘biblical archaeology’ has gone out of fashion, scholars are still preoccupied with correlating their finds with the biblical text. The fact that the vast majority of the sponsoring institutions are secular should encourage Christian believers of all stripes.

He reviews presentations about Jericho, Gath, the Philistines, Khirbet en-Nahas, LMLK seals, Qumran, and the “cave of John the Baptist.” Janeway concludes:

This review of biblical papers delivered at the 2008 ASOR meetings clearly shows that biblical archaeology is anything but dead, even if scholars are uncomfortable with the term itself. Indeed, it illustrates the central role that the Bible continues to play in the history and archaeology of the region; a source unmatched and unrivaled in its rich detail and description of life in antiquity.

Information about the 2009 annual meeting is given at the ASOR website. A schedule of the presentations may be downloaded here.

Tagged Excavations, Lectures

Update from Khirbet el-Maqatir, Week 2

The excavations of the site proposed to be biblical Ai continued for a second week, with a brief description and photos posted on the website of the Associates for Biblical Research.

Significant discoveries continued to be made during the second and final week of the ABR excavation at Kh. el-Maqatir, June 1-5, 2009. During the first week ABR Board President Gary Byers cleared the gate entry way and found considerable evidence for an intense fire, evidenced by the limestone bedrock turning red. Oral Collins of the Berkshire Institute for Christian Studies continued the excavation of a section of the western wall of the fortress discovered in 2000. The wall at this point proved to be 3.3 meters wide and is preserved to a height of 1.2 meters. Just inside the gateway of the fortress ABR Director of Research Bryant Wood uncovered a portion of a building, perhaps an administrative center. In the northeast corner of the 6 x 6 meter excavation square a deposit of four vessels from the time of Joshua were found: a storage jar, a small cooking pot, a trumpet-base bowl and a dipper juglet. The four restorable vessels will provide important evidence for dating the fortress.

Tagged Excavations, Samaria