Israeli archaeologists working on a major Roman-era port city on Wednesday unveiled new discoveries including an altar dedicated to Augustus Caesar and a centuries-old mother-of-pearl tablet inscribed with a menorah.
The finds at Caesarea, a complex on the Mediterranean coast 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of Tel Aviv, were the result of ‘one of the largest and most important conservation projects ever undertaken in Israel,’ the Israel Antiquities Authority said.
Caesarea was established some 2,030 years ago by Roman-appointed King Herod the Great, who ruled what was then Judea.
Today, the ruins are a popular tourist destination where concerts are still held in the remains of an ancient Roman theatre.
Archaeologist Peter Gendelman, leading a tour of the site, said the preservation work was perhaps the most ‘complicated and interesting’ project he had worked on in his 30-year career.
Some of the finds are ‘completely changing our understanding of the dynamics of this area’, he said.
Authorities are planning to finish the excavations within months and open a visitors’ centre built into ancient vaults to illustrate the city’s history.
Guy Swersky, vice chairman of the Rothschild Caesarea Foundation, said Caesarea was a major city from Roman times right through to the Crusader era.
‘This was by far the most important port city in this area of the Middle East,’ he said.
The Edmond de Rothschild Foundation and local authorities have allocated more than 100 million shekels ($27 million, 25 million euros) for the project.
The site, which contains ruins from later periods including the Byzantine, Muslim and Crusader eras, has been the focus of major excavation work over the decades but recent work has revealed new secrets.
The project also aims to preserve the remains of an ancient synagogue and a nearby aquaduct.
Officials said a small mother-of-pearl tablet engraved with a menorah was testimony to an ancient Jewish presence at the site.
Archaeologists said it likely dates to the fourth or fifth century AD.
Last year, Israel’s Antiquities Authority on Monday revealed cargo from a merchant ship that sank off the ancient Mediterranean port of Caesarea 1,600 years ago, including rare bronze statues and thousands of coins.
The find, happened upon by two divers, consisted primarily of ‘metal slated for recycling’ borne on the ship from Caesarea in the late Roman period, IAA experts said.
But a storm at the entrance to Caesarea harbour crashed the large ship into the seawall and rocks, the IAA said, spilling the cargo into the sea and preserving the ‘exciting finds’.
‘Metal statues are rare archaeological finds because they were always melted down and recycled in antiquity,’ Jacob Sharvit, director of the Marine Archaeology Unit of the IAA and his deputy Dror Planer said at the time in a joint statement, noting such a trove hasn’t been found in Israel for 30 years.
The artefacts include ‘a bronze lamp depicting the image of the sun god Sol, a figurine of the moon goddess Luna, a lamp in the image of the head of an African slave (and) fragments of three life-size bronze cast statues,’ the IAA said.
There were also ‘objects fashioned in the shape of animals such as a whale (and) a bronze faucet in the form of a wild boar with a swan on its head,’ the statement said, noting the sand protected the statues which were ‘in an amazing state of preservation.’
And, the year before, a record trove of some 2,000 gold coins was uncovered in the same area, with Sharvit crediting the abundance of divers with the growing number of finds.
According to Sharvit and Planer, the finds reflect the ‘economic and commercial stability in the wake of the stability of the Roman Empire,’ a period in which ‘Christianity was on its way to becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire.’
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