It was almost six in the afternoon; Laura lay on the bed thumbing through a collection of tour brochures she had picked up from the hotel tour office. A now well thumbed copy of Ernest Wright’s book Biblical Archaeology lay to one side.
After a busy morning and a late lunch they were relaxing after a hectic two weeks in Israel, it was now time to explore the background history of the Temple’s history and its destruction.
‘Look, if the last Temple was built and destroyed in Roman times, perhaps we should take a look at some of the Greco-Roman sites. What do you think?”
‘If you like.’
‘I’ve drawn up a list. There’s Caesarea, then Megiddo, Masada and Petra.’
‘We could start with Caesarea or even Petra in Jordan that’s nearby by.’
‘Where’s Caesarea?’
‘It’s sixty kilometres away, about an hour’s drive from Tel-Aviv, forty kilometres south of Haifa.’
‘Tomorrow Friday is Sabbath so things will be quiet for a couple of days, why don’t we rent a car?’
‘What about a chauffeur driven rental car, it would be easier, the driver would at least know where he was going.’
‘Great let’s do that!’
‘I’ll see if the car rental office is still open.’
Half an hour later, Laura returned triumphantly holding a tour booking form. She had rented minibus bus with an English speaking driver who was a trained guide who would meet them in the lobby ready for departure at nine the next morning. Their first stop would be Caesarea and they had a hotel booking at Haifa overnight before continuing to Megiddo the following day.
The next morning O’Connelly was awoken by the daylight that filtered through the curtains; he was used to the total darkness of his Parisian bedroom with its roller shutters cutting out all light, as in all French homes. He climbed out of bed, careful not to awake Laura and went to the bathroom.
It was seven and he felt wide awake looking forward to their day at Caesarea. The pick-up was at nine, which left them a couple of hours to ready themselves and take breakfast. He pulled up a chair to the writing table and switched on his portable PC to check his incoming mail, a glance told him there was nothing very important except for a message from de Lussac in Phnom Penh. The message visibly indicated that de Lussac was more agitated than usual, he had no news from Tel-Aviv where he suspected that they were checking his work; his mail was a diatribe of complaints about Alfred Mann who was not keeping him up to date regarding the translation of his book. From the recent mails O’Connelly had received it becoming clear by the day that de Lussac was of an extremely susceptible nature, if not paranoid, on the other hand it was understandable, he had invested ten years of his life dedicated to his work on the Temple of Solomon.
De Lussac had been the cause of considerable confusion sending annoying messages to Rubinstein and Mann, worrying O’Connelly who was beginning to suspect he was dealing with a loose canon. He would have to put a stop to it and quickly, if not he would have a problem with his publisher and Mann’s trust.
Laura stirred the noise on keyboard had woken her. She sat up and looked at him then smiled.
‘Can’t keep away from your mistress?’ she said softly.
He went over to the bed and kissed her tenderly on the forehead.
‘It’s our friend de Lussac, he seems to be upset.’
‘Oh.’
Laura got out of bed and read the message on the screen.
‘I hope he doesn’t spoil our plans.’
‘I’ll send him a reply, sympathise with him.’
‘The problem is he will be away for several months, far away.’
Over breakfast their conversation wandered from the day ahead at Caesarea to de Lussac. The question was to know what he would or could do if ever he really got upset; he had an agreement with O’Connelly and there was also a contract with Mann. They would have to find a way to calm him down.
There was another problem, it was necessary to have a direct communication with de Lussac, O’Connelly’s question were piling up at an alarming rate, it was important he sit down with him to go over a growing number of points. In spite of De Lussac’s continual repetitions and reiterations in his immensely long work of almost three thousand pages, which included a multiplicity of citations and references, the exploratory work related to the text accomplished over the three weeks they had spent in Israel had raised many contradictions as to foundation of ancient Israel, though the factual archaeological evidence exposed relative to the discoveries of the Palestine Survey Fund seemed solid.
Their discussions with renowned archaeologists such as Finkelstein and Silberman had raised numerous questions concerning early biblical history, which appeared to be nothing less than a glorious legend, comparable to that of Greek Mythology or the mythical founding of Rome, designed by their authors to form a glorious foundation and justification of their respective nations, and in the case of Israel origins to replace a likely reality, which probably consisted of a few wandering Bedouin tribes, caught between the conflicts of real and mighty empires with the Egyptian to the south and Assyrian to the north.
The minibus was punctual and they soon joined the morning jam, crawling out of Tel-Aviv northwards to Herzliya and Highway 2 in the direction of Haifa. Their driver and guide, Eli, a Sephardic who had immigrated to Israel from Morocco many years before, spoke good French and English, he was friendly and well used the needs of tourists such as O’Connelly and Laura.
O'Connelly listened to Eli with interest as he recounted the history of Caesarea, whilst Laura thumbed alternatively through her Guide Bleu and copy of Josephus’ Histories, interrupting from time to time with her more pointed questions. The city had originally been the site of a Phoenician port, where Herod built Caesarea transforming it into the finest city beside Jerusalem in Palestine with a magnificent amphitheatre and hippodrome. It had been the seat of the Roman governors of the Province of Judea and the main point of entry into the country for the Romans.
He pricked up his ears when Eli spoke of the impressive aqueduct they had seen that ran along the seashore. It had been built by King Herod with the help of the great Roman builder Agrippa in the first century to carry water to the city from springs in the Carmel Mountains over a distance of ten kilometres.
Their guide went on to explain how the Great Revolt of 66-70BC, which ended with the destruction of the Temple, had started in Caesarea. Riots had broken out between the Jews and Palestinians over a pagan ceremony conducted on the Sabbath near the entrance to a synagogue. At first the Romans ignored the Jewish protests, but the violence spread throughout the country and was transformed into a general uprising against them. The result was that the uprising was crushed and Caesarea became the capital of Palestine, it remained so until the Roman Empire was Christianized by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine in 325AD.
With the slow decline of Byzantine power there was a long period of peace until the Arab conquest and Muslim Palestine became a backwater until the arrival of the first Crusaders.
They turned off the highway near Or Akiva towards the coast following a small side road arriving at the archaeological site of Caesarea where they left car in the parking area and followed Eli to the entrance gate. The site was vast stretching several hundred meters along the rocky coast line. There were few visitors as they strolled along under the clear blue sky, to the left were the sparkling clear waters of the Mediterranean that lapped the ancient stones of the harbour now submerged after a distant earthquake that had destroyed the city, to the right in the distance were the Carmel Hills; the idyllic image was however spoilt by the huge electric power generating station with its enormous red and white chimneys that stood to the north of the site.
The amphitheatre faced the sea and to complete the picture they had built an oil terminal pier that stretched out onto the blue waters to the western horizon. The amphitheatre had been transformed for an open air concert hall with all the modern paraphernalia of lighting gantries and sound
systems for the event. Inside the amphitheatre gate was a plaque, a replica of the inscription found during excavations with the words ‘TIBERIVM’ and ‘TIVS PILATUS,’ references to the Emperor Tiberius, and Pontius Pilate the governor of Judea at the time of Jesus. This was an important find because it is the only archaeological evidence of Pilate’s existence.
The hippodrome built by Herod is still identifiable, though now it is a banana plantation. It is considerably smaller than the great Circus Maximus in Rome, but Herod's arena could hold 20,000 spectators for chariot races.
In addition there were vestiges of the fortress walls built by the Crusaders, monuments to the Christian invasion of the Holy Land in the eleventh century. Eli recounted the legend of how the Holy Grail, the goblet used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, was stolen by the Genoese who aided the Crusaders conquer the city in 1101AD.
The evidence of Rome’s presence, wealth and power in their Palestinian Province was overwhelming corroborating the descriptions given by Josephus. Palestine was a relatively small province within the Empire and had been crushed by its imperial masters when their patience with its endless trouble makers had run out. They had other more pressing problems with the conquest of the Germans to the north of the Rhine and the Persian threat from the east.
One of the points of interest in their visit to Caesarea was the Roman Temple that had been dedicated to the Emperor Augustus; it stood on the highest point of the city facing the harbour and symbolized the link between Herod and the Emperor Augustus.
Israeli archaeologists had sought not only to establish the temple’s design, but also its fate in their research into the conversion from paganism to Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean world. The Roman Jewish historian Flavius Josephus had described the temple as standing on high ground and being visible far out to sea.
‘What people don’t realise when they talk of the destruction of Temples is that there were large stone structures, as you can see,’ Eli said pointing at the huge blocks of stone. ‘It needed some considerable effort to pull them down. They probably used stone masons and craftsmen to dismantle the temples, it could have taken years.’
At its height of its importance Caesarea was an international port with a cosmopolitan population, many of whom continued their traditional religious practices after Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine in 323BC. In the late 4th century, the temple was dismantled, leaving only the foundations, to force pagans to convert to Christianity.
The extent of Roman influence in Palestine was visible through excellent relations maintained between King Herod, 73BC to 4AD, and Agrippa, the second most important person in the Roman Empire, during the first part of the reign of the Emperor Augustus.
Agrippa, 63AD to 12BC, married Julia, the daughter of Augustus 63BC to 14BC, and was therefore the son-in-law of the Roman Emperor, thus the children of Agrippa and Julia were the grandchildren of the Emperor.
Agrippa owed his close relations to Octavius, whom he had faithfully and loyally served during his ascension to the imperial throne, as the Emperor Augustus, and in particular after having played a decisive role in the Battle of Actium in which Octavius defeated his rival Marc Anthony.
It was against this background Agrippa was close to the Roman Empire’s seat of power and in a certain fashion exercised the role of Vice-Emperor.
Agrippa was an advocate of progress and Roman civilisation, and held a great interest in hydraulic works, undertaking major works across the Empire, making considerable technological progress in the projects he undertook, transforming them into veritable works of art. His political and visual approach concerning the distribution of water, both as a public service and as an instrument of the expansion of Roman civilisation and its values, was extended to the whole Empire.
In Rome itself Agrippa improved the flow of all the aqueducts built before the reign of Augustus and on occasions transformed their paths and structures employing arcades and superimposed bridges as well as building new aqueducts including the Aqua Julia, after the names of his wife and daughter, Aqua Alsienila, Aqua Virgo and Aqua Augusta.
According to Pliny the Ancient, Agrippa built 130 water towers in Rome in one year, half as much again as those that existed before, in addition he built 500 fountains and 700 public water baths in city.
The Romans owed the construction of the first thermes to Agrippa, other than being a spectacular monument its technological achievements, which were in constant development, characterised this particular aspect of Roman life.
Roman Gaul, conquered by Caesar of whom Augustus was the adopted son, was endowed by Agrippa with an extraordinary system of aqueducts designed both for the needs of the population and to be seen by the Gauls as part of the benefits offered by the marvels of Roman technology.
In the region of Lyons in Gaul, Agrippa built a network of aqueducts with the most advanced technology of the time including a succession of bridges and siphons.
Amongst the different achievements of Agrippa in Gaul was the aqueduct that carried the waters over a distance of 50 kilometres from springs in the region of Uzes to supply the city of Nimes, obliging the Roman engineers dig tunnels and build bridges. These included the Pont du Gard an aqueduct constructed with three levels of superimposed arcades bridging the River Gardon, 275 metres long and 50 metres high.
The technological renown and the aesthetic appearance of this aqueduct became one of the references of the Roman engineering as well as for the Empire’s client kings wishing to demonstrate modernity of their kingdoms.
Flavius Josephus often alluded to the privileged relations that King Herod had succeeded in creating with Augustus and Agrippa. Augustus had known Herod’s father, Antipater, had provided crucial help to Julius Caesar during his campaign in Egypt.
Herod was an ideal model of Rome's client Kings with his unswerving loyalty and his fidelity to the values of Roman civilisation, he was a modern king, soldier, administrator and an ambitious builder. It was he who built the Port of Caesarea and its magnificent temple also consecrated to the Divine Emperor Augustus.
However, by organising the Roman Games in Jerusalem held every five years, which were both festive and religious, he provoked religious Jews who were outraged by this profanation of the holy city consecrated to their sole and unique God.
After the visit they headed north through Haifa past the port and industrial area stopping at the picturesque historical seaside town of Akko or Accre They lunched in a small Arab run restaurant, their menu included delicious grilled fish accompanied by an excellent Carmel wine, the table was in a small courtyard shaded by vines and directly overlooking the waters of the town’s small port with its fishing boats and sailing boats belonging to the more prosperous locals. It was where Napoleon’s armies were struck down by the pest after the Emperor escaped to France abandoning his men to their tragic fate. In was a calamitous end to his glorious expedition in Egypt and his forced flight overland to Palestine, after his fleet was burnt in the Port of Alexandria by the Royal Navy of Britain’s King George III.
Their overnight stop was at Carmel where they were booked into the Dan Hotel situated high on the Mount, where their room overlooked the port far below. Carmel and its monasteries were of a passing interest to them as was the burnished dome of the Bahai Temple.
Nearby on the slopes of Mount Carmel the remains of prehistoric man had been found in the Skhul Caves, just one of the sites in Israel where human fossils have been found and where signs of early man’s appreciation of art is shown by the 100,000 years old beads made of shells that were strung together to form a necklace or bracelet. It was the first evidence of early man’s capacity to think symbolically as modern humans. It was strange to think that this small piece of land, a bridge between Africa and the rest of the world, has been inhabited by man for hundreds of thousands of years, commencing with Homo erectus, Neanderthal and finally Homo sapiens. Ever since it was the place of an endless mixing of
men as they flowed to and fro, between Africa and Asia.
The next morning O’Connelly discovered another furious tirade from de Lussac. Over breakfast they mulled over the problem of their unstable archaeologist. At first it seemed that the best solution was that he join them in Israel, where he could enlighten them with the evidence in view, but on second thoughts his archaeological argument was founded uniquely on the cisterns that lay below the Haram, which had been closed by the Waqf for almost a century and any investigations, especially by a Jew were totally out of the question. De Lussac was also bound to a year long contract in Cambodia with an American archaeological research foundation and would have difficulties in leaving his work, there was also the problem of his handicapped sister.
‘Why don’t you go to Cambodia?’
‘Cambodia!’
‘Yes. It could supply an interesting link in your story.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’ve got to get back to Paris, I’m needed at the Cultural Centre, at least I need them to earn a living, my leave is almost up.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Do that another couple of days here and we shall have enough information to keep you going for the moment. You also need to sit down somewhere and start getting your ideas on to paper!’
‘I’d forgotten about that,’ he said a little depressed at the idea.
‘Don’t worry once you get into the swing of it, it’ll go by itself.’
‘Your right, I send him a mail to see how he reacts to the idea.’
‘Great!’
‘Why don’t you join me, ask your boss for a sabbatical.’
Her eyes light up at the idea.
‘I need to pay my rent.’
‘Don’t worry about that, I’ll pay you as my research assistant with no strings attached.’ He knew how she valued her independence just as he valued his own, but he felt as ease with her, she was not demanding and had no visible nesting ideas.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she laughed.
Before leaving the hotel for Megiddo he mailed de Lussac proposing that he visit him in Phnom Penh. Laura’s suggestion seemed good and the idea of visiting the temples of Angkor was very enticing.
Megiddo was a fairly short drive away from the city, situated on the Great Plain of Esdraelon to the north side of the Carmel Mountains at the crossing of the Haifa to Jenin road and the Nazareth to Tel-Aviv road in the Yizre’el Valley.
It is one of the world's most important archaeological sites, where thirty successive cities had stood, each built one on top of the other, and archaeology evidence of six or seven thousand years occupation.
Today the site is a mound, a hillock, in the middle of the plain, or a ‘tell’ as archaeologists call it. The city was an important stronghold in ancient times because of its strategic position on the road that controlled important trade and military routes from Egypt to Syria, avoiding Cape Carmel, situated at the mouth of the valley, where the road divides into a western branch to Tyre and Sidon and an eastern branch to Damascus and Mesopotamia.
It guarded the key Yiere’el Valley, one of the bloodiest sites in the human history, where battles had been fought for thousands of years, the last in date being the British defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1917.
Excavations at the Megiddo tell began in 1903-05 with the work of the German Palestine Society, when their archaeologist, Schumacher cut a deep, wide trench on the east side of the tell, which still bears his name. Between 1925 and 1939 the site was systematically investigated by the Chicago Oriental Institute, and in 1960 Yigael Yadin began the excavations which determined the chronology of the site. Yigael Yadin’s work uncovered evidence that the site had been occupied in Neolithic times and a Canaanite settlement had been established in the fourth millennium BC that continued until the Israelite occupation of the Promised Land.
Megiddo was one of the most important biblical sites in Israel its roots going back to the fourth millennium BC when cities started to appear in the Levant. When the city-states rejected Egypt's attempted control, Megiddo led them against the Pharaoh. Thutmose III routed the Canaanite forces and laid siege to the city for seven months and after capturing the city Canaan was transformed into a province of the New Kingdom. The Egyptian description of the battle of Megiddo was the earliest account of a major war in antiquity.
In 1479BC, the Pharaoh Tuthmosis III gained control of the pass after a battle during his advance to the Euphrates and Megiddo fell under Egyptian control. In the Egyptian Tell el-Amarna archives that date from the 14th century BC letters were found from the Egyptian governor Biridja asking for military reinforcements against the Habiru, some archaeologists believe these were the Hebrews. The Bible tells of how Solomon built monuments in Megiddo, but no archaeological evidence of this has been discovered.
In Early Bronze Age, the fourth millennium BC, Megiddo was the largest site in a region that is now Israel. It covered an area of approximately 50 to 60 hectares. This was a large site for that time and in that region, it probably had some kind of defensive fortifications against marauding tribes, meaning that in the fourth millennium BC, there existed some kind of fiefdom.
It was a small city about approximately five or six hundred meters in diameter within the fortifications, the buildings included sanctuaries and administrative buildings. Outside the fortifications there were no doubt like in all such cities small dependant villages, farms and grazing land.
The significance of Megiddo is that it is the oldest real archaeological evidence of a significant permanent site of human occupation establishment in what is now Israel, at the outset it a simple early Bronze Age village.
They turned off the main road and arrived before a cluster of small buildings where they were met by Ishak Steiner, one of the young archaeologists present for the summer campaign during which students worked under the guidance of a team of qualified specialists from Ben Gurion University.
‘The Hebrew name of Megiddo is Armageddon, or the hill of battles,’ Ishak told them. ‘In the Late Bronze Age, between 1550 and 1150BC, archaeological evidence points to Canaanite culture. The city of Megiddo prospered, but at the end of this period there is evidence of its destruction,’ Ishak explained. ‘That black line you can see shows the buildings were burnt down.’
‘Who destroyed it?’ asked Laura.
‘Probable one of the Sea Peoples.’
‘The Philistines? They were one of the Sea Peoples?’
‘Perhaps. We don’t have any inscriptions to tell us.’
‘Could it have been destroyed by some other Canaanite army?’
‘It could have been destroyed by a neighbouring city state, but personally I think one of the Sea Peoples is the best candidate.’
‘Is there any possibility that it was the Israelites in their conquest of Canaan?’
‘No, at least not in my opinion.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m don’t have any knowledge of the Israelites in the 12th century BC,’ Ishak said a little forcefully.
‘Were the Sea Peoples the Minoans?’
‘Maybe, but the Minoans were wiped out by the explosion of the volcano Thera on Santorini, 1,600 years before Christ, it was a mega colossal eruption with a VEI or Volcanic Explosivity Index of 7, the caldera was fifteen kilometres in diameter, but we haven’t discovered any conclusive evidence up to now.’
O’Connelly was a little surprised by a young Israeli who seemed to deny the existence of the Israelites at a time the Bible described them as a nation.
‘So, in other words, archaeologically, you don’t feel you can identify the presence of the Israelites.’
‘Yes. If you think that a gang of Apiru or Habiru, an uprooted population, or Shasu, or whatever, in the 12th century could be identified as Israel, and, that in the turmoil of the 12th century, who conquered the city, then it’s a possibility. But myself I don’t believe in a functioning, coherent ethnic entity called Israel in the 12th century BC.’<
br />
‘When did Israel come into existence according to you?’
‘I suppose that there were groups who identified themselves as Israel in the Canaanite highlands as early as the time of the Merneptah Stela.’
‘Stela?’
‘It was a victory stela set up by the Pharaoh Merneptah around about 1207BC to mark an Egyptian victory over Israel in Canaan. However, at that time there were only undefended villages in Canaan, it was probably to glorify a relatively skirmish with the local tribes or the Assyrians for the Pharaoh's image.
‘I see.’
‘These tribes were, or at least they were identified by the ancient Egyptians, as the Haribu.”
‘When was that?’
‘In the late 13th century, that’s around 1200.’
‘So when was Jerusalem founded?’
‘That’s a difficult question, Jerusalem was conquered and reconquered, besieged, destroyed, abandoned and rebuilt over and over again throughout its history, almost 3,000 years according to the present archaeological evidence.’
‘It was probably like Megiddo at the beginning?’
‘Naturally, in the beginning it was just a very, very small town, no doubt captured by the early Jews from its previous inhabitants. Over the centuries it grew and according to the Bible it expanded under David, whether he existed or not is not the question, but the fact remains that it did expand sometime after 1000BC, later becoming the capital of the Kingdom of Israel.’
‘So Israel was already a nation.’
‘That we don’t know, in any case at the beginning Israel was small, very small, too small to be mentioned by the great powers of that time situated to the north and south. Later it was divided into Israel in the north and Judah in the south, both of which were conquered by the Assyrians, whose presence at Megiddo is in no archaeological doubt.’
He then led them to the underground tunnel, an aqueduct that supplied the city with water from the nearby hills.
Amateur archaeologists flourished in the 19th century, some of them were inspired like Schliemann who thought he had discovered the ancient Greek city of Troy. The treasures he unearthed were held in the Berlin Museum until they disappeared at the end of WWII when the Red Army captured the city.
O’Connelly told Laura how on a visit to Moscow in 1993 taking breakfast in the Marco Polo Hotel he had read in the Moscow English language daily that an exhibition of the treasures of Troy was to open that very day.
He told her how he quickly finished his breakfast and took a taxi to the Pushkin Museum with a friend, Kalevi Kyyronen a Finnish journalist. A queue had already started to form, it was not yet too long as the news of the exhibition was totally unexpected, a sensation in the archaeological world that believed the Heinrich Schliemann treasures had been lost forever.
He explained how they had been had struck by the Russian presentation of Schliemann’s excavations. Describing how he had dug vertical shafts into the mound where he believed Troy had once stood, at the entry to the Dardanelles in Asian Turkey. In the shafts Schliemann found an extraordinary treasure 1873, which he called Priam’s Treasure, composed of exquisite gold jewellery, necklaces, bracelets and brooches.
The Russian archaeologists explained that Schliemann, a German-Russian treasure hunter, had not discovered Troy, but several cities, one built on top of the other, like Megiddo, The treasures in fact came from different levels, centuries apart, and were not therefore the treasure of Helen but many Helens.
When O’Connelly opened his mail back in their hotel in Tel-Aviv he found De Lussac’s reply. De Lussac was delighted at the idea his coming to Phnom Penh, but he had evidently been exchanging mails with Alfred Mann who had touched one of his sensitive nerve ends. In addition he was insisting on receiving copies of the translation work done up to that point. The problem was that they had sublet it out to three different resident students at the Cultural Centre and though their productivity up to that point had been good, the quality of their work left a lot to be desired. The result was a lot of reading and corrections, the difficulty was accentuated by the student’s lack of historical and technical knowledge, which required a considerable amount of bibliographical research work and the sifting the serious biblical works from those of the religious crazies. The result was that they were seriously behind with the corrections and collation.
De Lussac appeared more and more like a loose canon and seriously worried O’Connelly who began to have a worm of doubt about the viability of his project.
They had pondered the utility of providing De Lussac with the translation chapter by chapter as it progressed, finally deciding that they would wait until its completion. De Lussac would receive the finalised text for his corrections. In spite of the disadvantage that the work was complicated by lack of his direct advice, it soon became clear that his absence in Cambodia was a blessing. However, his mails filled with his undisguised frustration and O’Connelly could easily imagine De Lussac’s paranoia that was being stoked by the day. In the meantime O’Connelly’s story was beginning to take form and the first stirrings of the pleasure he had felt in writing his early success were beginning to emerge. The theme was evolving day by day as he discovered the complexities of the Holy Land and the continual drama that was unfolding before his eyes meeting the different protagonists and visiting the historical sites.
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The Hittites
The Legacy of Solomon Page 29