Browse Items (64 total)

This scale model of Second Temple Jerusalem resides at the Israel Museum in modern Jerusalem. This particular photograph is looking west and shows a reconstruction of the Second Temple itself (after King Herod's renovations). The Holy of Holies would…

This scale model of Second Temple Jerusalem resides at the Israel Museum in modern Jerusalem. This particular photograph is looking from north to south at the Antonia Fortress, which sat at the north edge of the Temple Mount complex (the Temple…

During the Hellenistic period (332-63 BCE) the city of Beth Shean enjoyed a revival and came to be known as Scythopolis, or 'City of the Scythians', perhaps as a result of a unit of the Scythian cavalry in the army of Ptolemy II Philadelphus. During…

This photograph shows a vertical seam in the eastern wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The 100 foot-wide southernmost stretch of the wall (the left half in the photo) is clearly Herodian construction and indicative of the King Herod's additions…

In this photograph the Dome of the Rock is visible in the upper left and the dome of the Al-Aqsa Mosque is visible in the upper right. Below them, Robinson's Arch is visible, springing out of the Western Wall (to the left). The tower rising up at the…

This photograph was taken underneath the Temple Mount, in the area known as Solomon's Stables (at the southern end of the Temple Mount, underneath the current Al Aqsa Mosque). Rather than being stables, they are cavernous halls that were built during…

This aerial photograph of the modern Temple Mount, looking toward the northeast (with the Dome of the Rock roughly in its center and the gray dome of the Al-Aqsa Mosque at its southern end), one can see just how large and well-built King Herod's…

In this drawing, the yellow pieces are those that have been found in archaeological excavations and the rest are an architect's reconstruction of how the southwestern corner of the Temple Mount probably looked in the Second Temple period: a…

This photograph shows the 'springer' for Robinson's Arch. In 1838, Edward Robinson noticed the strange, curved stones jutting out of the southwestern corner of the Temple Mount (to the upper left of center in this photograph). He realized that these…

This photograph shows the detail of extra-long blocks that King Herod's engineers used to bind the existing exterior walls of the Temple Mount compound to the southern addition that he was building. Some of these blocks measure 39 feet long and weigh…

This inscription, written in Greek, was found in the City of David, south of the Temple Mount, in 1914. It can be dated, on the basis of script, to the reign of King Herod (37-4 BCE), and its content points to a synagogue having been built in…

This scale model of Second Temple Jerusalem resides at the Israel Museum in modern Jerusalem. This particular photograph shows the towers that were part of a defense system of Jerusalem constructed by Herod the Great at its western border to guard…

This monumental staircase, located to the south of the Temple Mount compound (the wall of which is seen in the background) is one of two that led up to the Double and Triple Huldah Gates and into the Temple Mount. They were built as part of King…

This stone, with an inscription in Hebrew that reads, 'To the place of trumpeting to an(nounce)…,' was found in excavations at the base of the southwest corner of the Temple Mount (where many things were found that had been thrown off of the Temple…

These three doorways, which were blocked up after the Crusader period, led from the monumental steps on the south side of the Temple Mount into the Temple Mount and the area called Solomon's Stables. They were built into the base of the Temple Mount…

This pool, just north of Jaffa Gate, on the west side of the Old City of Jerusalem, is one of several large reservoirs constructed to provide water for the expanding population of Jerusalem during the reign of King Herod the Great (37-4 BCE). It and…

This photograph shows Phasael's Tower, one of three towers built by King Herod the Great (37-4 BCE) as part of his defensive wall system on the western side of the city of Jerusalem. Herod named the tower after his brother, who was killed by the…

This scale model of Second Temple Jerusalem resides at the Israel Museum in modern Jerusalem. This particular photograph is looking from north to south at the Antonia Fortress, which sat at the north edge of the Temple Mount complex (the Temple…

This map shows both the size of Herod's kingdom at the beginning of his reign (the purple areas that include Judaea, Perea, and Galilee) and the regions that were given to him later by his Roman benefactors, mainly the emperor Augustus (the lighter…

This scale model of Second Temple Jerusalem resides at the Israel Museum in modern Jerusalem. This particular photograph is looking west and shows a reconstruction of the Second Temple itself (after King Herod the Great's renovations). The Holy of…

This aerial photograph, looking straight down on King Herod's (37-4 BCE) palace at Herodium, clearly shows its double circular defense wall and four towers. Three of the semi-circular towers were defensive, while the completely round tower probably…

This aerial photograph of the southern portion of the city of Caesarea Maritima shows the huge theater that looks out toward the ocean and the setting sun. The land that juts out into the ocean at the lower left corner of the photo is the so-called…

This theater is an example of both a new custom and a new architectural form brought eastward by the conquests of Alexander the Great and the Romans. Theater was a Greek invention, but many (if not most) of the Hellenistic 'influences' came to…

This aerial photograph shows one of the great engineering feats of antiquity: the enclosed harbor at Caesarea Maritima. The coast of Israel/Palestine has few good natural harbors, so King Herod built one using the state-of-the-art technology of…

This photograph shows the remains of a Tobiad palace at Araq el-Amir in modern Jordan (east of the Jordan River). The Tobiads were a Jewish ruling family in the late 3rd and early 2nd centuries BCE who, according to the books of 2 Maccabees and…

This monumental stairway is all that still exists of the monumental temple that King Herod the Great (37-4 BCE) erected and dedicated to the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus. The temple's foundations were laid directly over the top of the palaces of the…

A typical coin struck by the Hasmonaean (Maccabean) king Alexander Jannaeus (ruled from 103-76 BCE). The symbol on the left is an anchor and the symbol on the right is a lily flower, which was a symbol for Jerusalem. The inscription around the anchor…

This photograph shows the aqueduct that fed the city of Caesarea Maritima, a port city (notice the waves of the Mediterranean on the left) that King Herod the Great built nearly from scratch between 25-13 BCE. The monumental aqueduct stretches north…

This photograph shows one of the city streets in Caesarea, which was built by King Herod as a port city on the Mediterranean cost. Two seated statues can be seen facing each other across the street. When Herod's son Archaeleus was deposed in 6 CE,…

This aerial photograph shows the archaeological remains of Herod's palace at Jericho, which is located in the Judaean Desert, on the bank of Wadi Qelt, near the northern tip of the dead Sea. He likely chose it because it is in the Judaean Desert, so…

This aerial photograph shows the Roman-style forum and adjoining basilica at Sebaste, which is located in the central part of the Central Hill. Herod built this town around 30 BCE in honor of Caesar Augustus (Sebastos is Greek for the Latin word…

This photograph shows the outside of Cave 1, which, according to the common story, is what the two Bedouin shepherd boys saw and threw a rock into, hoping to find a lost goat. Instead, they heard the crash of broken pottery and found the first of the…

This photograph shows the inside of Cave 1, the first of 11 Judaean Desert caves that were found to contain the Dead Sea Scrolls. Seven intact scrolls came from this cave, including the two oldest copies of the book of Isaiah (they date to the late…

This photograph shows what one of the Dead Sea Scrolls looked like when it was found (before it was unrolled). Though a scroll in this state is much easier to deal with than others that were broken into thousands of fragments, the 2,000 year-old…

This map shows the expansion of the Hasmonaean kingdom in the period between 160 and 76 BCE. The capital of the kingdom was always in Judaea, colored light blue. The Hasmonaean ruler Jonathan (160-142 BCE) added the yellow portions; his brother Simon…

The Great Isaiah Scroll is one of the largest and best-preserved scrolls from the Dead Sea Scrolls and was probably produced around 100 BCE. The entire cache of Dead Sea Scrolls, which were initially found by some Bedouin in caves near the Dead Sea…

This aerial photograph, looking southeast, shows the mountaintop fortress of Masada, located in the Judaean Desert, which rises 400 feet above the Dead Sea. King Herod (37-4 BCE) built two palaces on top, and the Northern Palace is visible here. Note…

There are a few monumental tombs outside and below the southeast corner of the Old City of Jerusalem, in the Jehoshaphat Valley. The one in this picture is known anachronistically as the Tomb of Absalom (Absalom was the biblical son of David who…

This photograph shows the walls of the western side of the Old City of Jerusalem. The prominent portion of this wall was built by the Ottomans in the 16th century; however, significant parts of the wall, especially the lower layers, are from the days…

This aerial photograph, looking east, shows what Herodion now looks like after stones were piled up next to the walls and the towers were knocked down. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, King Herod (37-4 BCE) built this palace on the site…

This inscription was discovered in a tomb in a northern suburb of modern Jerusalem. It is written in Aramaic, a common language of the Second Temple period, but the script, called Paleo-Hebrew, is like the one that was used hundreds of years earlier,…

This photograph shows what the limestone cliffs in the region around Qumran look like, which makes it easier to understand how the Dead Sea Scrolls could have been hidden for nearly 2,000 years without being discovered. Cave 1 is in the upper left of…

The jars in this picture are the same type of jar inside of which the scrolls from Cave 1 were found. Its unusual shape suggests that it may have been made specifically for storing scrolls. The same sort of pottery, as well as a potter's kiln, were…

The two men in this photograph, Jum'a Muhammed (on the left) and Muhammed edh-Dhib (on the right) are the two Ta'amireh Bedouin cousins who claim to have discovered the first Dead Sea Scrolls in Cave 1 in 1947. Details of the discovery differ, but…

This fragment of a Greek inscription inscribed in stone is one of several large stone notices that were erected around the Temple precinct entrances in the Second Temple Period. A complete version of the same text was found in the 19th century, and…

After the Dead Sea Scrolls from Cave 1 were found by the Bedouin and taken to Bethlehem, they ended up in front of Eleazar Sukenik, a professor and archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who is the man in this picture. He was the first…

The light colored, curved shape on the left in this photograph is the roof the Shrine of the Book, a building within the Israel Museum in Jerusalem that houses the Dead Sea Scrolls. The roof was designed to look like the lid of one of the jars inside…

This aerial photograph shows the settlement of Qumran, which is located in the Judaean Desert, which is probably where a group of people known as the Essenes lived between ca. 150 BCE and 72/73 CE. Most scholars think that the people who lived here…

This photograph shows the marl terraces of Qumran, upon which the ancient settlement was built. The Qumran Caves 4 and 5 are pictured near the center of the image. The wadi (dry riverbed) flows with water after fresh rains. The Dead Sea is visible in…

This map shows the divisions of the Hellenistic kingdoms after the Battle of Paneas in 198 BCE. After this point, the land of Israel/Palestine was controlled by the Seleucids. The Ptolemiac Kingdom continued to occupy Egypt and North Africa.