Archive Discovered Under Maresha
046
You never know what the next day of an excavation is going to bring. We were reminded of this during our otherwise routine exploration of Maresha, an ancient city in the Judean lowlands. Located 22 miles east of Ashkelon on the Mediterranean Sea and 25 miles southwest of Jerusalem, this Hellenistic period (332–37 B.C.E.) urban center was wealthy—with cultural and mercantile connections as far afield as Italy and the Black Sea. Yet the kind of historical treasures that we brought to light (literally!) on one late summer day in 2018 surpassed all our expectations.
Earlier work at Maresha had provided a glimpse of the population and economy of the city in the third and second centuries B.C.E., during which it was a multiethnic cosmopolitan city whose dominant ethnos was Idumean (the descendants of Edom just to the south of Judea). At Maresha, the capital of the province, approximately 10,000 people lived in two-story dwellings built around central courtyards. Subterranean complexes existed beneath all the buildings and streets. These underground systems, some very large, were entered via openings between buildings and through courtyards or staircases quarried through the floors of the dwellings.
People initially hewed these caves when quarrying for building material to erect their dwellings on the surface. A relatively small opening through the upper crust of hard rock quickly reached the 047layer of soft chalk underneath, which was ideal for building houses. The chambers created by the quarrying were relatively immune to the weather conditions on the surface and, thus, were often repurposed as multipurpose rooms, but also as columbaria (walls of carved niches used as nesting cubicles for pigeons), olive presses, cisterns, ritual purification baths, cultic spaces, and stables.
So far, 169 subterranean complexes containing thousands of underground rooms have been found at Maresha. For the past 13 years, our excavations1 have focused on one such complex (SC 89) with at least 78 interconnecting rooms that served different purposes.The careful hewing of the rooms in SC 89 produced architectural elements of high quality (margins or borders at corners, arched passageways, doorways, etc.), suggesting that the owners of the buildings living immediately above them had a highly developed sense of aesthetics.
In August 2018, we exposed a small opening in the eastern wall of a room. After clearing away debris, we crawled through it to discover a new wing of the complex that appeared not to have been exposed for two millennia! The first room we encountered was large and round with a small opening in the ceiling. Climbing through this hole, we found ourselves in a small but beautifully hewn purification bath, with a finely carved entrance through which we could easily walk.
In the next room we passed a little opening leading into a small room (Room 67), and in the next two rooms, we discovered two Roman-period oil lamps on the floor. There were clear signs that these rooms had been disturbed, but because the entire wing had been sealed, we 048concluded that the Romans were the last visitors to the spot and had been responsible for the pilfering.
The room after that also appeared to have been vandalized, with clear signs of disturbance, broken walls, and pits. The pottery found inthis room, as well as other evidence, suggested to us that the damage possibly occurred during the Bar-Kokhba period (132–135 C.E.).
On the following day, Asaf Stern, our field photographer, came across a handful of clay lumps in Room 67, the small room not entered the day before. The lumps turned out to be impressed sealings, or bullae (small dried lumps of clay, which when wet were impressed with individual seals). Even in the poor lighting, we discerned clear images on many of them.
Upon reentering the room equipped with more lighting, it became clear that we had just discovered an ancient repository that once held written 049documents. Lying on the lime plaster floor before our eyes were hundreds of very small sealings! Although no papyri or parchments had survived in the humid conditions of the underground chamber, the sealings were ample evidence that Room 67 was once an archive.
This special space, barely high enough to sit in and with four broken storage jars from the Hellenistic period also on the floor, was more like a closet than a room. Remarkably, the tiny room had once been intentionally sealed. Remnants of the plaster used to seal Room 67 were still visible around the opening, and debris from the chalk bricks that had blocked the entrance were scattered all around.
The rest of the exciting day was taken up with carefully collecting and documenting even the smallest fragments of the sealings from the floor.
The sealings were all unfired and, therefore, exceptionally fragile. In other archaeological contexts with sealings, a fire that destroyed the archive burned and hardened the clay lumps, helping to preserve them. However, we were handling sealings in their natural state: unfired 050dry clay lumps that would crumble under the slightest pressure. This archive was likely vandalized in antiquity, but the documents and sealings were never set alight. Nonetheless, the quality of the images on these fragile lumps of clay were very much on par with hardened sealings from other contemporary archives, such as those from nearby Beth Shean and Kedesh in Galilee.
Overall, we collected 1,027 sealings. As generally no more than a few sealings were attached to a single document, more than a thousand sealings indicate that a few hundred documents were once stored here, deep in a cave under a wealthy family’s house. This clearly was the personal archive of the owner of the house above, making it the largest private archive ever found in the Levant.
All sealings were brought to our offices in Jerusalem where conservator Victoria Nosikovsky of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) carried out preliminary treatment on some of them. Soon afterward, Donald T. Ariel and Yael Barshak (also of the IAA) documented them, recording preliminary descriptions of the figures and symbols upon them and readings of the inscriptions. Due to their fragile nature, most of the sealings were later transferred to individual transparent capsules with internal membranes for their protection.
The task of cleaning will be slow and painstaking, as many of the sealings are covered—and some even encrusted—with limey powder from the archive’s plaster floor. Others are friable and crumbling, requiring consolidation.
Elisheva Kamaisky, senior objects conservator at the IAA, is currently examining a group of specimens in varying states of preservation to determine the effectiveness and estimated time of cleaning and conservation. As part of this assessment, Elisheva gently removed the powdery encrustation with a fine-bristle paintbrush for some of them and also delicately used a scalpel to pry harder encrustation off a couple of others—documenting them before and after her treatment.
It was thus determined that, on average, ten sealings can be conserved in one workday, meaning that treating the whole assemblage will require almost half a year of uninterrupted, focused attention. Delaying the conservation of the sealings in their current fragile state can cause irreparable damage, so the task needs to be carried out as soon as possible. Moreover, research on the archive can begin in earnest only after the conservation is completed.
On most of the 1,027 sealings, the faces bearing the impressions of vertical oval seals are at least partially visible. The sealings are generally smaller than those in the archive found 051in the large public building at Tel Kedesh in Galilee. The length of our impressions, ranging from 8 to 14 millimeters, and the nature of the depictions on them, suggest that most of the seals’ owners were private individuals of modest means.
Otherwise, the iconography of the sealings is similar to other Hellenistic assemblages in the East, with symbols overwhelmingly derived from the Greek mythological world: gods, goddesses, heroes, and their attributes. Every known Hellenistic archive has its own character, and Maresha is no exception. Here, there are unusually high numbers of certain Greek symbols, such as a (single) cornucopia. The many sealings bearing this symbol makes it likely that the owner of the archive or a business associate owned a seal or seals with the cornucopia image.
It is significant that in our assemblage there are very few official sealings and no images characteristic of Ptolemaic or Seleucid cultural, religious, or political influence, lending further support to the private nature of the archive. Important for our dating of the archive, a small number of sealings bear a Seleucid-era date—inscribed in Greek—from the middle of the second century B.C.E. Even more interesting is a five-letter inscription on three sealings that may belong to the same individual; its suggested reading is chreophylax—“a registry (or finance) official.”2 This title is found on numerous sealings from two other Hellenistic archives, but it is completely unknown in the southern Levant.
We can assume that most of the documents in the archive were written locally and impressed with seals, while others may have derived from outside Maresha. It is thus by no means certain that the (suggested) chreophylax was a resident of Maresha. He may also have been from a neighboring city or happened to do business and sealed a document that was later deposited in the archive.
The overwhelming majority of the sealings was not owned by public officials, such as notaries, but rather by individual parties. Our assemblage attests to the newly discovered underground wing at Maresha being a private archive whose documents would have reflected the generally low socioeconomic class of the parties validating the documents, including economic documents, deeds, and domestic agreements, deposited there.
More work is necessary to clean, decipher, and document the sealings from this invaluable cache. Once proper funding is secured, future analysis should provide information regarding the number of documents represented by the sealings, number of people represented by the seals, and sealing practices at Maresha, as well as the larger issues of trade, administration, and interethnic and interregional relations. In the next few years, this newly discovered archive undoubtedly will give us a deeper understanding of Maresha, a multiethnic Hellenistic city and Idumea’s western capital.
A large private archive was recently discovered in a subterranean cache at Maresha, a Hellenistic city in the Judean Shephelah. The original documents have not survived but are attested through hundreds of decorated sealings.
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