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Spotlight on Sepphoris

Bringing Water to Sepphoris

By Tsvika Tsuk

I first learned of Sepphoris’s ancient water system in 1975 from a local resident named Buki. He told me about a huge underground cavern three stories high and stretching more than two football fields long. It sounded to me a little like a flight of fancy. “When I see it, I’ll believe it,” I said. So Buki led me down a steep slope into the middle of an enormous hall 30 feet high, 625 feet long, 10 feet wide and capable of holding more than a million gallons (160,000 cubic feet = 4,300 cubic meters)—enough to supply water to […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Thomas Gordon Smith, “Eternal Architecture,” in Archaeology Odyssey, May/June 2000.

Endnotes

1.

For more on the water system, see Tsvika Tsuk, “The Aqueducts to Sepphoris,” in Galilee Through the Centuries, ed. Eric M. Meyers (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999).

2.

See Leroy Waterman et al.,Preliminary Report of the University of Michigan Excavations at Sepphoris, Palestine, in 1931 (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1937).

3.

Sextus Julius Frontius, The Stratagems and the Aqueducts of Rome, vol. 1:16, trans. C.E. Bennett, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1925), pp. 356–359.

4.

Babylonian Talmud, Erubin 87a.

5.

The plaster was dated by its materials and by comparison to the table prepared by Dr. Yosef Porath (Porath, “Lime Plaster in Aqueducts—A New Chronological Indicator,” Mitteilungen 82 [1989], [Braunschweig: Leichtweiss Institut für Wasserbau der Technischen Universität], pp. 1–16).