Jerusalem Flourishing—A Craft Center for Stone, Pottery, and Glass

If Jerusalem is famous for one thing, it is for being a religious center. But our interest in the Holy Cities lies also in its everyday life, of which so little is known. Recent investigations revealed that in ancient times, especially in the late Second Temple period (50 B.C.–70 A.D.), various arts and crafts, such as stonework, painted pottery and glass industry, flourished in Jerusalem.

To understand these crafts is to add a new dimension to our understanding of life in the Holy City. From these crafts we learn about the world of the craftspeople who produced the artifacts, about the art and culture their products reflected, and about the people who used them. A knowledge of these crafts breathes new reality into the ancient world we are trying to understand.

For 14 years, between 1969 and 1983, I directed archaeological excavations in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, within the area of Jerusalem where its Upper City was located. The Jewish Quarter of the Old City had been largely destroyed by the Jordanians in 1948. When the Jewish Quarter was reconstructed after the 1967 Six Day War, we took the opportunity to investigate the site, which had never been excavated before. Our archaeological excavations provided some of the most important evidence yet uncovered concerning Jerusalem as an ancient craft center. Foremost among these crafts was one that utilized the common raw material naturally available locally—stone.

Even before our excavations, Jerusalem stonework was well-known. The well-developed art of stoneworking is evidenced by the Second Temple Period tombs scattered around the city. The architectural carvings and ornamentation in these rock-hewn tombs, as well as on carved stone sarcophagi and ossuaries,^a which are found in such large quantities in Jerusalem, are witness to the local skill in this craft, which eventually evolved into a typical Jewish style. Although no sepulchral discoveries were made in our excavations, I have reproduced here one of the finest of the sarcophagi discovered on the campus of the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, which superbly demonstrated the high standards attained by these Jerusalem artisans.

Other excavations in Jerusalem over the last decade have also uncovered artistic stonecarving. For example, the ornamented stones with geometric and floral patterns discovered near the Southern Wall of the Temple Mount fully display the ornamental richness and variety that typified the Royal Portico of the Temple Enclosure at the end of the Second Temple Period. One stone ornamented in a similar style was found in our excavations, and it, too, was apparently from a monumental building somewhere in the so called Upper City, which was where our excavations were located.

Our excavations in the Upper City have shown that Jerusalem artisans also produced such practical wares as stone tables and household vessels. In other words, Jerusalem had a flourishing and varied stone industry, employing many artisans and craftsmen.

Until we discovered stone tables in our excavations, as far as the archaeologist was concerned, the furniture of the Second Temple Period in Israel had been unknown. Even now this is the only type of furniture actually found. The ordinary tables in the Jerusalemite home were, of course, made of wood; but they long ago disintegrated under moist climatic conditions. We now know that Jerusalemites also had stone tables, decorative in nature and quite expensive, that had specific functions within the house.

Our first stone table was found in the so-called Burnt House, which was burned in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. (See “Jerusalem in Flames—The Burnt House Captures a Moment in Time,” BAR 09:06.) Later we found more of these tables in many houses in the Upper City. Fragments of such tables had been discovered in other excavations in Jerusalem–some of them long ago—but these fragments had not been recognized as parts of tables. Fragments of the small columns that form the legs of these tables had also been found, but long puzzled excavators.

We found two types of stone tables, one rectangular and high, the other round and low. The rectangular tables have a single central leg and a rectangular top. A projection on the underside of the table slab fits into a corresponding depression in the top of the leg, joining the two together. The leg is fashioned in the form of a column, with all the usual elements including base, shaft, and capital. These tables were the same height as modern tables, 28 inches to 32 inches, and the tops measure about 18 inches wide by 34 inches long.

One unusually elegant table had a thin top and a foot in the form of a tall, well-designed column; it is made of a hard, polished stone that was shattered into dozens of fragments and splinters by the fire in the house where it came to light. Our search for its pieces continued over two seasons, during which time we carefully sifted all the earth removed from rooms of the house.

Another table is more typically proportioned, with a thick top and stubby central leg. The fore-edge of the top bears a stylized leaf pattern also found on Jewish ossuaries from Jerusalem; its leg has a capital in Doric style. The top and leg of the table were found in different buildings and did not originally compose a single table. They do, however, go together quite admirably.

The edges of these tables are generally ornamented on three sides with geometric and floral patterns; the fourth side is most often plain. This suggests that the tables originally stood against a wall.

On the edge of one table fragment there is an unusual motif—two crossed cornucopias with a pomegranate between them. Until recently, this motif was known only from Hasmonean (first century B.C.) coins; this is the first instance of this Hasmonean emblem being found on an object other than a coin. An unusual motif on another tabletop, a fish, is particularly noteworthy because it is the only animal figure found in ornamental use. This period in Jerusalem is known for its strict adherence to the proscription against human or animal representation.

The smaller round tables are about 20 inches in diameter. Their tops are usually of soft limestone, though some fragments are of either a hard, reddish Jerusalem stone, a blackish bituminous stone, or imported black granite. On the bottom of these smaller tabletops are three depressions, where wooden legs had been affixed. Nothing survives of the legs, but on the basis of Hellenistic and Roman paintings and reliefs, we can suggest that they were in the form of animal legs, sometimes with bronze fittings at the bottom. A round table of this sort appears in a wall painting in a Hellenistic tomb at Marisa, some 22 miles southwest of Jerusalem, as well as on several of Herod’s coins.

The group of tables from the Jewish Quarter thus reveals a hitherto unknown aspect of home furnishing in ancient Jerusalem. Hellenistic and Roman paintings and reliefs depicting rectangular tables with a single leg reveal that they were used as serving tables to hold drinking vessels. The round tables with three legs are depicted in use for meals, surrounded by guests reclining on couches.

Stone tables like these were in widespread use throughout the Roman Empire, although they originated in the Hellenistic East. The Roman historian Livy, who lived in Herod’s day, mentions “tables with one leg” among the booty brought from Asia Minor in the second century B.C., when they were apparently still considered a novelty in Rome. The Roman scholar Varro (first century B.C.) describes “a stone table for vessels, square and elongated, on a single small column … many placed it in the house alongside the central pool. On and near it, when I was a lad, they would put bronze vessels.” A graphic representation of such a group is also found on a Roman pottery oil lamp. Even today, the visitor to Pompeii will find such decorative tables in the dining rooms and patios of the luxurious villas there. In Jerusalem, too, these attractive stone tables added beauty and culture to the home. The basic technique of the Jerusalem stonecarvers who made these tables, as well as the style of their ornamental motifs, was deeply rooted in the local tradition of stoneworking and, although their work was patterned after foreign models, it had a decidedly local flavor.

An ornamented fragment of a stone tabletop was recently purchased from an antiquities dealer in Jerusalem by Dr. L. Y. Rahmani on behalf of the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums. The dealer claimed that it had been found at Turmus-Aya near Samaria. Dr. Rahmani showed this fragment to me before his Department bought it and asked if I thought that it might have been stolen from our excavations, for we had just found the first such tables in the “Burnt House.” The stone offered for sale bore the typical traces of soot, as did ours. I was in an embarrassing position, because we had carried out the excavation of the burnt rooms under strict supervision, employing only staff members and volunteers, and the site was guarded after working hours and at night by a special guard. Since a heavy fragment of a stone table was no mean item to put in your pocket and smuggle away, I told Rahmani that I didn’t think it was ours. I began having second thoughts, however. One of the day workmen, in cahoots with the night watchman (who also worked for us during the day) might have been able to remove such a bulky item. It might have been placed to one side during the day and then removed at night, to be sold to a waiting antiquities dealer. Other factors also seemed unexplainable. For instance, at the very time we were uncovering the first such rare objects in the Jewish Quarter, a similar fragment of a Jerusalem table came to light at a site far away in Samaria, where no excavations were currently known to be in progress, and this fragment, too, bore traces of fire. I reluctantly came to the conclusion that the fragment Rahmani bought from the antiquities dealer had indeed been taken from the Burnt House in our Jewish Quarter excavation.

According to Rahmani’s published description, various motifs are incised on the edge of the tabletop: on the long side is a ship, while on the shorter side there is a table with a single leg, bearing various vessels and flanked by two large jars with high bases. This latter depiction appears to be a precise graphic counterpart to Varro’s description noted above and is also in surprising agreement with the depiction on the Roman oil lamp also mentioned above. In ornamenting this tabletop, the Jerusalem artisan had simply chosen the motif of the table itself, with all the vessels usually associated with it; in other words, a page straight out of the book of the everyday life of his period. On the basis of these depictions, both literary and pictorial, we have been able to restore such a grouping, using finds from our excavations.

In addition to stone tables, we found an abundance of stone vessels. Indeed, the discovery of stone vessels became routine. Whenever we approached a stratum of the Second Temple Period in which a building was burnt by the Romans during the destruction of the city in 70 A.D., stone vessels invariably made their appearance as well. Thus, even in the absence of other specific chronological clues, we were often able to date a structure as Herodian solely on the basis of the presence of even a single stone vessel—or even mere fragments of a stone vessel. Generally, these vessels were accompanied by traces of fire, obviously from the destruction of 70 A.D.

Our discovery of stone vessels came as no surprise, for their existence in Jerusalem had long been known from previous excavations. What did surprise us was the great number and variety of complete vessels. Our discovery of them in almost every house soon led us to realize that stone vessels, previously regarded as isolated luxury items, were in fact widely used. Some of the stone vessels served the same functions as their pottery counterparts; others were of special shapes for special uses. In general, the stone vessels are a rich and variegated addition to the types of utensils known to have been in use in the Jerusalem household in antiquity.

Stoneware production in Jerusalem during this period reached a pinnacle of both technical skill and design. Stone vessels were of course produced in other lands. For example, some stone vessels found in Delos in Asia Minor are quite similar to ours. The Jerusalem artisans undoubtedly learned much from others, but the peculiar and specific need for stoneware in Jerusalem (for reasons explained below) led Jerusalem artisans to outstanding achievements. The products of Jerusalem were undoubtedly famous and were apparently unrivaled within Palestine. The one large stone jar found at Ain Feshkha and the several smaller stone vessels found at Masada and other sites were surely made in Jerusalem.

The stone vessels are generally made of a soft, readily carved limestone, found in abundance in the vicinity of Jerusalem. Among the smaller vessels found in our excavations, a few are made of other types of stone, such as alabaster or marble.

On the basis of form and finish, it is possible to distinguish between stone vessels made on a lathe and those carved by hand. In either case, the craftsmen would use chisels to give the vessels their general form and then usually would drill to extract the material from the interior before finishing.

The lathe-turned vessels have open and cylindrical shapes, as is dictated by that technique of manufacture. Among such vessels are the very impressive large jars in goblet form, standing on a high foot. The rim has a molded profile, as does the high base, and the surface is well smoothed and often ornamented with horizontal bands or vertical ribbing. Where ledge handles are present, the strips between the two handles are rougher, giving them an ornamental effect. It is possible that these jars are to be identified with the stone “jar” (kallal) mentioned in the Mishnah^b (Parah 3, 3), a large stone or pottery vessel that was used for holding the ashes of the Sin Offering. Long ago, the late J. Brand described the kallal of the Mishnah as a goblet-shaped vessel with a broad rim, straight sides, curved bottom, and a high base—a description that fits our vessels perfectly.

The blocks of stone from which these jars were fashioned weighed several times as much as the finished products, which were 26 inches to 32 inches tall. This makes it all the more surprising that the ancient lathes could support such a mass, and we can only wonder how they were powered.

Most of the lathe-turned vessels, however, are much smaller than the jars: plates, bowls, and handleless cups, which are also rather attractive, some of the forms clearly imitating imported pottery vessels. These smaller vessels were readily made on a bow-powered lathe, somewhat resembling a primitive drill.

Hand-carving of stone vessels was employed for special forms where a lathe could not be used—as in the case of vessels with a vertical handle (which would interfere with the turning of the lathe) or of vessels that were not round. Of the types with handles inconvenient for turning, we may note two examples. A cup of fine form, resembling a modern coffee cup, has a delicate handle apparently imitating some pottery form of foreign origin. Ordinary cups of the period are in the form of a deep bowl; indeed bowls were generally used for drinking in antiquity. Another sort of stoneware cup was cylindrical with a pierced, vertical handle; its surface was not smoothed but rather pared vertically with a knife or an adze. These cups often have a short spout at the rim, not opposite the handle but at a right angle to it.

These two types of cups were the most common stone vessel found, and we encounter them often outside Jerusalem as well. The fact that they were made in various sizes, from large (6 inches high) to small (2 inches high) has led archaeologists to consider them to be “measuring cups” for liquids and for dry measures; one opinion is that their standard corresponds with that mentioned in the Mishnah, but this requires further investigation.

Handwork is, of course, also necessary on vessels that are not round, as is especially obvious on deep, square bowls—a shape not found in pottery but one apparently considered very convenient for kitchen use. Another noteworthy vessel has multiple compartments, with two, three, or four divisions; one such vessel is reminiscent of a salt and pepper shaker, while another resembles an army “mess tin” or a serving dish for a selection of relishes.

Round or elongated serving trays of stone with ornamental handles have also been found. Such trays are depicted in Roman mosaics loaded with food. In one depiction, a tray of our type bears a large fish.

Another handcarved vessel worthy of note is a stone oil lamp, the only example known to us. Additional stone objects were found whose original function cannot even be guessed.

All in all, we were astonished by the rich and attractive variety of stone vessels. Neither the local abundance of raw material nor the attractiveness of their shapes would alone explain this phenomenon. Moreover, their manufacture is much more costly than that of pottery, and stone vessels are more restricted and less convenient to use because of their weight and the softness of their material. Why, then, did they appear so suddenly and in such quantities in the Jerusalem household?

The answer lies in the realm of halakhah, the Jewish laws of ritual purity. The Mishnah tells us that stone vessels are among those objects that are not susceptible to uncleanness (Kelim 10, 1; Parah 3, 2), but no further details are given. Stone was simply not susceptible to ritual contamination. When a pottery vessel, on the other hand, became ritually unclean through contact with an unclean substance or object, it had to be destroyed. In contrast, a stone vessel would preserve its purity and thus its usability, even if it had come into contact with uncleanness.

One of the clearest literary witnesses to the Jewish ritual of purity relating to stone vessels is preserved in the New Testament, in the episode of the wedding at Cana in Galilee. There Jesus performed the miracle of changing water into wine. The text reads: “Now six stone jars were standing there, for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding two or three gallons” (John 2:6). These were most probably jars of the very type we have been discussing.

With the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the flourishing production of stone vessels and stone tables came to an end, and the tradition of their manufacture was never revived.

The most common article in any household in antiquity was, of course, its pottery. The corpus of Palestine pottery during the Herodian period is not especially rich, but in the light of the recent excavations in Jerusalem, it turns out to have been more variegated than previously thought. The most common vessels were those most used in the house: cooking pots and storage jars. Most of these vessels were not found in the kitchens and storerooms which, at least in our excavations, were mostly looted and destroyed; rather, they came to light in the cisterns and pools of the houses, which had been turned into refuse dumps.

The cooking pots are almost invariably blackened with soot—evidence of their daily use. We would expect, in keeping with the large number of cooking pots in which food was prepared, that there would be a correspondingly large number of bowls or plates for serving. But the pottery of this period includes few locally made bowls or plates, types that are generally found in large quantities in other periods. In this particular period, only small, thin bowls are found here, suitable only for small portions. This raises an interesting gastronomical question, for which we have no ready answer. We do know from other sources that the wealthy people of the period generally enjoyed, if anything, excessive culinary delights.

Most of the storage jars used for water, wine and oil have elongated bodies. We also found some with a more globular, sack-shaped form.

Another basic vessel-type, in this as in all periods, is the jug in its various forms, including juglets and small bottles for small quantities of oil or perfume. Equally common were the thin-walled asymmetrical flasks.

In addition to these common vessels, we also found several types of unusual pottery. Foremost are the painted bowls sometimes known as “Pseudo-Nabatean” ware. Curiously, this type of bowl was entirely unknown during the first hundred years of excavations in Jerusalem, and only since 1968, with the commencement of excavations near the Temple Mount, have these painted bowls made their appearance. They have since become a regular feature in our excavations in the Upper City as well, among the finds of the first century A.D. These bowls are very fragile, and they are seldom found intact; but even so we have been able to mend and restore an impressive group.

These thin-walled bowls, which measure about 5 inches to 6 inches in diameter, are of very fine quality and are painted on the inside in stylized floral patterns in red and, sometimes, in brown or black. Two styles of painting are evident. One employs symmetrical compositions taking up the entire area of the bowl; the motifs are usually arranged radially, but sometimes they are in concentric circles, as on one example found in the house we called the Mansion. In the second, more carefree style, the painter often used a few quick strokes of the brush, much in the manner of abstract artists today.

When these painted bowls were first found, they were called “Pseudo-Nabatean,” for they superficially resemble the Nabatean bowls, famous for their thinness and painted motifs. But the bowls from Jerusalem are different in the form of their motifs, in their composition and even in the quality of the ware itself. They seem to be a sort of Jewish alternative to the fine Nabatean bowls, which simply did not reach the Jerusalem market in significant quantities. Since these locally produced bowls have been found thus far only in Jerusalem, it would be appropriate to recognize them as a class by themselves and to call them “Painted Jerusalem Bowls.”

No one would have previously thought that Jerusalem was famous for its glass, but now we know it held an important place in the technological history of ancient glass. This came to light through one of our most unusual discoveries—the refuse from a glass factory. This waste material included a rich variety of glass fragments—some of them distorted by heat—unfinished products, hunks of raw glass, and lumps of slag. Where the glass factory itself was located, we do not know, except that it must have been somewhere in the vicinity.

The reader may ask what value scrap glass could have for us. Scientific research is not a treasure hunt for finished products in perfect condition, and the archaeologist treasures material that can provide an insight into methods of manufacture and their development as well as he cherishes finished products. It would of course be nice to find a complete workshop, with all its various installations, tools and products in various stages of manufacture, but no such glass factory has ever been found, and the next best thing are the waste materials that derive from one. Even such refuse is infrequently found and its rare discovery in our excavations can thus be considered a blessing in disguise.

Among the vessel fragments, we could distinguish two major types of glass products, each based on a different method of manufacture. For one type, the artisan formed vessels in molds; for the other type, the artisan shaped the hot glass into the desired form by blowing through a tube.

Chronologically, the molding process is the earlier of the two. We found hundreds of fragments of thick glass bowls, hemispherical or conical in shape, all of the molded type. The glass itself is greenish, but the surface is now generally covered with a layer of thick, black patina. These bowls, attractive in their simplicity, were very common in the Late Hellenistic period (second to first century B.C.), and similar examples have been found in many places in Palestine. Alongside these fragments were a small number of fragments from another type of bowl, also molded, but of thinner material, either rounded or carinated (sharp-angled), with rims that are modeled and bodies that are ribbed—a very common mode of decoration in the Hellenistic period.

The fragments of the second type of glass product are of closed vessels, such as small bottles of the “perfume bottle” type. This is the simplest shape to obtain using the glass blowing technique. It was probably the first shape ever produced by this process.

Our mixed find of molded and blown glass is especially interesting, for we see here a single factory using two different techniques side-by-side. Despite the numerous excavations in Israel and abroad of sites rich in glass finds, never before has such clear-cut evidence for the initial stage of glass blowing come to light. This process revolutionized the production of glass vessels and facilitated their “mass production,” relatively speaking. The invention of glass blowing can be compared to that of the potter’s wheel in ceramic production. In our glass finds we can see at least a partial explanation for the actual beginning of glass blowing.

Scholars have long believed that, from the initial invention of glass blowing, vessels have been blown from a gob of hot, plastic glass stuck on the end of a metal tube or pipe, as is still the practice today. But our finds from Jerusalem now indicate that the earliest glass blowing was done with glass tubes. These glass tubes are perhaps the very first stages of experimentation at glass blowing, followed later by the use of the blow-pipe. Our pile of glass refuse included many thin glass tubes, some of them with the beginning of a swelling at one end, though the continuation was broken off. There were also bulbs of glass the size of birds’ eggs, which had clearly been blown from glass tubes. In other words, both the pipes and the bulbs of glass composed a single element, the initial phase of blowing a glass vessel. For one reason or another, the blowing ceased on these pieces, and the vessels were never completed. It is not quite clear yet how blowing with a glass pipe was accomplished in the heat of an open hearth. The matter requires further specialized study.

Dr. Gladys Weinberg and Professor Dan Barag, well-known experts on ancient glass, examined the glass refuse soon after its discovery, and they tell me that no evidence of this sort has been found at any other site in the world, and that this find of the earliest phase of glass blowing is of revolutionary significance for technological research. In their opinion, Jerusalem is the first site at which the meeting of the two techniques, glass molding and glass blowing, has been encountered. This discovery, then, represents a transitional phase in which the production of glass continued in the older molding technique alongside the newly introduced technique of glass blowing. This occurred around the middle of the first century B.C.

Another glass product reflecting the process of manufacture was thin, twisted rods, most of them found broken but originally about six inches long with one end rounded and the other pointed. Generally known as “kohl sticks,” and probably used for cosmetics, they are rarely found in excavations but can be seen in some museums. Here we suddenly uncovered an abundance of them. We also found the smooth rods that were the raw material employed in their manufacture. We can follow the process of their manufacture into twisted sticks from smooth rods, through the phase of twisting, to their actual finishing. The marks of the pincers used to hold the hot, plastic rods are still clearly visible. Other glass objects discovered among the refuse included spinning whorls, conical gaming pieces, discs, and inlay plaques.

It is odd that we should find such significant remains in Jerusalem, for scholars have generally assumed that the centers of glass production were located close to sites rich in silica sand, the principal raw material of glass. However, the production of glass vessels, like that of pottery or metal wares, was not restricted to a single area. Chunks of raw glass could readily be transported from place to place, and glass artisans in various locales, however remote, could use them in whatever manner they desired.

Much research still needs to be done on this material. From it, glass experts will no doubt be able to clear up many of the longstanding questions relating to the earliest history of blown glass. One of these questions concerns the part played by the Jews in the production of glass in antiquity, for it is commonly thought that their role was a major one. Though this has not been proved conclusively, our finds from Jerusalem may well be a valuable contribution to that discussion.

Unless otherwise noted, all photos and drawings in this and the following article are courtesy of Nahman Avigad.

This article has been adapted from Chapter Three, section 10, of Discovering Jerusalem: Recent Archaeological Excavations in the Upper City by Nahman Avigad (Thomas Nelson Publishers: Nashville, 1983). Printed by permission of Thomas Nelson Publishers.

If Jerusalem is famous for one thing, it is for being a religious center. But our interest in the Holy Cities lies also in its everyday life, of which so little is known. Recent investigations revealed that in ancient times, especially in the late Second Temple period (50 B.C.–70 A.D.), various arts and crafts, such as stonework, painted pottery and glass industry, flourished in Jerusalem. To understand these crafts is to add a new dimension to our understanding of life in the Holy City. From these crafts we learn about the world of the craftspeople who produced the artifacts, about […]