The Spade Hits Sussita - The BAS Library
Login
Home > Magazines > BAR > May/June 2006

The Spade Hits Sussita

BAR Article—“Sussita Awaits the Spade”—Leads to Excavation

By Arthur Segal, Michael Eisenberg

Fifteen years ago, I (Arthur Segal) sat in my study reading an article in BAR by Vassilios Tzaferis about Sussita, a dramatic site overlooking the Sea of Galilee that had been destroyed in a violent earthquake in 749 C.E. and had never been resettled. The columns of a church at the center of the site were still lying on the ground like toothpicks, just where they had fallen 1,250 years ago. The site had been surveyed at the end of the 19th century by the German engineer and excavator Gottlieb Schumacher, who located the main street, a city gate, […]

You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

1.

BAR, September/October 1990.

2.

A polis (city state in Greek) was an independent entity in which every citizen, i.e., an adult male being a member of an “ecclesia” (general assembly), could elect or be elected to any of the city’s governing bodies, but mainly to the boule, the city council, whose members (200–700, on average, according to the size of the population), elected the officials, especially the strategoi, who ran the city’s affairs

3.

The Roman Army used several types of siege weapons for discharging missiles. The largest was the onager, also called a scorpio. This siege machine could hurl massive stones. The Jewish historian Josephus states that at the siege of Jerusalem the machines of Legio X Fretensis hurled stones that weighted a talent (more than 50 pounds) a distance of two furlongs (about 1,400 feet [The Jewish War V, 6, 3]). The smaller machines, to which the Roman architect Vitruvius gives the general term of catapult (catapulta) were of various sizes. The smaller ones were called scorpiones and the larger, ballistae. (See G. Webster, The Roman Imperial Army, [London: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1985, 3rd ed.], pp. 243–244.)

Endnotes

1.

These excavations were conducted by Claire Epstein, Emmanuel Anati, Michael Avi-Yonah and Aaron Shulman.

2.

Participating in this project were Ze’ev Meshel, Tsvika Tsuk, Z. Felbush and Y. Peleg.

3.

The excavations were conducted by the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa in cooperation with the Research Center for Mediterranean Archaeology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the National Museum in Warsaw, and the Concordia University in St. Paul, Minnesota. The project is headed by Prof. Arthur Segal and the co-directors of the Sussita expedition are Prof. Jolanta Mlynarczyk, Dr. Mariusz Burdajewicz and Prof. Mark Schuler.

4.

Antiquities 13:394–397.

5.

Antiquities 17:217; War 1:396.

6.

Antiquities 17:320; War 2:97.

7.

Jerusalem Talmud, Ketubot 12:4; Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashana 2:1.

8.

Tosefta, Shevi’it 4:10; Tosefta, Ohalot 18:4.

9.

Lamentations Rabba, Buber edition, 46a.

10.

Jerusalem Talmud, Shevi’it 8:3.

11.

The Northeast Church was excavated by a team from Concordia University, St. Paul, Minnesota, headed by Prof. Mark Schuler.