The Yattir Mosaic: A Visual Journey to Christ

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Once the Yattir excavation team got over the surprise of finding a magnificent sixth-century C.E. church on the site’s southern spur, where we were looking for much simpler, earlier remains, we began to think about how to interpret the many complex symbols embedded in the mosaic floor of the nave. We were immediately struck by the absence of animal and human images in the later floor, dated to 631 C.E., which was laid over the first mosaic. Images of birds and vine medallions from the original floor are still visible along the north side of the nave. Why did […]

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Endnotes

See Ruth Ovadiah and Asher Ovadiah, Mosaic Pavements in Israel: Hellenistic, Roman and Early Byzantine (Rome: L’erma di Bretschineider, 1989), p. 163.

I am grateful to Christene Kondoleon for this identification.

Crosses trimmed in this manner demonstrate an Eastern origin and are found on sixth- to seventh-century pilgrims’ ampullae. See John A. Cotsonis, “Byzantine Figural Processional Crosses,” in Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection Publications 10 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1994), p. 90.

Hans Biedermann, Dictionary of Symbolism: Cultural Icons and the Meanings Behind Them (London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 379–380.

David Fideler, Jesus Christ, Sun of God (Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1993), p. 288.

Fideler, Jesus Christ, p. 280.

Ernest Kitzinger, “The Threshold of the Holy Shrine: Observations on Floor Mosaics at Antioch and Bethlehem,” in Paul Corby Finney, ed., Art, Archaeology, and Architecture of Early Christianity (New York: Garland, 1993), p. 104.

Fideler, Jesus Christ, p. 234.

Fideler, Jesus Christ, p. 235.

10.

Personal conversation with Jacqui Carlon (Boston Univ.). The grammatical construct for this switching process is called quantitative metathesis: The quantities of two vowels are exchanged, thereby altering the traditional spelling of a word to a dialect variant.

11.

Emmanuele Testa, Il Simbolismo Dei Guideo-Cristiani (Jerusalem: Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, 1962), p. 292.

12.

Erwin R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (New York: Pantheon, 1954), vol. 1, pp. 189–198, vol. 4, pp. 109–117.

13.

For a discussion of church layout, see John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels (Warminster, UK: Aris & Phillips, 1999), pp. 60–64.

14.

Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, p. 173, n. 6, p. 174, fig. 34; and André Grabar, Ampoules de Terre Sainte (Monza-Bobbio) (Paris: Librairie Klincksieck, 1958).

15.

Testa, Simbolismo, pp. 84–86; Yohanan Aharoni, “A Byzantine Monastic-Farm near Beit-Ha Shitta,” Bulletin of the Israel Exploration Society 18 (1954), pp. 209–215.

16.

Cotsonis, “Byzantine Figural Processional Crosses,” pp. 14–26.