Image Details
Courtesy Ruth Amiran
Two kinds of masonry mark two building phases of the Arad well. King Herod added the light-colored cube-shaped stones to the well, about the first century B.C. The lower, dark stones are flint slabs laboriously set in place by the original builders, the Israelites, in the ninth century B.C.
The pulley, ladder, lift basket and supporting structure suggest some of the problems faced during the recent years of painstaking excavation of this deep well.