Image Details

Garo Nalbandian

MANY MOSAICS have been found at Emmaus-Nicopolis— most from the Byzantine period. Flora and fauna graced the floor of the northern nave of the fifth-century Byzantine church. Two birds sit peacefully in a papyrus plant. More sinister happenings occur in other panels of the floor; a lion stalks his prey; a gazelle loses its life to a hungry leopard. The excavators call it the “Nile Mosaic” and see it as representing the fight between Good and Evil.