Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 2010

Features
In Roman times, Aphrodisias in the southwest of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) was the city of Aphrodite, goddess of love. It was also a city of marble, abundantly available in excellent quality from nearby quarries. The monumental marble gate of the sanctuary of Aphrodite (the tetrapylon) has now been magnificently restored. Beyond are the […]
Josephus tells of the Jews who fled to the “mines” (underground passages) when the Romans conquered Jerusalem and burned the Temple in 70 C.E. The victorious Romans then “instituted a search for those in the mines, and, tearing up the ground slew all whom they met.”1 Some of the Jews were dying of hunger, […]
Israel Finkelstein is professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University and has codirected the excavations at Megiddo since 1994. Recently, he was the recipient of an award that provides a fund in excess of $4 million for a scientific study of the history of ancient Israel. Editor Hershel Shanks and Professor Finkelstein discuss, among […]
The underground chambers were filled with the sounds of the crunching of small picks against the dirt floors and the thud of earth dumped into buckets. Voices of a dozen children and their parents accompanied warnings not to swing picks at each other and to use the buckets assigned to each room. Discoveries of […]
In the November/December 2008 issue of BAR, we reported on an inscribed limestone stela that had been purchased on the antiquities market by Judy and Michael Steinhardt and is on permanent loan to the Israel Museum.a The incomplete stela, broken off at the bottom, was studied and published by Hannah M. Cotton and Michael […]