Sepphoris or Zippori traveling down the hill....

Sepphoris or Zippori

Traveling Down the Hill

As we walked down the hill area of the old palace or castle we can see the ruins of more of the city.  A few tents are up with permanent posts to protect the digs and the restored part of the ruins. 

A capital the sat on a column at one time is placed out for people to sit on and rest. It is a lot of walking to see the area. 

If you can visualize it the columns were support for a porch to a main building. All that is left is the bottom two or three feet of the walls. When I think about, the material that was used to put the stone walls was not a concrete. It was made of local clay and sand that was put into a slurry to use between the stones. Two thousand to three thousand years later the material used did not hold it together. 

The stone streets are a lot like the walls. Wear and tear on the roads have had all the material between them wear away leaving cracks.

One of our walk ways shows the floor of a house that was along the street. The decoration along the walls is still in tact but the floor pieces have shifted. This city is in a national park. The workers only work on the ruins a couple of months of the year .

All that is left of some of the houses is the floor. In this photo you can see the layers of material that was place down before the mosaic tiles.  are applied.

A modern sculpture was placed on this old section of tile floor. I don't know the story about it but I do know there was one. It seems out of  character but I guess it is a modern version of a soldier.

It does look like a scattered mess. In my imagination I bet people came here to salvage stone to build houses elsewhere. It is over three thousand years ago when it was first built by Romans. When the Romans invaded the land they would build building just like the ones that they had in the home country. Roman ruins can be found all along the north edge of Africa with the walk along the shoreline to give them access as well as the ships across the Mediterranean Sea.

 

One area that had a tarp like roofs over it had this mosaic emblem of tiles.

 

I believe this is a walkway in front of one of the large houses there. You can see a couple of columns remaining and I bet the whole area had a row of them holding up a porch roof.

Signs were helpful but there were not enough of them.  The guide did gives us a lot of info but more things could be marked.

 

  More mosaic work along the street.

Houses were built with stone and this area shows that under their wood floor would be draining systems for water disposal. The wood was suspended on the rocks.

As we leave this area we see a city off in the distance. Modern cities were built hundreds of years ago next to old ruins.

Sepphoris or Zippori(Hebrew)....

Our next visit was to drive north of Nazareth  to the ruins of Sepphoris. The village has had numerous influences on it through out history. Jewish, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, Arabic and Ottoman influences are seen in the area.  The village is believed to be the site where Mary, the mother of Jesus, had lived.  The Muslims had taken over the whole area until the Crusaders came in and drove them out. As I toured these areas I had to realize that a city through two thousand years or more would be reused or restored enough to make them habitable. At one time  the whole city is then just abandoned and the years of sentiment and physical destruction by enemies made them become ruins.

The first impression of the village was one of a large archaeology  dig. You can see the city on the opposite hill. The village was spread out from this area to a palace on the hill. The dwellings were constructed by stone and the the roof material was a wood supported one.  Also the floors were of wood some times with hallow channels under them to use for drainage. In the temple in Jerusalem the walls were covered with wood so maybe the stone structures also had wood wall attached to the stone. With any ideas that I am imagining I do know that they could destroy a city by setting all of the wood parts of the buildings on fire.

As we approached the area we were able to walk by trees in a garden setting.  This is actually a national park.

The stones are a part of the area and shows the kind of land that they built on in the city. As we walk up the path we are headed to upland to see the remains of a building and palace floors.

Cactus does grow all along the path with large patches in different places. Cactus could have been a part of their menu back then but now it isn't being harvested. Prickly pear looks like the variety.

Ruins are everywhere and in some cases they look like there isn't much left there for them to excavate.

I really don't understand the makeup of the soil as it looks the color of sand but yet is a soil. The hill formation could actually have ruins in it but it hasn't been worked.

Wandering up the trail we come upon a  main palace area ruins of walls and floors. The building was at time half rubble and research says that in 1948 the top half of the building was restored and it had been turned into a school. If it had been reworked that explains why we didn't get to go inside. The whole area was actually castle-like with a surrounding wall.

There is evidence of column on a building that sat infornt of it. The Roman arch over the door shows that the  place could have been first built by the Romans. The fence keeps people from going inside and also the basement area is wired shut to keep people from exploring.

Next to the large building is another part of a building. The back part of it has been built in with wood to help protect what we saw inside of the place.

Walking through the structure are many floor areas of tile mosaics. It must have been a part of the main palace with this grand main room. The roofs over the whole area helps to protect all that is here. It is thought to be 2,500 years old.

The floor was highly decorated showing the everyday life of the early past of the city.  The exact dates I do not know but two thousand five hundred years would be the rough estimate of its time. It may be older. During a time when the Jewish people were driven out of Galilee it is said to be the city in which they established homes. 

I keep enlarging these as they are so amazing to see. We didn't have that much time to look at them so I was glad to get good pictures. They had a walkway in the big room where we could take stairs down to get closer.

A good edging does help to make the composition look good.

She has been nicknamed the Mona Lisa of Sepphoris. It is located on the edge of that main floor. In our times we would see a fireplace at the edge of the room but that is not there. The whole floor is a masterpiece.

Another large section of the floor. After the visit I did find that there was an open air ampitheater just next to the building, built into the hill.

A borrowed photo from a travel brochure shows the open theater below the back of the hill. I again am so amazed at the age of things as I visit Sepphoris/Zippori. My next posting will be the city that is down the hill from this hilltop part of the city.

Nazareth, the next stop.

Our journey into Nazareth was a surprise.  One expected a desert-like location but it was a very busy city. The streets are filled with cars and very few people obeying the signs. They have some round a- bouts that really are aggression centers for cars to honk at each other. The streets are narrow and the sidewalks narrow too. The kids were getting out of school and they were everywhere.  There were many adults and it was a very crowded busy place.  The city we were in was a lot older than these more modern buildings in the photos.

Nazareth was the city in which Jesus was raised. Mary and Joseph had lived lived there before Jesus was born. They walked to Bethlehem to register their census and Jesus was born there.  For a while God sent them to Egypt, as King Herod wanted Jesus dead.  He wanted all one year old  boys to be killed to make sure Jesus would not survive. Being warned, Joseph took his family down and into   Egypt. Once Herod had died and the danger was gone, Mary and Joseph returned with Jesus to  Nazareth.

 

We visited an area in Nazareth where they recreated a typical city that represented the way life would be at the time of Jesus. You can see the contrast of this park in contrast to the city behind it.

Stables were represented where sheep and goats lived. The carved out area in the rock represented how they could keep their livestock safe while there was bad weather.

There were two donkeys at the recreated village. One was allowed to be out and tied to a tree.  The other one was used in the building where they crush olives into oil. The donkey would walk the stone roller around in a trough to crush olives for oil and to remove the seeds.  The donkeys are exchanged for  the duty throughout the day.

The photo to the side here is a gardener who is planting the field.

I am sharing a stray photo that I had of a sheep seeking hay through the poles.

This wagon looks like it would be useful to carry stone or crops.  I assume they used donkeys for this also as I am not certain if they had horses in the area two  thousand years ago.

The tree reminded me of a weathered olive trees at the Mount of Olives. It did fit in with the character of village.Everyone dressed in period clothing to help recreate the site.

This was described as a grape stomping area.  The juice would be ladled up from the low part of the rock bottomed area.

It looks like cabbages to me but I am not certain. It is an arid land so carrying water to the plants would be needed to keep them growing.

This is a building that was to be the future potters shack. They had a wheel and some pottery out to show its purpose. No potter has been hired to work in the shop. 

This man was a carpenter, Making wood items for the village. He made tools and spindles for wrapping wool yarn. The recreation showed how these items were needed  to help a community do household tasks.

Wooden bowls and spoons were essential at that time period of history.

This women was creating cords from wool of a sheep.  As she spin out wool she had to wrap it around spools.  Then she also was needed to weave the cords into cloth.

Spinning was done with a spindle twining the wool into a thin string for use on the loom.

A small temple was created to resemble one of the era. There were windows around the top to allow it to be lighted. The columns were made from stone and the floor was covered with stone. It is a dusty village so the stone floors appeared to have a coating of sand on them.

A Jewish village would have a temple in which to pray and also an altar for reading of the scrolls. This would be a strong structure compared to the use of maybe a tent when out in a desert setting. Two tiered seating was all along the outside walls. Oil lamps would have been used when more lighting  was needed.

As we left the tour we were give ceramic oil lamps that represented the one made in Jesus' time. Our bus leaves to take us north into the area  of the Sea of Galilee.Nazareth is in the district of Galilee.