Below the Nea Church
The famous Madeba mosaic map of the Holy Land depicts the country and its towns and cities as they were at the time the mosaic was made. The result is that the city of Jerusalem looks nothing like the city we know today, even allowing for the fact that the oval shape the map depicts is almost certainly a stylisation.
At one end of the oval is an open plaza with a tall pillar in its centre. One of the features of the now-defunct Damascus Gate museum and exhibition centre was a hologram - revolutionary display technology in its day - of this very column, based on some fragmentary remains of a monumental column discovered when the Israelis excavated in the area.
Running across the middle of the city is a double row of pillars, the Cardo or "High Street" of every Roman city. I was fascinated to discover the remains of this Cardo in the Jewish Quarter of modern Jersualem, the double row of columns still visible beside the modern shops. In fact, the main street of curio and souvenir shops that runs through the Arab Quarter and on into the Jewish Quarter is this same Cardo in a modern reincarnation.
The map shows two large buildings with golden domes, one half-way along the Cardo (and below it from the map's perspective), which is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; the other is at the far end of the Cardo, where no church exists today. Nevertheless, in my explorations of modern Jerusalem I was surprised and delighted to discover, hidden under a modern building, the preserved walls of this vanished church, the Nea Church built by the byzantine Emperor Justinian.
It was a massive building, so large that its foundations actually extend beyond the modern walls of Jerusalem and, if you know where to look, you can see the rectangle of stones at the base of the south wall. To support this huge building Justinian's engineers had to create an artificial platform six feet high overlaying the rough ground and ruined buildings that previously occupied the area.
Professor Shion Gibson and Professor James Tabor of the University of North Carolina are planning to excavate this fill in a campaign beginning in March 2008. They believe they will find a series of houses belonging to 1st century AD nobles, including, probably, the house of Caiaphas, the high priest involved in the trial and crucifixion of Jesus.
This is not just guesswork; a little higher up on Mt Zion there were excavations in the 1970s that uncovered rich houses that featured wall frescoes of birds, wreaths and buildings that rival those found in Pompeii.
However the excavation has another aim. Mt Zion was one of the centres of Jewish settlement of Jerusalem and Gibson and Tabor hope to be able to conduct a model excavation that penetrates below the 1st century era and down to the first buildings, whenever they were. By using the full range of techniques available to modern archaeologists, along with inter-disciplinary cooperation with experts in zoology, botany, hydrology and ancient architecture, they hope to reconstruct the history and economy of ancient Jerusalem with unprecedented detail and accuracy.
They are aware of the controversy that surrounds the history of Jerusalem, with the Bible portraying a rich and cultured centre of empire and the minimalists claiming that the city was nothing more than a shanty town of a few shabby houses. They hope that their excavations will go some way towards settling this controversy.
<© Kendall K. Down 2009
