King Herod 's tomb found, archaeologist says

[Mychal]

King Herod 's tomb found, archaeologist says
POSTED: 11:17 a.m. EDT, May 8, 2007
Story Highlights• Researchers have been studying site outside Jerusalem since 1972
• Scientists found pieces of ornate sarcophagus they believe was that of King Herod
• To be sure it's Herod's, they need to find fragments inscribed with his name
• Site is at Herodium, where Herod built palace compound about 2,000 years ago



Researchers work at a dig site near Jerusalem which reportedly includes the tomb of King Herod.


JERUSALEM (AP) -- An Israeli archaeologist on Tuesday said he has found the tomb of King Herod, the legendary builder of ancient Jerusalem and the Holy Land -- a potentially major discovery that capped a 35-year quest for the researcher.

Hebrew University archaeologist Ehud Netzer said the tomb was found at Herodium, a flattened hilltop in the Judean Desert where Herod built a palace compound. Netzer has been working at the site, just outside Jerusalem, since 1972, the university said.

Netzer said the tomb was discovered when a team of researchers found pieces of a limestone sarcophagus believed to belong to the ancient king. Although there were no bones in the container, he said the sarcophagus' location and ornate appearance indicated it is Herod's.

"It's a sarcophagus we don't just see anywhere," Netzer said at a news conference. "It is something very special." Netzer, who led the team, said he was not at the site when the sarcophagus was found.

Stephen Pfann, an expert in the Second Temple period at the University of the Holy Land, called the find a "major discovery by all means," but cautioned further research is needed.

He said all signs indicate the tomb belongs to Herod, but said ruins with an inscription on them were needed for full verification.

"We're moving in the right direction. It will be clinched once we have an inscription that bears his name," said Pfann, a textual scholar who did not participate in Netzer's dig.

The fragments of carved limestone found at the sandy site are decorated with flowers, but do not include any inscriptions.

Herod became the ruler of the Holy Land under the Romans around 40 B.C. The wall he built around the Old City of Jerusalem during the time of the Jewish Second Temple is the one that can be seen today. He also undertook massive construction projects in Caesaria, Jericho, the hilltop fortress of Massada and other locations.

It has long been assumed that Herod was buried at Herodium, but decades of excavations failed to turn up the site until now. The first century historian Josephus Flavius described the tomb and Herod's funeral procession.

Herodium was one of the last strong points held by Jewish rebels fighting against the Romans, and it was conquered and destroyed by Roman forces in A.D. 71, a year after they destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

Hebrew University had hoped to keep the find a secret until Netzer's news conference on Tuesday. But the university announced the find in a brief statement late Monday after the Haaretz daily found out about the discovery and published an article on its Web site.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/05/08/herods.tomb.ap/index.html

[Davita]

Unearthed after 2,000 years, the tomb of King Herod
By MATTHEW KALMAN and DUNCAN ROBERTSON
 
Last updated at 20:13pm on 8th May 2007
 

The tomb of King Herod has been discovered in one of his palaces 2,000 years after his death.

The grave was found by a team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Herodion, a stunning volcano-shaped desert fortress five miles south-east of Bethlehem.

The excavation site

[Davita]

Ehud Netzer, who led the team, said that despite an absence of bones they concluded the 8ft-long tomb they unearthed must have been Herod’s because of its lavish design.

One of the limestone remnants had a flower-like pattern.

"It was not a sarcophagus that was common or which anyone could afford during the era," he said.

An aerial view of Herodium

[Davita]

The site of the tomb of Herod on the hilltop fortress of Herodion

[Davita]

The location of Herod’s grave has long been a mystery among archaeologists. The Roman historian Josephus wrote that he was buried at Herodion, but until now all efforts to find it have proved unsuccessful.

It seemed unlikely, however, that a monarch known for spending huge sums on building monuments and palaces which have lasted for centuries would not have planned his own colossal tomb.

Herod the Great ruled the ancient kingdom of Judea from 37BC and was monarch at the time of the birth of Jesus.

He has been painted as a monster throughout the Christian world because of his depiction in the Bible, which tells how he ordered the Slaughter of the Innocents.

According to the gospel of St Matthew, Herod was determined to hold on to power at any cost.

After being told by soothsayers that the birth of a new King of the Jews was imminent, he ordered the massacre of all newborns in Bethlehem to kill off the threat to his authority.




Professor Ehud Netzer showing a red stone decorated with a rosette that is part of his discovery of the Tomb of Herod
Other records, however, do not mention the massacre.

And many historians say Herod was a hugely successful ruler who built lavish palaces, sea ports, aqueducts and temples, including the magnificent Temple in Jerusalem, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and the sea port complex and racing track at Caesaria.

The massive stones of the outer wall of Herod’s Temple Mount still stand today in the Old City of Jerusalem, where they are known as the Western Wall.

He also constructed an elegant winter palace on the slope of Masada, a mountain overlooking the Dead Sea where Jewish forces held out for a year against three Roman legions.

Herodion itself, where his tomb has been found, is a series of underground tunnels hewn out of a natural mountain.

Topped with a magnificent palace complete with bath-houses, it is regarded as one of the most astonishing engineering feats of the ancient world.

Herod was descended from the Edomites, a tribe of ancient enemies of the Jews who converted to Judaism in about 120BC.

When Palestine was under Roman rule, his father became chief minister of Judea and made Herod governor of Galilee when he was 25.

After the assassination of Julius Caesar, Herod became a protege of Mark Antony and Caesar’s nephew Octavian.

In 39BC Herod invaded Judea to win the country back for the Romans and was later made king.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=453481&in_page_id=1965

[Mychal]

King Herod's return
How Israelis and Palestinians put their own spin on archeology to claim an ancestral homeland.
By Walter Reich, WALTER REICH is a professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
May 30, 2007


AFTER 2,000 YEARS of indignity and ignominy, Herod the Great has finally gotten his revenge.

During their revolt against Roman rule over Judea between AD 66 and 72, Jews who remembered King Herod as a Roman puppet smashed his sarcophagus, which had been interred with royal pomp about 70 years before. Christians have identified him as a baby killer who forced Jesus' family to flee Bethlehem. And Herod's habit of having his rivals and relatives killed has hardly burnished his image.

True, he built monumental projects — not only Masada and Caesarea but the grand expansion of the second Jewish temple in Jerusalem, the best-known remnant of which is the Western Wall. In the main, though, he's been a forgotten and derided historical figure.

But now Herod is back, at least in spirit. Israeli archeologists announced earlier this month that they've found his tomb, eight miles south of Jerusalem. And that tomb has become yet another impediment on the already impassable road to Israeli-Palestinian peace.

In the land of Israel — or Palestine, as Palestinians and others call it — anything that demonstrates the area's Jewish past, whether above ground or below, makes a big impression.

For Israelis, such finds are seen as an emblem of the Jews' ancient and unbroken connection with the land, going back 3,500 years, that justifies the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. For Palestinians, they're seen as a way of legitimizing Israel — the creation of which turned many of them or their forebears into refugees — and are therefore often dismissed as myth or fantasy.

In 1983, I saw how the unearthing of evidence of the Jewish past gives heart to some Israelis. While researching a book on the West Bank, I visited the Jewish settlement of Shiloh, in the northern West Bank. Archeologists were digging at the nearby site of ancient Shiloh, which in biblical times was the first capital of Israel. It was in Shiloh that, according to the Hebrew Bible, the Ark of the Covenant rested. Every evening the archeologists would display their finds. When they showed artifacts from the Israelite period, the settlers cheered; for them this was proof that they were now living in the ancient heart of the land of Israel.

Small wonder that archeological finds like these provoke many Palestinians to deny that such discoveries, and any other evidence of Jewish history in either Israel or the West Bank, have anything to do with Jews. After the recent announcement that Herod's tomb had been found, the Palestinian response was quick and sharp. A Palestinian official said the finding lacked scientific credibility and was driven by ideological motivations.

But this episode of archeological denial pales in comparison with the decades of denial in the case of Jerusalem's Temple Mount, which is known to Arabs as Haram al Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary.

In 1930, when Britain administered the area, the Supreme Muslim Council in Jerusalem noted that the Temple Mount's "identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute." But at the Camp David summit in 2000, Yasser Arafat insisted that a Jewish temple had existed not on the Temple Mount but in Nablus. And an Arafat aide, Saeb Erekat, said, to President Clinton's amazement, "I don't believe there was a temple on top of the Haram, I really don't." Mahmoud Abbas, the current Palestinian Authority president, later agreed with Erekat, as did the mufti of Jerusalem. Arafat later went further and denied the temple existed anywhere in Israel, the West Bank or Gaza, including Nablus.

Today, denial of the temple's existence has become a mainstay of Palestinian rhetoric. "They say that the temple was here," a Palestinian historian scoffed. "What temple …? What archeological remains?" And temple denial has turned into temple removal. During the last few years, Palestinians have discarded remains of the first and second temples.

This absurd Palestinian denial of Jewish roots in the land has been matched on the part of Israelis who deny that there was a large and long-indigenous population of Arabs in Palestine when the Zionist movement vastly expanded the number of Jews in the area more than 100 years ago. Fortunately, the denial of Palestinian history has been utterly discredited among nearly all Israelis.

Only when each side recognizes the historical right of the other to live in the region will it be possible to begin to talk about peace and a fair reckoning on Jerusalem. And only then will it be possible to put Herod's vengeful ghost back into his haunted archeological tomb.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-reich30may30,1,4216461.story?coll=la-news-a_section&ctrack=3&cset=true

[sevens]

Hi

I think its just amazing all the these discovery of key people and places of the past.

sevens

[Mychal]

Yes, and my compliments to Davita for adding the new pictures.