Meggie Macdonald

In a stunning discovery, five intact Roman shipwrecks have been found near Ventotene, an island off the coast of Italy.  These ships’ cargo holds were left in virtually the same state as when they were loaded two thousand years ago when they sank upright into the Mediterranean.  In the amphorae so far recovered, traces of wine, olive oil and even garum – the famous Roman fish sauce that has yet to be reproduced in its original form – have been identified.

Ventotene was famous in antiquity for being the island upon which noble ladies of Roman society were exiled to for committing heinous acts of adultery or treason.  Among the most unfortunate of these ladies was the only child of the emperor Augustus himself.  He exiled his daughter Julia there after discovering an affair that could have severely damaged the image of the imperial family as one embodying the most traditional of Roman virtues.

Archaeologists are hopeful that, among the delicious cargo, the ships may yield imperial correspondence from between the first century BCE and the fourth century CE.

Ehud Netzer, an archaeologist associated with the Hebrew University in Israel, has announced that discoveries led by his team in 2007 have unearthed what he believes is the tomb of King Herod the Great at Herodium, one of several palaces built by Herod during his 40-year reign.  After excavating this site and others throughout ancient Judaea, Netzer’s team narrowed the scope of possible sites for the tomb and the results are astounding.

Part way up the hillside – artificially increased by Herod himself to a further height of 65 feet and overlooking a vast expanse of desert, with Jerusalem to the east - Netzer’s team have found architraves, friezes, and cornices all decorated with various Judaea and Nabataean funerary motifs (Herod’s mother was from Petra, capital of the Nabataeans).  However, the most stellar discovery thus far has been the remains of a smashed sarcophagus, and specifically its red limestone fragments decorated with rosettes.  It appears that the mausoleum stood on the eastern slope of the great palatial fortress – the largest in the Roman world, author Barbara Kreiger points out - on a base 30 by 30 feet and originally standing approximately 80 feet high. 

Without letting assumptions cloud observations, the whole site seems to indicate nothing less than the mausoleum of the king himself.  Jodi Magness, an archaeologist in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Maryland, and Ken Holum, curator of the Smithsonian exhibition ‘King Herod’s Dream’ both feel that Ehud Netzer has found what has eluded archaeologists for two hundred years.

From Herodium’s first identification in 1838 by Edward Robinson who, like Heinrich Schliemann with Homer at Troy, used the extant works of Flavius Josephus to seek out the site, to confirmation of that identification by german archaeologist Conrad Schick, Herodium has been under the scrutiny of diligent archaeologists for two centuries.  In the 1860s, French explorer Felicien de Saulcy, began an outright search for Herod’s tomb.  From 1963 to 1967, Father Virgilio Corbo of the Franciscan Faculty of Biblical Sciences and Archaeology in Rome scoured the summit.  Lambert Dolphin, an American geophysicist, worked through the 1983 dig season analysing the base of the highest of the fortress’s four towers.  Netzer’s own work, begun on the site in the 1970s and continuing since then, allowed him to further narrow down possible locations for the tomb.  His 2007 discoveries are, he believes, as conclusive as can be expected.

However, Duane Roller, professor emeritus at Ohio State University, suggests instead that Herod’s tomb is at the base of the summit tower and not part-way up the slope at the site of Netzer’s dig.  One of Roller’s main arguments against this site as the location of Herod’s tomb is that no inscriptions have been found to positively identify the mausoleum.  Refuting this comment is the evidence that inscriptions were not the norm in Judaean burials during the first century CE when Herod died.

More to the point, the body of King Herod is no longer entombed at Herodium.  Coins recovered from the site, along with the obvious destruction pattern of the sarcophagus itself, suggest that the mausoleum was desecrated some time during the first Jewish Rebellion against the Romans in 66-74 CE.  Herod was a particularly ruthless king who killed much of his own family before he died, fearing they were plotting against him.  He had come to power with the support of the Roman princeps Augustus, whom he had befriended while in exile in Rome, and his reign was marked with ambitious building projects throughout Judaea.  Among his most famous were the fortresses at Herodium and Masada and the great temple at Jerusalem, built to replace the First Temple that was destroyed by the Persians in the sixth century BCE.

Archaeologists who are not already affiliated with the site and those scholars who find ancient Judaea endlessly alluring will, if they have not already, begin flocking to the site and those who do not will watch avidly for news of further discoveries at Herodium.  It is clear that Ehud Netzer’s career as an archaeologist has reached new heights of success, and we can only hope that his team will continue surprising the world with news of King Herod.

During excavations on the island if Limnos, a team of Greek, Italian and American archaeologists have discovered the remains of the oldest human settlement known so far in the Aegean.  Dated to approximately the 12th millenium BC/BCE, the site at Limnos takes its place among the Prehistoric and Bronze Age settlements discovered in the Aegean in the past, making this region one of the richest in ancient human settlements.