Posted on 09/03/2012 6:06:02 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The remains of two Jewish ritual baths and two public buildings were uncovered in a salvage dig ahead of the paving of a new section of Israel’s Highway 6, a north-south toll road eventually slated to run much of the length of the country.
Both of the public buildings feature raised platforms along the walls facing Jerusalem, archaeologists say -- a trademark feature of Jewish houses of prayer...
The existence of the town was known to scholars from archaeological surveys, but the findings show it was more substantial than had been previously thought, Nir Shimshon-Paran, the dig director, told The Times of Israel.
The remains also indicate that the area was home to a cluster of Jewish settlements at the time -- the final years of Byzantine control and the first decades after the Islamic conquest in the 630s CE.
Remains from Jewish towns dating to the same period have been found at Horvat Rimon, 5 miles to the east, and at Beersheba, 9 miles to the south...
The site shows signs of an orderly departure of its residents in the decades around the time of the Islamic conquest.
Residents appear to have cleaned out the buildings and taken their belongings with them, he said. The exodus might have been linked to a downturn in the economic situation, he suggested, as the settlement shows no sign of war, fire or earthquake around that time.
About a century later, a new settlement was built on the ruins on the first, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesofisrael.com ...
The new findings 9 miles north of Beersheba show the existence of a substantial Jewish town on the site 1,500 years ago (photo credit: Courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority)
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“The site shows signs of an orderly departure of its residents in the decades around the time of the Islamic conquest.”
“The exodus might have been linked to a downturn in the economic situation, he suggested, as the settlement shows no sign of war, fire or earthquake around that time.”
The archaelogists are just too smart for their own good. Hello, archaeologists! Don’t you think if the Muslim horde was approaching your area you’d pack up and leave before they go to you and your family?
614 to 640 was a tumultuous time in Byzantine occupied Israel. In 614, during the last Byzantine-Persian war, the Jews and Samaritans rose up in rebellion. They were joined by 20,000 Persian Jews who came to liberate the land. When the Byzantines reconquered "Palestine" they slaughtered the Jews and Samaritans in Jerusalem and the Galilee.
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I had a gee whiz moment when flying over the desert in northern Iraq when I looked down and saw what appeared to be the remains of a Roman bath. I thought wow,those guys really got around.
Ehud Barak has been demolishing Jewish houses for THAT long?!
All the unrest in Palestine and the exhaustion of the Byzantine armies in the Sassanid wars made for perfect timing, from the Arab point of view, when the Arab invasion came.
Nope. It was the persecution of the Christian heretics in the Levant that opened the floodgates.
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