“Differentiating the works
of the two sovereigns is neither easy nor, in the context of current politics,
especially sought after. In some quarters, Herod – the half Jew – is viewed in
a poor light, but then Hadrian, the nemesis of the Jews, is castigated as a
vicious tyrant …”.
Building-wise,
in Jerusalem, it is apparently difficult to separate Herod from Hadrian.
That is manifest
from this article: http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/herod-vs-hadrian.html
Herod, Hadrian – and
Jupiter
Who built
what, when?
In the city of Jerusalem both Herod
the Great and the Roman Emperor Hadrian built on a monumental scale. Directing
public works little more than a century apart, the two monarchs built in a
similar style and with a common – Roman – technology. In the later Hadrianic
period material from the earlier Herodian constructions was reused, resetting the distinctive
"Herodian" blocks in new locations.
Both potentates wielded vast resources
but an order of magnitude set them apart. For all his grandiosity, Herod was
the client king of a minor kingdom; Hadrian was master of the Roman world at an
apogee in the empire's fortunes. Among the resources at the emperor's disposal
were the legions, the most effective instrument of construction, as well as
destruction, in the ancient world.
Differentiating the works of the two
sovereigns is neither easy nor, in the context of current politics, especially
sought after. In some quarters, Herod – the half Jew – is viewed in a poor
light, but then Hadrian, the nemesis of the Jews, is castigated as a vicious
tyrant: “may his
bones rot”
is an injunction found in the Talmud itself. Much of the material written about
the temples of Jerusalem fails even to mention the edifice built by Hadrian.
Great claims are made for Herod as a
builder but could it be that Aelius Hadrianus
was rather more involved in the sanctuary of Temple Mount than is generally
supposed?
Jupiter on
Temple Mount
"At Jerusalem Hadrian founded a city in place of the one which had been
razed to the ground, naming it Aelia Capitolina, and on the site of the
temple of the god he raised a new temple to Jupiter. This brought on a war of no slight importance nor of brief duration,
for the Jews deemed it intolerable that foreign races should be settled in
their city and foreign religious rites planted there."
– Cassius
Dio, Roman
History, 69.12.
 |
|
Caesarea: Emperor Hadrian upgrades the city of Herod
An example from Caesarea provides some
guidance for what may have happened in Jerusalem. Herod built his famous
harbour of Sebastos (Greek for Augustus) with Roman
engineers, Roman technology and Roman marine concrete. The port is regarded as
Herod's greatest work. But Herod's trademark city actually owes more to Hadrian
than it does to the Jewish king.
It was Hadrian who substantially developed and
improved every aspect of the city.
In the original foundation, Herod built for
his own enjoyment a palace, a theatre and a racetrack and to further ingratiate
himself with his Roman master, a temple to the imperial cult. The civilian city
beyond the port began to develop only after Caesarea had been chosen
as the seat of Roman prefects and headquarters of the 10th Legion – from 6 AD
onward, a decade after Herod's death. Only then did it acquire its
thorough-going Roman character.
Caesarea's development actually accelerated
during the conflict with Rome. The city became the marshalling point for the
Roman army and in July 67 sixty thousand troops assembled here. The 5th legion
joined the 10th in winter quarters in the city. Vespasian rewarded the locals
with Italian rights and raised the status of the city, henceforth
Colonia Prima Flavia Augusta Caesarea.
After the war Caesarea grew rapidly,
becoming the economic and political center of the province and hub of a new
road network. Hadrian himself visited the city in 130 and again in 134,
re-founding the city after extensive rebuilding which followed a severe
earthquake two years earlier. The city responded with a Hadrianeum,
a temple dedicated to the emperor.
Herod's palace, refurbished as the governor's
headquarters, was extended fifty metres further east. Herod's racetrack was
shortened and redeveloped as an unusual elongated amphitheatre, with double the
original seating capacity. A huge new hippodrome 460-metres long was built
inland and a second amphitheatre was added on the north side of town. Pagan
shrines proliferated, including a Mithraeum developed from an Herodian
warehouse.
From the evidence of the theatre and
elsewhere, "Herodian" materials were reused in the reconstruction.
By Hadrian's time parts of the outer
harbour had already deteriorated. Tectonic activity had lowered the ocean floor
and sunken parts of the breakwater were causing a hazard to shipping. Hadrian's
repairs to the harbour included attaching a new pier to the Herodian structure
in order to inhibit silting up of the inner harbour.
The Hadrianic city extended far beyond the
Herodian foundation and had no defining city wall for more than 300 years. To
supply the city's larger population, Hadrian set the 10th legion to rebuilding
the town's aqueduct. Engineers tapped into a new water source, the
Tanninim River, and attached a second aqueduct to the first built by Herod more
than a century earlier. Thus, there are two channels to the famous
aqueduct – one Herodian, the other built by Hadrian. The style and materials of
the two channels are identical and in fact are indistinguishable but for the
identifying plaques of the legion.
Fortunately, the
legionaries who built the later channel also attached the emperor's name – or we can be sure it would all be claimed
for Herod! ….
The fall of Jupiter
Hadrian's erasure of the ruins of the
Herodian temple was so complete and the expulsion
of the Jews so effective that by the 4th century even the location of the
temple edifice was beyond recall.
"Rabbi Yermiah, son of Babylonia
came to the Land of Israel and could not find the site of the Temple."
– Tractate
Shevuot (Oaths) 1 4b. ….
Part
Two:
Who
built the Aqueduct at Caesarea?
“Was the high-level aqueduct built by Herod? The difficulty in providing
a definitive answer is illustrative of the difficulty encountered time and
again in deciding what parts of the ancient remains at Caesarea were actually
built by Herod and what parts were built later”.
Robert J. Bull
Puzzling questions
such as the above can commonly arise due to the disjunctions caused by a faulty
chronology, leading to a failure by historians to connect identical eras that
have become separated by centuries in the text books.
Such is, I
believe, the case with Herod ‘the Great’ and the emperor Hadrian, who, as
argued in this series, and elsewhere, e.g.:
A New Timetable for the
Nativity of Jesus Christ
were the same treacherous - but
master of building works - person.
In Part One I also briefly touched on the
Aqueduct of Caesarea and other buildings, and how difficult it apparently is to
separate which is Herodian from which is Hadrianic.
But, if Herod
and Hadrian were one, then there is no longer any problem.
The whole lot
belongs to the one ruler.
Robert J. Bull’s
article,
“Caesarea Maritima- The Search for Herod’s City” (BAR, 8, 3, 1982), may be further proof of the need to unite Hadrian with Herod (emphasis added):
http://cojs.org/robert-j-bull-caesarea-maritima-search-herods-city-biblical-archaeology-review-8-3-1982/
….
Before we began our excavations
in 1971 a number of ancient structures were visible in addition to the fortress
walls of the Crusader city and the mosque of the Bosnian refugees inside.
Perhaps the most famous is the Caesarea aqueduct. It has been romantically
portrayed on a hundred tourist brochures. Actually there are several aqueducts
that supplied water to the city in various periods of its existence.
The most famous aqueduct,
however, is the so-called high-level aqueduct which, as it approaches the city,
is supported on a 6½-mile line of arches. This aqueduct, upon close
examination, will be seen to consist of two aqueducts joined together side by
side, both originating at a spring near the foot of the Carmel range northeast
of the city. Since the spring water was not of sufficient volume to supply the
two water channels, a search for additional water was made in the limestone
foothills east of Mt. Carmel. About 10 miles due east of Caesarea, a farmer
showed us a shaft 8 feet by 5 feet by about 33 feet deep, hewn at a steep angle
into the side of the limestone hill. Down the shaft ran a series of steps and
at the bottom of the shaft was a rock-hewn tunnel approximately 3½ feet by 4
feet which ran eastward from the bottom of the shaft. Pick marks on the sides
of the tunnel ran in two directions, indicating that the tunnel was cut by
teams working in both directions. On the walls are niches for oil lamps that
lit the tunnel as work progressed. This tunnel, cut some 6 miles through the
limestone of the hills east of Caesarea, taps a water collection point 10 miles
east of the city and conducts that water along a circuitous but constantly
declining channel until it joins the high level aqueduct on the side of Mt.
Carmel. The aqueduct then carries the water another 6½ miles into the city. In
short, Caesarea was supplied with an aqueduct nearly 13 miles long, half of
which was a rock-hewn tunnel (for purposes of purity and security) and the
other half of which was carried on a series of arches to the city.
A second aqueduct, the low-level
aqueduct, has its source in a river 4½ miles north of the city. This aqueduct,
dated by pottery taken from beneath its concrete foundation, was in use in the
fifth century The volume of water carried in each of the aqueducts has been
calculated and indicates that in the fifth century the water demand of the
growing city was about five times as much as it had been in the second century.
Experts agree that the
high-level aqueduct is the older. Was the high-level aqueduct built by Herod?
The difficulty in providing a definitive answer is illustrative of the
difficulty encountered time and again in deciding what parts of the ancient
remains at Caesarea were actually built by Herod and what parts were built
later. The London-based Palestine Exploration Fund examined the high-level
aqueduct in 1873 and attributed it to Herod himself, largely on the ground that
Herod must have built an aqueduct to supply the city with water.
Since then, several formal
Latin inscriptions have been found on the western face of the western aqueduct
that have led some scholars to date the structure to Hadrian’s reign (117
A.D.–138 A.D.) [sic]. These inscriptions contain references to Roman legions
that served in Caesarea at that time and according to one inscription “the Emperor
Caesar Trianus Hadrianus Augustus made it.” The Latin word is fecit, which means make or build, and seems to refer
to original construction rather than to a repair.
The fact that the
high-level aqueduct consists of two distinctly different but adjacent aqueducts
helps to solve the dating problem. Investigations by an Italian team in 1961
and by Abraham Negev of the Israeli Department of Antiquities in 1964 showed
that the two channels of the high-level aqueduct were built independently. The
eastern aqueduct was finished on both sides. Later the western one, the one
toward the sea, was added, and was, according to the inscriptions, built by
Hadrian. The eastern aqueduct was built earlier. It was probably built by
Herod. In 1975, our excavation team made several attempts to date the eastern
aqueduct by carefully digging beside it in an effort to find the trench in
which the builders of the aqueduct would have laid the foundations of the
arches. Unfortunately, we were unable to define the outline of the trenches or
to recover any datable material.
However, our excavation
team was able to locate the foundation and the foundation trench of another
structure, the great defense wall built by Herod as part of his city plan.
Beneath the wall and within the trench located 650 meters (one-third mile)
north of the harbor, we uncovered pottery dating to the Herodian period.
Caesarea’s imposing
theater, almost half a mile south of the harbor, is very likely Herodian.
Josephus refers to a theater built by Herod. Today this theater still commands
a magnificent view of the sea. How much of the existing structure is original
and how much is reconstruction is difficult to tell. ….
[End of quote]
Most likely, I think,
Herod-Hadrian built both the eastern
and the western aqueduct.
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