The lack of early-morning cloud suggested it was going to be hot today, and sure enough it was pretty brutal up on the hill. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve ever soaked through the knees of my pants with sweat.
Still, it was an exciting day both in our own little square and more generally too. In our area, we established the location of the second face of the E-W wall we were looking for. In fact, it’s anchored (or ended) by a great big column base, a large drum of stone on which a column once rested, which ties together the two layers of stone at their eastern end. Actually, quite apart from its function in joining these two walls, this column base is an exciting find in itself because it suggests that the entire Northeast Church complex was built atop an older Roman foundation. What kind of a building was it? Maybe it was a Roman temple honouring some other god. If so, building a Christian church smack dab on top of it would be a powerful way of saying to the world that Jesus, nobody else, is now the Lord. This kind of thing happened pretty often in the first Christian centuries, as more and more people converted.
Also in our square today we found two more “new” walls. One lies just north of the double-wall I just finished talking about, separated from it by a gap of about 20 cm and rather crudely built of a single layer of irregular stones. This gap bothered me: Why on earth would it be 20 cm away from the other wall? Mark Schuler, though, had an explanation. Perhaps the earthquake caused this shoddy single-thickness wall to tip outward, away from the double-wall. Good thinking!
The other “new” wall we found is at the extreme east end of our square and runs N-S. Again this is not unexpected; it aligns perfectly with one of the walls of the church itself. Still, it’s good to have found this one, since it confirms Mark’s hypothesis that a small street continues north from the church in the same way that it also runs south from the church all the way down to the city’s decumanus, its main E-W street, maybe 30 metres to the south of the church complex.
Beyond our own square, the big news today was the removal of the marble sarcophagus from the tomb in the chancel of our church. It was a huge event. The tomb itself was discovered three years ago and partly excavated that year. The next year, it was learned that the bones of three young men were buried in it—in sequence, one after the other, with each preceding set of bones being pushed to the edges of the cavity before the new body was laid inside. The sarcophagus, however, is a bit smaller than the finely built masonry crypt in which it lay beneath the church’s floor—and initial probes beside the sarcophagus two years ago discovered nails and still more bones below it! In other words, the sarcophagus wasn’t sitting right on the floor of the crypt, but was suspended above it, resting on a couple of rocks (?). Between its bottom and the bottom of the crypt lay… what? It’s been a mystery to our team for two years now!
But today the answer became clear. The team that spent Sunday and yesterday digging down to the top of the tomb, and then removed the large slabs serving as its top, was ready by about ten this morning to remove the sarcophagus itself. A backhoe was brought in, and a double sling was hooked up from its bucket to the sarcophagus. Then it was a tense couple of minutes as the sarcophagus inched its way up past each successive course of the crypt. Finally though it was clear!—and we became the first people in 14 centuries to see what lay beneath it. Guess what? A few supporting stones… a layer of dark-coloured earth (organic remains?)… at least one very visible iron nail… and a couple of obvious bones! Mark was absolutely beside himself with excitement. This is what he had suspected all along: that the sarcophagus was a secondary burial, a way of honouring its occupants and their families with a final resting-place in the closest possible proximity to the earlier burial of a saint. How cool is that?
Our whole team gathered around to watch this awesome procedure with the key people from the other Hippos teams as well, including Arthur Segal, the director of the whole project. He was just beaming from ear to ear, delighted with this completely unprecedented find. Apparently, nowhere in any site from the Ancient Near East has this kind of double subsequent burial ever been found. In fact, Mark told me later, the experience of opening an ancient tomb of any kind is so rare that Arthur Segal, who’s spent his entire working life in Israelite archaeology and is a well-respected field-man, has only had the opportunity to do it twice. And here, in this rather mediocre church that nobody was really very interested in at all, we find not only two intact sarcophagi, but a further burial beneath one of them!
It’s hard to imagine how anything could possibly get better than this, dig-wise. But we’ll just have to wait and see what the next days, and a lot more buckets full of dirt, bring.