Matthew J. Adams | Armageddon and the Roman VIth Ferrata Legion

[Applause] great thank you thank you deal for that and Thank You Barbara for making this happen it's really exciting for me to be here in Chicago to talk about some of the work that we're doing as part of the Jezreel Valley Regional project and I understand that the program has been very successful so far many of my colleagues from Israel have been here in the past and agree some of you have seen of some of those lectures before and so I hope I can live up to their standards today and we talked about Armageddon and of course I aren't put Armageddon in the title just to get you in here clicker here how many of you came just because Armageddon was in the title nice good so I got you two more two extra so I will all pay out a little bit here I'll let the concept of Armageddon kind of book in what we'll talk about today and the word Armageddon is something that you're probably very familiar with and you probably know or maybe you don't but here it is it occurs one time in the New Testament and here it is and I'll get my best Bible voice on for you and read it for you this is from Revelation the book of chapter 16 12 through 16 the sixth angel poured his bowl on the great river Euphrates and its water was dried up in order to prepare the way for the kings from the east and I saw three foul spirits like frogs coming from the mouth of the dragon from the mouth of the Beast and from the mouth of the false prophet these are demonic spirits performing signs to go abroad to the kings of the whole world to assemble them for battle on the great day of God the Almighty and they assembled them at the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon this is a unique reference in fact what it almost certainly represents is a Greek corruption of the Hebrew har Megiddo the hill of Megiddo and I'll mention Megiddo again in just a little bit but suffice it to say davido is a major archaeological site in Israel that has a major bronze and Iron Age presence and of course for those who visit the museum galleries here you've probably seen many Megiddo artifacts including the famous in any case what's what this text is doing is it's telling us that the ten ultimate battle of good versus evil at the end of the world is going to take place at this archaeological site and I want you to keep that in the back of your mind because I'm going to I think I'll give you enough information today that will help you figure out why these weird New Testament guys would have situated the ultimate battle at Megiddo because by the time they're writing in us in fact Megiddo was abandoned as the site of Megiddo and the name Megiddo had been detached from the site itself so keep this in mind and at the end if you're still awake we can talk a little bit about why Megiddo fulfills this role okay hopefully many of you know where Israel is East Coast Mediterranean Megiddo is here in the northern part of Israel just on the north side of the border with Palestine today located in the valley of Jezreel now the Jezreel Valley is very important as you already indicated for its geographical setting the tectonic situation of Western Asia has created this massive mountain system that is very much running in a north-south direction here the Rift Valley is and it's separation is kind of forming this as well so it's really easy to go north and south most of the time you can go up and down the coast you can go up and down the Jordan Valley but crossing from east to west is a little bit more difficult and so finding the least path of resistance is of course human nature and one of the best places to do this happens to be here not far from the modern cities of Akko and Haifa in the valley of Jezreel you can get a good sense of this from this image on the right where you get a little bit of a sense of the topography here Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley become a hub of international roads and once you're inside the valley you have access so these roads will take you anywhere else in the ancient Near East that you need to go whether it's heading westward and down to Egypt or down centrally to the hill country of Samaria and Jerusalem or up to the north to the Phoenician coast or inland of the Jordan Valley by a number of roots and then onward to Damascus Mesopotamia so on so megiddo you know long-lived history pretty much continuously occupied from say 5000 BC up to the modern day is based on the fact that it is here commanding this hub of roads here you see an image showing you the famous be amorous route which is a route that existed for thousands of years where was really codified with this term via maras in the Roman period and it's essentially a primary route from Egypt to Mesopotamia and all the stops along the way by way of the Jezreel Valley and Megiddo everybody who was going anywhere remotely interesting in ancient world passed by Megiddo and hopefully left some cool stuff for the archaeologists all right this image again for you here in red we've marked the Roman Road for you the Romans really just codified the road system that was already more or less in place or least the traditional road system for thousands of years and one of the main roads through the valley was monstered by the Empire itself and ran from seseri on the coast through the mountains past Megiddo and onto Beit Shean and so forth and here you're looking at a close-up view of the Megiddo area itself with tel megiddo located here and in red the main Roman Road more or less as we understand it today what's really what I really like about this opportunity to talk to you about Leggio is that it helps us to better contextualize Megiddo itself you know many of us who work in the ancient Aries and many of those who go and visit slice in their near East are typically has horse blinders on to those big tel structures on the landscape you know Megiddo is this huge artificial hill and archaeologists have been attracted there for centuries tourists are attracted there but what we don't realize usually is that the site itself is much larger larger so this is Tel Megiddo today the national park itself with a parking lot and a visitor center here the building visitor center is actually built by the University of Chicago by the way still in place but the actual extent of archaeological remains from all periods is much larger I have a graphic for you all of this is where we can find archaeological remains and this is probably a very conservative drawing for you so one of the aims of my project has been the jesuit valley regional project to kind of emphasize parts of sites that are typically neglected because of our obsession with these visible sites on the landscape we've been doing this for a hundred years redundant in ages what were the first major sites to be excavated where those giant pointy rocks are sticking out of the Giza Plateau right next to it all the way around it and then realize oh there's a bunch of other sites you can't actually see so this is a you know part of a process of the entire discipline trying to correct for these over both sides in any case there's quite a bit of material here which range from all different periods and we'll be focusing on the Roman period in particular if we I like to refer to this area of Greater Megiddo so we still get to use the name Megiddo for fundraising purposes because nobody knows what Leggio is but in short Leggio is the term that we generally use to refer to the Roman legionary base that was somewhere in this area in the first sorry the second and third centuries CE II and if we look at Greek and Latin sources we get an idea of the types of places that were located somewhere here in the vicinity of Tel Megiddo we know that there's a Jewish Jewish village called Cafaro tonight we know that there's a Roman legionary base which goes by the name Leggio we also know that in the Byzantine period a major polis was established here called max Indianapolis named after Constantine's co-emperor Maximian we also have an early Islamic sources and later Islamic sources and even modern sources that refer to a place called Lejeune and this is in fact our first clue to the location of the Roman legionary base because this name is not in fact Arabic but is preserving the ancient Latin Leggio the the village of Lejeune which was occupied already probably in the 7th and 8th centuries ad continued to be occupied right up into the very early 20th century that the earliest excavators at the site of Megiddo who you'll meet in just a moment talk about some of the villagers from Lejeune coming to steal stones from the dig site and so on in any case from the Arabic name we were able to determine as others have before us but somewhere in this greater vicinity is the ancient Roman legionary base as far as a Faro tonight the Jewish village it is a Greek defied into the word copper Kotani and does in fact appear on a couple of maps and geographical sources here you're looking at the Tooting your map which is a 5th century map that probably has some earlier data on it and here you see the Mediterranean here North is off to your right caesarea pepper Kotani skip Doppel is beit shean more or less representing the same road that I have Illustrated for you over here alright a brief historical overview that will contextualize some of the things that we're going to talk about in particular how and why the Roman legion would be stationed in this area at all of course tel megiddo itself is the main Centre for the bronze iron age and Hellenistic remains there as with many sites in Israel and other parts of the Levant by the time the Hellenistic period rolls around and larger cities are needed to be built and Greeks and Romans are a lot lazier they don't want to go up to the top of these big tells and establish new cities they tend to establish cities in the flat areas next to tells and the same seems to be true here today so tel megiddo itself really only goes into the Hellenistic period and there are of course too little over two thousand years of history at Megiddo afterwards the most important period that we're interested in right now as we call the early and middle Roman period the first three centuries CE and in particular we are interested in this series of revolts that took place beginning in 67 to 70 CE II with the first revolt which of course was the revolt of the local Jewish population against the Roman Empire in the area and they were very interested in regaining their independence particularly in a cultic level but also in a nationalist level as well they started out the revolt didn't go so well when it well for a little bit but it ended up not being successful and in 72 Romans marched on Jerusalem and destroyed the temple and so on the main results from our point of view today is that as a result the Romans decided to station the tenth Legion in Jerusalem permanently to prevent against further revolts it didn't work out because there were a number of other revolts that kept breaking out in particular the famous to ask for revolt which happened all over the Mediterranean world but also in the region of Israel from 115 to 117 the result of that was bringing in of a yet another legion and somewhere into the north we know that the second try on Allegiant was brought here for some amount of time and then the six throughout the Legion was stationed here to replace them permanently around 120 destacia a little bit uncertain plus or minus five or six years another revolt broke out the famous Bar Kokhba revolt ooh the second revolt for him 132 to 136 and of course not successful again the Roman Empire is able to maintain hold but even after this revolt the Roman 6th Legion was a still present all the way up until the reign of Constantine in the Megiddo area somewhere the location of the legionary base there were only about five of us who really wanted to know where the base was but let's pretend like the whole world of scholarship was waiting for somebody to find it the location of the base was really not known and for a lot of people who were interested in Roman Jewish relations and the Roman revolts most scholars of those periods were very interested in understanding the 10th Legion which is in Jerusalem and today archeology of the 10th Legion is difficult because it's a modern living City and the legionary base for the 10th Legion was probably located somewhere was now the western side of the old city so as kind of a secondary desire to study the Roman legion in this particular region there's an opportunity to find the 6th Legion in the Megiddo area as I've already said the name of Lejeune already gave us one of the main clues there's been a lot of work in this area over the years you have a very long list here which you can commit to memory as you see fit one of the first the pioneers of archaeology of Megiddo and in fact greater Megiddo was this fellow Goethe Lee of schumacher worked on behalf of the society German society for Insel research in the early 20th century don't let his name an affiliation fool you he was from Ohio his parents were German immigrants but we still got to keep the cool name I suppose and what he would work all over Israel doing a lot of different things and you may have heard of his name or in other contexts but what he did at Megiddo was really kind of bad at tel megiddo itself he used responsible for this giant gash through the center here and where she cago and is now our excavations understand that they're about 35 major strata he found four so that gives you a sense of the resolution of his methodology but in any case we will blame him for that if we have to have a lecture on SEL Megiddo we're going to give him credit here tonight because he did something that's very valuable for us today here is the map that he produced tel megiddo is here and he did a very detailed survey of the area around Megiddo he understood the concept of Greater Megiddo even though scholarship has sense kind of ignored that for the TEL itself and in a lot of ways his survey and the I mean unfortunately sometimes as minimal as simple red dots on the map remained the only record for some of the antiquities that were still standing in the early 20th century most of which are completely gone today due to looting in the teens and 20s primarily in any case this map we see on the right is supposed to mirror image this modern areal of aerial photographs today so you can see that in addition to the tale there's quite a bit of activity in the southern area here I put in a lot of exercise so if I skip some because I changed my mind and little don't don't panic here are some images from the teens and 20s of the Megiddo area in particular these are of the village of Lejeune which is located right in this area showing you but there is in fact quite a bit of Roman and Byzantine remains well that were there at that time and these are some of the earliest clues that we had for the possibility of finding the legionary base over the last century or so a lot of circumstantial evidence not even circumstances the small pieces of evidence have risen up from Greater Megiddo that helped us in present times to try to find the legionary base in particular you see this beautiful sculpted lion this probably dates to the 2nd century ad was found in this larger field to the south of Tel Megiddo if any of you have been to Israel to the Rockefeller Museum this lion has now it's kind of sad yet beautiful at the same time they ran up water pipes through its mouth and it's now part of a fountain in the middle of the Rockefeller Museum but it belongs here at Megiddo other finds a few of these cremation burials are found and some we probably know cremation was a roman practice in this particular time period so we know or we suspect based on this there are Romans floating around here in one way or another in the 20s the British built a police station just on the south side of Greater Megiddo here and in preparation conducted some very modest salvage excavations in fact those salvaged excavations weren't even known about the current scholarship until my colleague Gil Tom pepper will tell you about in just a moment went into the archives and found these but you can see just from this image there's tel megiddo in the north and if you see these big piles of dirt right here those are the big piles of dirt at the University of Chicago use their giant railway system to dump off the side of the till that's not a criticism I'm showing you that they Chicago impacted the landscape here and it's really quite impressive not laughing that wrong audience anyway so here's the prison the police station in the south when you see that there are remains here this particular stone door was found in the first some extent for a second and third centuries a lot of wealthier Jewish tombs had stone doors with inscriptions on them for those of you heard of Bates erm which is not far away from here this is a typical kind of burial for this period this one is nice because it mentions this fellow at fryin bar shimon with a hebrew script written with samaritan in samaritan so we know that at Faro tonigh Jewish Samaritans were living and here's a nice piece of archaeology deal with that we don't have to go over all of these but Cafaro deny the Jewish villages rep referenced hor ish times in rabbinic literature without a lot of detail you can read those all later if you want but if Ryan bar Shimon is part of this context here so it seems likely likely on the basis of that tomb and some of the archaeology that at least part of our own eye is located here underneath the British police station CH now it serves as a modern prison my colleague Joe some pepper who is one of the co-directors of this particular excavation at Leggio conducted a number of surveys in the late 80s and 90s and as part of the survey see accumulated picked up collected thank you collected a lot of Roman pottery from the 1st 2nd and 3rd centuries including these lovely roof tiles at least one of which had a partial stamp referring to the Roman 6th Legion that doesn't give us the exact location of the base but it's the clues are mounting up these are very nice water pipes that were found in the 30s eroded from the road the area next to the road here typical Roman style one of the most dramatic clues and some of you may have heard about this before came from more recent excavations in the modern prison today for good or ill the prison needed expanding and of course they called in the archaeologists because it's Israel and there's archaeology everywhere to check out where they're going to build this new whatever it is they're going to build my colleague Yotam was brought in to do that work and he worked there for two very short seasons you got to get him here to tell the stories because he was actually working with the prisoners who were there as as labor they had to set up metal detectors because coins get secured a terminal excavation in any case he did confirm that the Jewish village of Faro of night was here under the prison and what was really unique about the village is that the archaeological remains demonstrated that there was wasn't just a Jewish village there were the Romans there Roman pagans as we'll see in just a moment incipient Christians there were civilians and soldiers and so on was a very dynamic and diverse little village here's some of the excavations have conducted and just showing you some of the items that came out of his excavations in some cases from the same building showing Roman remains including the LA Reis deity bronze deity figurines and then things like this Jewish Jewish ritual vessels which are known otherwise only from exclusive Jewish villages the find which he got a lot of things for very happy for him was in his area q and it was this large building here in fact this is the building here and what we're most interested in is this back room here which had a very nicely preserved mosaic in it dating to about the 3rd century AD and the inscription the mosaic inscriptions themselves are very interesting of course they indicate to us this was somehow a public building that residents of the village could contribute funds toward to beautify and in this case we have three inscriptions which refer to supporting the construction of mosaics here the so-called woman's inscription which is up here in my favorite in fact remember Pramila and Kuryakin and Dorotea oh and Christi don't you love that why does he get it at the end with this like little extra like nib over here we have the dedication by guy honest also called peripheries a Centurion our brother has made the payment as own expense as an act of liberality routiers has carried out the work so here we have a Roman centurion is also participated in this which doesn't sound surprising by itself until you consider the third inscription the gods loving at kept tooth as offered the table probably referring to this thing here to God Jesus Christ as a memorial and this is the earliest archaeological reference to Jesus Christ outside of the New Testament and so it's of course a very important find in itself and it has some of the early traditional iconography including some of the earliest fishes and if we reconstruct the building for you you can kind of get a sense of what we're talking about here are some of these buildings that the early church fathers the very early church fathers are referring to or that Paul is referring to himself these houses that are acting as community centers of sorts in which some of these early Christian rituals are taking place including probably the agape meal which is probably what the table stood for itself so once again we have a really remarkable piece of evidence for diversity here in Greater Megiddo that is somehow connected to the Roman legionary base as well as we will get to which we have a Centurion paying for a mosaic that is very clearly dedicated to Jesus Christ in the third century this is before Constantine's reforms if you have if you listen to all the Church Fathers they're telling you that the Romans are doing nothing but killing every single Christian in the universe this is another piece of evidence as modern scholarship is starting to to show that this is not exactly the case and programs against early Christians are perhaps if not overstated not as prolific as the early fathers will tell you another piece of evidence Rhodes Romans loved Rhodes and we're very happy that they invented the idea of the mile marker we all know about mile markers today what they were very nice to do for us in the ancient Roman period was to tell you how many miles you were away from a particular place and to also put the Emperor's name on it so from an archaeological point of view you know exactly what time period you're talking about and if we study mile markers from the greater region when we select all of those that refer to a place called Leggio we actually have enough to triangulate back by Roman miles to about the area of Megiddo today in short all of the pieces of evidence that have accumulated over the last century that I've kind of summarized for you today suggest that the best place to look for a Roman legionary base might be in this area here and this is how we began our project which ultimately ended up in some excavation as we will see but first what exactly do we expect to find if we're looking for a Roman legionary base well in this particular time period that is the second and third centuries we are looking for something very specific and something that does not exist at all in archeology of the eastern Roman Empire yet that is a full sized five thousand soldier scale legionary base we have a lot of them from the Western Empire I'll show you in just a moment but none of them from the east despite the vac in Roman archaeology and the East is quite expensive we know a lot about the fourth century and onwards after the Diocletian Anik reforms in which Roman legions were chopped up into smaller units and distributed over larger areas but what did a second third century full-scale legionary base look like do they even have them in the eastern empire and how might that inform how we understand the deployment of the Roman army and the administration of the empire in the east oh I guess I should tell you what this is here you're looking at one of the temporary camps from Masada the Romans are great because they they did things very precisely and with some rigidity that we as archaeologists are happy for today if they were on a simple March that was going to be two weeks every night they would stop and assemble a temporary camp and that temporary camp would have all of the specifications that a permanent Airy base would have and the same specifications that a semi-permanent regen Airy base would have so I have Masada where this is from which which was besieged by the Roman army for some amount of time we have 10 or 12 of these small-scale semi temporary camps that you can see here what's great about these and other ones they all follow the same basic pattern oops yeah we'll look at these first here's some examples from the western empire maybe many of these are open to tourists today so hopefully some of you visited them some are very impressive including dinna Banda which is in fact downtown Vienna today carnism in Austria also not far away and no bayesian in Germany there dozens and dozens of these from this period you can see how big they are and if you look closely they all pretty much look the same with only some minor changes let's look at a template here is a schematic version for you they all have a rectangular shape and in terms of size for these ones in the western empire these are cute these are sitting with themselves this can be 500 meters by say 2 or 300 meters so the small city and themselves surrounded by a fortification wall what's not shown here is that often these fortification walls were further surrounded by a series of defensive trenches or moats dry moats with all sorts of sharp things in it so the bad guys can't get in inside you also see some regularity usually have one main road crossing in this direction about a third of the way from one of the walls occasionally you'll have a similar sized road another third of the way down between the two were the Principia and the Praetorian the two main headquarters building in legionary bases the Principia being kind of the main headquarters where the treasury would be where the standards of the main eagles of the region would be placed where meetings would take place and so on and the Praetorian is essentially the the villa of the commander and so these two were always centrally placed in this general configuration another Road ran axially through the long part of camp and these are the main roads within it you have a lot of other buildings and a lot of other subsidiary roads you see that many of these buildings are very similar in shape guys here and here and so on these are the barracks for the soldiers and they are the most ubiquitous architectural element in deep originary bases I do not know these guys I found them on the internet but I think they represent very nicely ancient Romans I tried to recruit this year what would be digging in a few months I've been trying to recruit this reenactor crowd which is a huge community none of them want to do our ki ology they just want to dress up I guess any reenactors here can spread the word now I guess you wouldn't say it after I said all that right okay all right so that basic template is more or less what we're looking for and these things are so regular in the West that if we can just get a few corners of some of these buildings and a few pieces of these walls we can kind of reconstruct the whole camp and that was kind of the main goal I am NOT a Roman archeologist I'm not here to make Leggio a 50-year career we are as Gil explained doing a much broader archaeological project and if we can suck some important data out of Lego for the Roman period that helps us fill out that point in time that's great so it's nice to have the Romans on your side with this the excavation is currently directed by three of us myself and yo comms will I introduce you to already and our other colleague Jonathan David at Gettysburg College is very much a joint project here Yotam and John are the hardcore trained classicists and I'm just in charge of stuff but I've learned a lot along the way so some of our first clues and looking at the for excavation even started in trying to understand this hill that we assumed that the legionary base might be on came from aerial photography if you look close enough you can kind of maybe use your imagination and start to see some rectilinear features already we see that there's some sort of long shall long shadow here and another one over here and if you really want you can kind of see one here as well so some sort of wreck a linear feature that is in fact on the scale that we were assuming we would find this is about 300 meters apart we commissioned a light our study of the whole valley and in particular used it here this particular Hill basically means an airplane went with a giant laser and zapped the ground and gave us a bunch of high-resolution topographical data from which we can create all sorts of different models and we can digitally reconstruct the Sun at different angles across the landscape and see what comes up by looking at shadows there probably been lectures here in which similar concepts were used for a pig Rafi you know shining light from different directions to renew inscriptions so that worked out very nice for us because we were able to accentuate some of those features that we saw digitally and you know rectilinear things like this don't exactly happen every day on natural landscapes so based on all of the evidence we put together we and what we could see on the ground at Leggio or from the air rather we sort of imagined that we only have enough data to surmise that we have a couple of options for the size and shape of the camp it could either be the size that we would expect something like this like the examples that I showed you before or the data wasn't enough to say that it definitely went all the way over here and there was some topographical anomalies in this area that suggested well I guess it could be a smaller camp like this now either option tells us something very different about how the six Legion was deployed here in the larger version we're talking about a full-scale legionary base and the smaller version we're talking about something smaller so one of our main questions to answer as soon as possible was which option is the correct one so here we are on the first day of excavations there's tel megiddo in the north and here we are on this hill and this is yo Tom here where you can't tell this was taken seconds before he started crying because he had been working and fantasizing about Leggio for decades before we actually broke ground so it was a very happy day for him when he could lay out the first squares some of you will understand crying on a dig site in 2013 our goal was really to just do as much exposure as possible over the course of two weeks we had a very small team we weren't trying to do a massive excavation we wanted to even get a few pieces of evidence that would help us understand a if the base was in fact here and B if there are enough pieces that we get to help us kind of reconstruct the overall thing and understand the size that would help us plan for future excavations as well so we're now here looking from the north hovering by drones somewhere above tel megiddo actually looking southward toward the prison which is here over the entire field that we've just been looking at here and as you can see from this aerial photo this is a series of excavations that we did which ran for approximately hundred meters hundred meters across the site okay day one easiest first day of excavation ever and not for good reasons unfortunately the site was incredibly poorly preserved very much denuded it's been robbed out in the early 20th century and it's the use as a an industrial level wheat field for about 60 years so the preservation of the site is not wonderful but it means that we could just dust off a few centimetres of dirt before we started finding architecture and that's good for the students they'd like to see something on day one right including all of these folks here okay let's take a look at what we found here I'll go through this a little bit quickly in the interest of time and get to some other things as you can see from the drawing here we the northern part of the excavation area was in that darker shadow area that created the first linear feature that we saw and what the reason why it was so dark in that image that you saw before is because it is impacted depression and so she's fun from a particular angle cause that to be a shadow so up here we're actually down inside of this trough and as we work further to the south or coming up on top of the hill more and that will help you understand a little bit of the things that we found so here rotated for you we're down in the trough coming up onto the hill so on down in the deepest part of the trough we found a channel a man-made channel that we now realize as you'll see in just a moment is part of a much larger channel that cut through the local limestone down into underlining basalt and then further they cut a v-shape channel here into that basalt just upslope from that about 10-15 meters where the remains of a large wall about seven meters wide and as you can see these are the lowest courses of this wall which is of course much grander in its in its day and just a few fragments of it here altogether we can see the defensive fortifications undoubtedly of classic Roman military style and here you see them both in plan and section the large wall here down slope cut by the Roman military down into the bottom of a channel and a channel cut into the bottom now I think that yeah here we go I have a couple examples for you but this would have looked like in real life and I think that will help a large fortification wall with soldiers on top and that sort of thing with these v-shaped channels down below with sharp objects and things like that so that was great we had and understood that within about three or four days so that really felt good deficit progress just inside of this large fortification wall we found an in situ line of pipes which excited us very much at the time but now we've excavated thousands of these pipe segments so they're a little bit boring but they are part of the water supply system that said Roman military camp and as many of you probably know the Romans loves water they brought it from everywhere they had Bad's and everybody was wet all the time and they had toilets and they were flushing them they use more water than any other civilization even us today I think probably but that's good for us because they left a lot of their infrastructure in place which we have found archaeologically as you will see shortly as we continue further upslope and we get inside of the larger fortification wall itself you see and I can represent this whole area here and beyond with just a couple of quick photographs we didn't have a lot of horizontal exposure but we didn't need it we found a series of rooms and that seemed to be typical all the way across the excavation area small rooms like this maybe three meters by three meters with various variations on that along the way some of them were separated by alleyways or street wave car since alleyways are what did I say Street waves Street wave cars right out of the bedrock with sewer channels built inside of them as well classic Roman construction and as you'll see the pottery and coins and everything like that pretty much secured the Roman date for these things one of the rooms was kind of interesting in in that it's a small mystery there seem to be a small closet at the center of which was this the stone with a hole in the center and it's not a closet that anybody would hang out in or sleep in or anything like that so it must been for something else and our best guess is that maybe this is an employee Legion would have dozens of these things for different divisions and so forth that's a little bit speculative most of the finds that we had from the inside of these rooms were roof tiles in fact we excavated tons and tons and tons of roof tiles if anybody knows anyone who wants to do a dissertation on Roman roof tile we have a lot of them and you will happily ship them wherever you want you would some insisted on keeping them all just in case such a person wanted to do such a dissertation in any case you see that they're ubiquitous here they work just as many modern roof tiles do with these trays with the coverings on top of them and so on we are fortunate enough also to have many of them that were stamped with the name of the Legion and we had several samples that were broken and only said part of the name of the Legion and some which had a Roman numeral but you couldn't be sure if there wasn't another eye there or another V or something like that but eventually we did find an example that had the full Leggio six sirata which is the name of the Legion that we were in fact looking for and you're looking at that example here eg V PI F II and then they are and are on top of each other so this is of course every archaeologists dream is to have the name of the people who were at the side of the name of the site actually represented there this is a nice medusa head there was probably one of these decorative elements on the end of roof tiles some other objects these a scale from the scale armor which is nice to see that we are definitely in a Roman military context of course we had dozens and dozens of coins and lamps these peculiar features these are lead ingots of some sort not the kind of Inc ingots that we know very well from the Roman Empire which are kind of long and they have nice stamps on them but these are apparently probably melted down from local objects intended to be reused by soldiers themselves and on an ad hoc basis preliminary analysis of a lead here suggests that might come from a Sardinia which is a known location of Roman lead mining this is one of our nicer finds from this season 2013 which is the this nice sea lion sculpture which is probably part of a tripod table nice we also found perhaps the last Roman soldier from Leggio almost didn't find him at all here we have part of a room which is only partially excavated one corner with a rock kind of leaning up against one of the walls and we are originally not going to bother with this because the rock was really heavy and it didn't matter we were there to get a few pieces of information in the rock wasn't one of them eventually we decided to move it and found that this rock was covering the entrance to a cave which we very quickly excavated and found that there was one lone Roman soldier in a cremation burial buried inside of it was probably one of the well here he is here other things which were kind of surprising we had numerous fragments of these Kalaa Jewish ritual vessels from just this small excavation at the camp I'm not suggesting that the Romans were also Jewish but clearly there was some sort of exchange with the local Jewish population and the Romans were using these for who knows what but there are a number of them there and there'll be an interesting study once we continue and put them together farthest upslope we had yet another larger Road cut out of bedrock not large enough to be one of these major roads of the camp but it also had a number of sewer channels connected to it an additional architecture as well which also produce numerous roof tiles and things like that so that was great at the end of the 2013 season we were sure that we had identified the location of the camp which feels good we had a good understanding we think of its configuration more or less in the landscape we had the defensive structure we had a lot of these smaller chambers which almost certainly are part of something and statistically almost certainly part of some of these barracks structures and we had a couple of larger roads which probably indicates some of these kind of larger alleyways in-between we didn't quite have that piece of evidence that would help us understand if we were dealing a small camp or a larger camp so we went back in 2015 we held our first larger-scale season not too large we had about 50 people this is the staff and volunteers funny it's like when you show your pictures of your kids to people that don't really care archaeologists always showing pictures of their teams of people so just struck me then in 2015 we open up to new excavation areas areas B and C which were meant sort of an ad hoc decision because there was a major drainage channel from the local winter rains which were severely eroding this part so we thought well if we're going to dig anyway we might as well try to protect some of those things and another part we were interested in getting some of the central architecture of the camp so this is a good opportunity further Area C was strategically placed so that if you imagine the smaller version of the camp here C would catch the defensive wall on that side based on everything we thought we knew at that time and if it did great if not then it might suggest that we had the larger camp let's look at area C first this was both of these areas we're very productive and exciting so I'll let you in on that ahead of time not for because they had beautiful monumental architecture giant inscriptions but because they gave us just a couple of clues we needed to better reconstruct the overall layout of the camp and here in Area C you get your best example of that it doesn't look like much but if we zoom in and I help you understand what you're seeing here you see that we're looking in red at two foundation walls for a large road system a road that's about eight meters wide the center of which had a deep sewage channel in it now all of this would have been covered nicely with stone and the sewage channel would be lined with stone and have these beautiful caps on it but all of that has been robbed away and you're looking only at the substructure of the road itself if we reconstruct the length of that road you can see it here going through Area C all the way towards the end of the camp now this is a major road as I said it's about eight meters wide almost certainly one of the major roads across the camp and once we had this we knew with 90% certainty that we're probably dealing with the large size of the camp and this was the main in this case north-south Road through it on the east side of the road we had a number of very nice structures we just don't know much about them at all but on the west side of the road severely destroyed but we had clear evidence for monumental architecture here's some examples of rows that helps your imagination as I said on the west side we identified some big chunks of monumental architecture not the normal stuff for barracks or anything like that in fact now that we have looking at our schematic here now that we have this main road through here we can understand where we are in the whole scheme of things this monumental architecture almost certainly belongs to the brink appiah the large headquarters building who have been near the center of the camp and that was a very nice pieces of data to have a couple other shots of some of this architecture again not very well preserved but the data you get from that one data point of where you are on the map is more valuable sometimes than finding the gold and well sometimes so in addition to these large monumental walls here and here we also had evidence for at least two column bases which would have fronted the main road and that's great because if we know very well with these plink if you look like and they are situated right there on the main road they do have beautiful facades with columns on them and they do have large-scale monumental architecture so here you see one example reconstructed from the Nova in Poland here is the main road coming through and here you see the facade of the Principia with its column bases and other large scale architecture another feature of the Principia is this larger structure which usually spans the main road this is called the groma this is a monumental structure that very much marks the center of the camp in a lot of ways and a lot of ways and quite literally the groma is actually refers to the surveyors peg which would have been placed at the main surveying location and all the edges of the camp's are based on this particular point okay so we have the main road we have the defensive fortifications and we still have one n different capilla and we have one other area to look at which is area B just to the west similar situation not great preservation but a few good clues first of all as I've outlined for you in red we have another road it's really shabby and they're only fragments of it but just enough and you know today all of the main utilities that are supplied to the city all run underneath the main roads right electrical plumbing and so on same is true for the Romans the first inkling that we had a road here with the fact that all of these sewer I'm sorry water supply pipes were running just under what would have been the main stone covering over on this side we found remains of terracing which would have supported the road much of the camp was kind of built on a slow and so a lot of the buildings and roads themselves or partially terraced up and so forth some of these water pipes for you on the south side of the road we found more monumental scale architectures so we knew again that we weren't dealing with the common barracks level of the camp barracks of the camp but something a little bit nicer here I've outlined some of the walls for you not enough to get a fantastic idea of the plan but it's just inside of this road there are fragments of door thresholds and jams here and here and so forth but what was nicest the best-preserved with this larger room that you see here so we'll look at now which turned out to be a latrine which is really cool especially when the kids come to visit you want to show them what contribution you're making to understand the ancient world and take them and show them the toilets but it's not just any toilet I will tell you it is probably the toilet used by the camp commander that's right it was beautiful really it had these ceramic tiles in the floor and here you see the main commode itself your your what you're missing from this particular image is the toilet seat which has long since been robbed away and looking therefore down into the sewage channel below here you see it from a slightly different angle we assume if you need the visual you can imagine one of these toilet seats covering this part here your feet are resting comfortably here your arm is probably resting here with your latest tablet newspaper what have you and it's big enough I must say that it was probably a double seater it also featured what was probably not actually a unique thing in ancient toilet but it a unique fine from an archeological point of view is this sewer pipe here which allowed which would have allowed water to be poured down underneath the toilet seat so you can flush and of course there would have been running water underneath at all times anyway so that's nice some other views for you so on okay so all of these pieces of data helped us put together a very nice architectural story here we have defensive structure we have franca Pia we have a main road and these main roads inevitably lead to the defensive wall which at which point you would expect to find large gate structures here a couple of examples of the types of gates that would come from this types of legionary bases not small things at all we're hoping this year we'll be going back to this area to see about the gate the gates are nice because they're monumental architecture who doesn't like that but they're also the best chance to find inscription Ulm aterial related to the founding of the camp inscription saying and so in such emperor such and such a date set up the six Legion here and so on one of our outstanding questions is when was the base actually established we also have evidence for a very nice building near a main road that fits very nicely with the probable location of the of the Praetorian the commander's residence and his toilet of course we did a little bit of ground-penetrating radar works just in the last five minutes of the last season which will form the basis of this summer's work in between these two areas and in fact what we kind of get an inkling up here and I'll just interpret it for you is this is the continuation of this main road here and a large open area inside which probably represents part of the Principia as well because the Principia is essentially a two-part structure with a large open courtyard and at the silica type building in the back so it's nice to have this additional data it helped out so if we plot and expand all of the roads that we now understand and so forth when kind of get an image something like this we're pretty sure at this point that we have the full-scale legionary base which is the first time that we can say with any certainty that the eastern empire had full scale legionary bases and probably and this will be of interest to those who work in Jerusalem in the first second and third century probably the tenth Legion also had a full-scale legionary base this image was done by our drone team just a couple of weeks ago and I'm happy to show it because it happened to be just the right moment in the barley growing season in which we got we could see a lot of underground structures and I can zoom in for you you can see area B and C here but you can see very nicely now the northern fortification wall the western one which we can never really see before the southern one here and if you see these linear lines in here that's the continuation of that basalt trough inside of the moat which we can now expand all the way across here and there are a bunch of other features that were able to make out and hopefully we'll be exploring some of those this summer okay back to Armageddon because I know you've been waiting to find out what the story is here and the story that you would always get especially from the tour guides at Megiddo who didn't even know Leggio was here Romans were here at all just this Iron Age and Bronze Age site well of course the end of the world is going to start here at Megiddo because this was the crossroads of Empires and of course it's the most logical place for a final battle and and there are so many battles fought here over thousands and thousands of years so of course they would choose this all very unsatisfying suggestions for how Megiddo would be associated with the penultimate battle so the question on the table now is why then would Megiddo be associated with this let's think now in terms of what is underlying the book of Revelation let's strip away all of the theology for just a moment you can have it back when we're done and try to understand what is really at the kernel from a historical point of view behind the book and what is behind that is rebellion rebellion against Rome the kicking out of the Romans and independence for the Jews and possibly the Christians in Israel that is what inspires all of the imagery in the book and so now suddenly now that you understand that there's a major Roman legionary base here you can understand just a simple pure strategy behind this if you are going to if your Bar Kokhba for example and your going to kick the Romans out you really have two objectives and you have to do them in the following order eventually at the end you have to kick the 10th Legion out of Jerusalem but before that you got to kick out their reinforcements from Leggio from Megiddo here and start the whole process so that is why Megiddo it's not Megiddo itself it's the legionary base that is the site of the penultimate battle so I'll leave you with that I think no more slides yeah you can check out our website if you want or not thank you all for coming and for listening [Applause]

Channel: The Oriental Institute

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Length: 56min 1sec (3361 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2017