Horvat Mazad

On one small hill west of Jerusalem, a Jewish ritual bath was later cut through by Muslim graves facing Mecca.

historicalmilitary

About ten miles west of Jerusalem, a bare hilltop kept getting fortified by whoever held the road below. The Hasmoneans went first, raising a square watchtower and a courtyard covering roughly two hundred square meters. Herod the Great's builders came next and swallowed the older fort whole, leveling it and using it as the core of a complex eight times the size. Inside they cut a ritual bath into the rock, with seven steps down to the floor. A complete oil lamp was found wedged in a crack in its wall. Centuries later, in the Early Islamic period, gravediggers cut tombs straight through that bath. Twenty-two of them were found, laid out east to west and aligned toward Mecca, with jewelry, coins and scraps of textile still inside. The Byzantines had already built their own small fort on the summit, eleven meters by seven, planted directly on the Hasmonean and Herodian foundations. Nobody knows what the place was originally called.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
a rock-cut mikveh (Jewish ritual bath) that was later altered by burials dating to the Early Islamic period

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Khirbet Badd 'Isa 7.6 mi Someone hid a hundred and forty-seven coins in a building here, and the newest one was struck four years before the revolt that emptied the village.
  • Gibeon (ancient city) 8.1 mi The people of this hill town tricked Joshua into a peace treaty by pretending they lived far away.
  • Church of the Holy Sepulchre 10.6 mi A caliph prayed outside this church rather than inside, so nobody could later claim it as a mosque.
  • Tel Hadid 11.8 mi Two clay tablets found on this hill record business deals from 698 and 664 BCE, and the names on them belong to people deported here from Mesopotamia.
  • Qula 16.3 mi A defense tower still standing here was built by Crusader knights, out of stones taken from something older still.
  • Antipatris 21.2 mi The oldest winepresses ever found in the southern Levant sit beside an Egyptian governor's house at Tel Afek.