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Artifact Analysis
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- The Art of Sepphoris
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Excavations of the Galilean city of Sepphoris, just north of rural village of Nazareth, have revealed dozens of exquisite mosaics featuring Greco-Roman motifs and Jewish and Greek inscriptions. Such mosaics served as the "carpets" in elite dwellings, entertaining guests in the triclinia (dining rooms) and other public spaces with works of art and displaying the wealth and good taste of the host. Most of these mosaics date to the 200s CE or later, when the city saw an infusion of Romans and, with them, an escalation in the quality of the decorative arts.
But archaeologists have found several elite villas of the first century CE with both private miqvaoth (ritual baths) and beautiful frescoes. Cities like Sepphoris, rebuilt by Jewish client kings of Rome, became centers of trade under the Herodians, and attracted wealthier Jewish residents. Along with the amphitheatres, gymnasia, aqueducts, hippodromes, and central cardo of such cities, the frescoes reveal the aspirations of the local elites to imitate the culture—and curry the favor—of Rome. As these cities grew, they required more food and services from the local rural population—and some scholars have wondered if the strains on the rural populace help to explain the popularity of Jesus' "last shall be first" teachings.-
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- Bibliography
- Several of the articles below can be found in the Dig Teams folder for Sepphoris
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- Meyers, Carol L., Ze'ev Weiss and Rebecca Martin Nagy, eds. Sepphoris in Galilee: Crosscurrents of Culture. Raleigh, North Carolina/Winona Lake, Indiana: North Carolina Museum of Art/Eisenbrauns, 1996.
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- Meyers, Eric M., Ehud Netzer and Carol L. Meyers. "Artistry in Stone: The Mosaics of Ancient Sepphoris." Biblical Archaeologist 50:4 (1987) 223-31.
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- Talgam, Rina and Zeev Weiss. The Mosaics of the House of Dionysos at Sepphoris Excavated by E. M. Meyers, E. Netzer and C. L. Meyers, Qedem: Monographs of the Institute of Archaeology, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 44. Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Institute of Archaeology, 2004.
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- Weiss, Ze'ev. "Greco-Roman Influence on the Art and Architecture of the Jewish City in Roman Palestine." In Religious and Ethnic Communities in Later Roman Palestine (ed. Hayim Lapin; Studies and Texts in Jewish History and Culture [The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies, University of Maryland] 5; Bethesda, Maryland: University Press of Maryland, 1998) 219-46.
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- --------. "Private Architecture in the Public Sphere: Urban Dwellings in Roman and Byzantine Sepphoris." In From Antioch to Alexandria: Recent Studies in Domestic Architecture (ed. Katharina Galor and Tomasz Wliszewski, with contributions by Frédéric Nicolas Alpi et al.; Warsaw: Institute of Archaeology, Warsaw University, 2007) 125-36 + illustrations and plans.
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