5-30-15. Tiberias, Israel
After wrenching myself out of bed this morning, I choked down a power bar for breakfast, checked my maps, and set out to do two days’ worth of sightseeing in Galilee. I began with the spectacularly sited crusader castle of Belvoir. Though not as large as its counterparts at Karak and Shobak, Belvoir was strikingly well-preserved, the rooms of its keep still preserved to vault level. As so often in this part of Israel, however, the real highlight was the view: east, the green and gold of the Jordan valley rolled off to the sparkling Sea of Galilee and ranges of hazy hills; to the west, the perfectly rounded shape of Mount Tabor loomed over a wadi darkened by a mass of clouds.
My second stop, the archaeological park of Beit Shean, was less scenic but more interesting. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, this was the site of Scythopolis, a wealthy member (like Gerasa and Gadara) of the Decapolis. Although only a small portion of the city has been excavated, the colonnaded streets, temples, and baths already exposed attest to centuries of wealth, and bear still more striking testimony to the earthquake that put an end to this prosperity in AD 749: along stretches of the main street, smashed columns and tumbled architraves have been left where they fell, mute witnesses to the few cataclysmic moments that terminated Classical urbanism in Palestine.
After picking my way through this ruin field, I climbed the massive tell that dominates the Roman ruins. Beneath the windblown grass that now covers its slopes, upward of twenty distinct occupation levels, the earliest dating to the Stone Age, have been traced. To the layperson’s eye (i.e. mine), little more than a jumble of stones is visible in the trenches left open on the summit. The excavators, however, have pieced together a fascinating history from these fragments, highlights of which included the city’s service as an administrative center in the Egyptian Empire and citadel in the kingdom of David and Solomon.
Sepphoris (modern Zippori or, according to my ever-frustrating GPS, Tsipori) was never as important as Scythopolis, and boasts relatively little monumental architecture. Yet this minor Galilean city is set apart by the surprising quality of its mosaics. Unlike the vivid but rather crude examples in Madaba, the finest mosaics here were obviously created by craftsmen trained in the major cities, where the endless construction projects of local notables created steady demand for high-quality work. The two most striking examples now visible in Sepphoris were created several centuries and a few hundred yards apart. The first, the so-called Nile Mosaic, was executed in the fifth century. Its subject is the annual flood of the titular river. In the upper register of the composition, a nilometer (depth gauge) is shown registering the telltale height of seventeen cubits; horsemen race off Alexandria (shown as a stylized cluster of buildings) to report the beginning of the flood, while fish leap in the stream and exotic animals haunt the banks. The broad border of the mosaic, departing for no apparent reason from the Nilotic theme, depicts an array of hunting scenes. The second and more famous of the great mosaics at Sepphoris was laid about two centuries earlier in the dining room of an opulent mansion. The theme was the triumph and revels of Dionysus. A series of entertaining and beautifully executed vignettes, culminating in the wine god’s drinking match with Hercules, cover most of the floor. The highlight, however, is a life-size portrait set into the acanthus border of the floor. This remarkably lifelike representation of a young woman, dubbed “the Mona Lisa of the Galilee,” may have been intended to depict Venus. Whatever the artist’s purpose, his product equals any mosaic portrait in my experience, with the possible exception of Justinian and Theodora in Ravenna’s Church of San Vitale. The effect was like that of the best Fayyum mummy paintings: tantalizingly direct contact with a vanished world.
For my last stop, I had intended to visit the Castle of Nimrud in the northern Golan; but since that was more than 100 kilometers away, I settled for Gamla, an ancient fortress at the southern edge of the Golan Heights. The drive was surprisingly pleasant. Dry and vulnerable, the Golan Heights are sparsely populated; with the exception of a few military bases and an isolated kibbutz, the landscape of grass-covered hills along my route was broken only by a dark line of distant hills. A field of dolmens, mysterious stone markers erected by Stone Age tribes, emerged from the tall grass as I turned down the road for Gamla.
At the gate, I discovered that no cars were admitted after 4 PM. For once, I didn’t mind, and took the slow road back to Tiberias. Along the way, I stopped briefly at the Orthodox monastery at Capernaum, a small chapel liberally painted and plastered with icons. After a long last look over the Sea of Galilee, deep green in the raking sunlight of late afternoon, I returned to my hotel, and to the Tiberias McDonald’s.