Ceasarea - Day 2 part 3

The day moves rapidly forward, we are learning at a fast pace.  One concept that is sinking in that will be repeated again and again is that the ruins we are so fascinated with have not remained the same through the ages waiting for us to come along and be fascinated.  There were no historical preservation societies in these ancient cultures and (like biblical cultures) to conquer another culture was to wipe out all remembrance of them.  Or, at least tear down the old stuff and use it for building material for the new stuff.

This is repeated over and over again through the centuries.  What results is the layering upon layering of archaeological strata that tell the story to those so dedicated to reading the dirt.

As we leave the hippodrome wishing to spend more time there, we continue on to a "newer" part of Ceasarea that was built after Herod's time, much past it.  Most of what we now see are byzantine ruins "improved" by the crusaders and Muslims.  

As you can see in the pictures, we are now encountering stone fortresses.  These were built by the byzantines (the dominant European culture that came following the fall of Rome).  in the second picture note the two differing colors of stone and the flat expanse at the base of the slanting wall.  The fortress was built by the byzantines, but the crusaders added their slanting wall (improved protection from enemies) and added the flat expanse which served as a moat.  In the crusader era, it was filled with water for added protection.  I don't know if they had alligators swimming around in the moats.





In this next picture, you can see the Muslim minaret in the background.  It is quite "old" by our standards but not old enough to be of any archaeological significance.  In the land of Israel, the relativity of the word "old" is starkly different than what we think of as "old" in America, especially Alaska.  What would be extremely old and significant to us here the archaeologists hardly sniff at there.  Strange indeed.

The man in the picture with the floppy hat and wearing a jacket is Dr. Wave Nunnaly, one of our guides.  He is a Hebrew scholar among other scholarly things he does.  He is passionate about his work and his explanations especially in regards to how the pile of stones you are looking at relate to scripture is amazing.  He may look like a tourist (as other familiar faces to come also resemble tourists) but he is the real deal.  The sun protections only make him look like a tourist.  

Another interesting thing that we begin to encounter here are the modern shops (another thing that didn't occur to me to take a picture of) like espresso, and restaurants that are housed in these ancient ruins.  Yes, you can sit in a byzantine era stone fortress sipping your espresso and surfing the internet to see what Israeli trinkets go for on Amazon.  Weird.

We are making our way to our buses which have thankfully moved to pick us up so we do not have to backtrack, we learn something new that will from this point forward ruin all the movies that I watch that involve "city gates".  Yes, like the "Hobbit" series and all the movies you have seen where the enemies marches up with a battering ram and slugs away at the "city gate" until it splinters and the bad guys come rushing in.  Apparently it didn't work that way, these guys were way smarter than that.  

Every ancient city gate we encountered, was not a simple opening in the city wall where some big wood gates opened and closed.  Every ancient gate had at least two gates with one right angle in it.  So, the enemy would go through one gate and have to turn a corner (around which the defenders of the city had all kinds of nasty surprises for them) and face another gate!  This was usually in tight quarters so there was no way a bad guy could haul his battering ram in there.  While the bad guys were attempting to breach the second gate their "flank" would be exposed to the defenders who had special little "slits" from which the archers would assault them with arrows or dump the boiling tar and that sort of thing on them to make their life miserable.  This little trick would make the task of breaching the city gates much more costly and difficult.  Smart.

From here we boarded the buses to drive from sea level to about 1700 feet on Mt. Carmel.