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ChurchWatch 11/20/08

Oldest Temple & Herod's Tomb May Be Found

Archaeologists have discovered a temple in Turkey that dates back to 11,500 years, which they say might be the birthplace of civilization. Smithsonian magazine is reporting the discovery was made by Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute, at Gobekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey.

Schmidt and his team found massive carved stones that are believed to be approximately 11,500 years old. They have been crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who may have not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. These megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years, and are twice as old as the pyramids.

Schmidt, who is in charge of excavations at the site, said that the ancient site might be the birthplace of agriculture, of organized religion, even of civilization itself.

"This is the first human-built holy place," he said. "Only man could have created something like this. It was clear right away this was a gigantic Stone Age site."

According to Schmidt and his colleagues, no evidence of permanent settlement has been found at the site, although there are remains of butchered animals and edible plants. However, all of the bones are from wild animals, and all the vegetation from wild plants. The archaeologist believes that this indicates that the massive structure was built by a hunter-gatherer society, not a settled agricultural one.

The three dozen T-shaped standing limestone monoliths arranged around the site are 10 feet high, weigh several tons each and bear detailed, stylized carvings of foxes, scorpions, lions, boars and birds.

The builders may not have been farmers, but they weren't primitive, suggest the archaeological team. Massive amounts of manpower would have been needed to build the site, a logistical problem that may have spurred the builders to begin planting grain and herding wild sheep, according to Schmidt.

The site itself is just outside the city of Sanliurfa, known as Edessa to the Crusaders, and which locals say is the Biblical city of Ur, birthplace of Abraham.  The Euphrates flows eighty miles to the west, putting Gobelki Tepe right in the middle of the Fertile Crescent.

"This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later," Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder told Smithsonian magazine. "You can make a good case this area is the real origin of complex Neolithic societies," he added.

Read the Smithsonian Magazine article.

Herod's Tomb May Be Found

Possible Site of Herod's Tomb in IsraelKing Herod may have been buried in a crypt with lavish Roman-style wall paintings of a kind previously unseen in the Middle East, Israeli archaeologists said recently. The scientists found such paintings and signs of a regal two-story mausoleum, bolstering their conviction that the ancient Jewish monarch was buried there.
 
Ehud Netzer, head of Jerusalem's Hebrew University excavation team, which uncovered the site of the king's winter palace in the Judean desert in 2007, said the latest finds show work and funding fit for a king.
 
"What we found here, spread all around, are architectural fragments that enable us to restore a monument of 25 meters high, 75 feet high, very elegant, which fits Herod's taste and status," he told The Associated Press in an interview at the hillside dig in an Israeli-controlled part of the West Bank, south of Jerusalem.
 
Church Report Online states that no human remains or inscriptions have been found to prove conclusively that the tomb was Herod's, but excavation continues. Herod was famous for his extensive building projects throughout the Holy Land.
 
Netzer said that since finding fragments of one ornately carved sarcophagus in 2007, he and his team have found two more, suggesting the monumental tomb may have been a royal family vault.
 
"A mausoleum like the one which we have here was generally built by a king but not (necessarily) only for himself, many times for his children and his family, like the famous mausoleum of Augustus in Rome, of Hadrian in Rome," he said. "It's not a surprise that we found here more than one sarcophagus."
 
Herod was the Jewish proxy ruler of the Holy Land under imperial Roman occupation from 37 B.C. and reigned for more than six decades. Netzer described the winter palace, built on a largely man-made hill 2,230 feet high, as a kind of "country club," with a pool, baths, gardens fed by pools and aqueducts and a 650-seat theater.
 
In Herod's private box at the auditorium, diggers discovered delicate frescoes depicting windows opening on to painted landscapes, one of which shows what appears to be a southern Italian farm, said Roi Porat, one of Netzer's assistants on the digs. Just visible in the paintings, dating between 15 and 10 B.C., are a dog, bushes and what looks like a country villa.
 
Site surveyor Rachel Chachy-Laureys said the paintings were executed using techniques unknown in the Holy Land at the time and must have been done by artisans imported from Rome.
 
"There has been no other discovery of this type of painting in the Middle East, as far as we know, until now", she said.
 
Gidon Foerster, a professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University not connected with this dig, agreed that the art is "unique" for the region. "King Herod is said to have been buried there and this proves it as much as it can possibly be proved," he said.
 
After Herod's death in the 1st century B.C., Herodium became a stronghold for Jewish rebels fighting Roman occupation, and the palace site suffered significant battle damage before it was destroyed by Roman soldiers in A.D. 71, a year after they razed the Second Temple in Jerusalem.
 
The insurgents reviled the memory of Herod as a Roman puppet, and Netzer and his team believe that the violence inflicted on the first stone casket they found suggests the rebels knew it held the king's bones.
 
"That sarcophagus was found shattered all over the place. It seems it was taken from its place and was destroyed in a fit of rage," Porat said. "That, among other things, is what tells us it was the sarcophagus of Herod."

Related CBN News Story: Unearthing Herod the Great

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