The beautiful capital you see in the first photo is a style of decoration used on pillar tops originally found in northern Israel. With the earliest examples coming from the 9th century BCE. Only here, at Ramat Rahel is this decorative architecture found in Judah.
Another distinctively northern Israel style is found in the building technique in the next photo. These 'headers' are stones turned on end - so they sit on their narrow edges. Notice how neatly they fit together. Again this building style shows up in Judah (southern Israel) in the 7th century - after Assyria had invaded the region, conquered Northern Israel and made Judah a vassal state to this first true empire.
In the third photo you can see neat header's on the top row and the first blocks on the 2nd row on the left. To the right of these, the wall building construction changes to less well cut smaller stones. In fact the white stone in the middle has been taken from elsewhere and reused (it has the remains of a door sill on its top.) Later builders cared less about the look of their stones since they covered them in plaster (that is now gone.)
Today, in the space of 2 hours team members found 7 jar handles with royal stamps we can date to various time periods in the 7th century BCE. The jars contained goods - either taxes in kind or goods grown on royal estates or perhaps stores belonging to the king. The stamps change in style over time - some have winged solar disks, some say "belonging to the king" which sounds like "le-melek" in Hebrew, some have carved concentric circles on jars that were not marked with stamps when they were made.
No comments:
Post a Comment