A gold coin of Roman Emperor Diocletian from the Legion excavations.photo credit: JEZEREEL VALLEY REGIONAL PROJECT
Posted on 06/06/2022 10:00:09 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Less lavish than amphitheaters for the civilian population, the military amphitheaters were used for training and entertainment by the troops.
Archaeologists excavating at the base of the Legio VI Ferrata Roman Legion near Megiddo (known as Legio) believe they have found evidence of the first military amphitheater to be identified in the Southern Levant.
While remains of over 230 Roman civilian amphitheaters have been found throughout what was the territory of the Roman Empire, fewer military amphitheaters have been excavated, and most of those are in the western regions of the empire...
The archaeological project at Legio is conducted under the auspices of the Jezreel Valley Regional Project. The amphitheater is one of several parts of the excavation of the base of the Roman Sixth Legion that was stationed here from the second to third centuries CE. The excavation of the amphitheater there is being supervised by Mark Letteney from the University of Southern California. The nearby Kibbutz Megiddo has also been providing strategic assistance.
The area had a vibrant community, and the Roman Legion’s military camp shared the area with a Jewish village as well as with a Roman-Byzantine city.
Several excavations teams have worked at the site over the years, starting in 1902 by Gottlieb Schumacher on behalf of the German Society for Oriental Research. Schumacher – after discovering two stone stairs, one stone seat and several other architectural elements – decided that a bowl-like depression in the wadi near Megiddo had been the site of an eastern-facing theater.
However, because of the more elliptical shape of the crater, the current excavating team believed what lay underneath was actually a military amphitheater where spectators sat all around a flat-surfaced arena in a seating area called the cavea.
(Excerpt) Read more at jpost.com ...
A gold coin of Roman Emperor Diocletian from the Legion excavations.photo credit: JEZEREEL VALLEY REGIONAL PROJECT
Did they find any of Bob Hope’s jokes?
But of course.
That will be a “to die for” venue during Armageddon.
5.56mm
Countries with lots of amphitheaters and stadiums says something about their societies. Just saying.
"Israel's archeological richness Israel boasts three Roman amphitheaters, in Caesarea, Bet She’an and Beit Guvrin. While some scholars maintain that the amphitheater in Beit Guvrin was also used for military purposes, Tepper and Adams believe that its location within the city indicates that it was more than likely mainly used for the population of the city."
"Levant" is simply a term used to deny Israel's history.
No. But Helen of Thomas was there.
Ditto Larry.
Better Helen of Thomas than HellonWheels.
Actually, the term has a much broader application than just Israel.
”The Levant (/ləˈvænt/) is an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Western Asia. In its narrowest sense, which is in use today in archaeology and other cultural contexts, it is equivalent to a stretch of land bordering the Mediterranean in southwestern Asia, i.e. the historical region of Syria ("greater Syria"), which includes present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine and most of Turkey southwest of the middle Euphrates. Its overwhelming characteristic is that it represents the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia. In its widest historical sense, the Levant included all of the Eastern Mediterranean with its islands; that is, it included all of the countries along the Eastern Mediterranean shores, extending from Greece to Cyrenaica in eastern Libya.”
Source: Wikipedia
Thats Donold Maximvs Trvmp on that coin!
[snip] he Levant is an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Western Asia. [/snip]
IOW, this is the first one in a very large, multinational region, to be excavated. That’s all that it says.
This find was entirely within Israel, so why didn't they just say so.
Wikipedia is NOT some benign academic source.
Southern Levant
Is that Israel?
This was found scrawled on a tablet near the site:
“My galley just beached from Naples and, boy, are my arms tired!”
“Hey! I came to praise Ceasar! Not to marry him!”
“Cleopatra! What a dame! That snake in the grass will be the death of her. But speaking of Mark Anthony...”
Wikipedia sucks as much as google search.
Photos are funny things. One gets the impression that you can walk around a bit and find gold denarius coins just laying about, when in fact a museum curator took that one out from it’s protective sleeve, placed it in his palm, took a photo in the sunlight, carefully put the coin back in it’s labeled container and returned it to the basement collection with the other rare coins.
It’s hard to see how a term that encompasses a region from Turkey to the Euphrates was created just to deny Israel.
This find was entirely within Israel, so why didn't they just say so.
From the way I read it, they were saying that such a archaeological find that they were referring to was rarely found in the Levant as a whole which, as defined, covers a larger area than Israel.
Wikipedia is NOT some benign academic source.
Fair enough. If you can find an alternative definition of Levant from a Bible dictionary or other authoritative source that says something different, please share it with us.
>>Yes, but the purpose of its use is to deny Israel.
Not necessarily, if the term is restricted to an archaeological context. Especially in this instance where the amphitheater was built AFTER the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and their renaming of Judea.
>>Wikipedia is NOT some benign academic source.
True, but wikipedia, in this case, was just quoting ‘The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant’
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