Free Republic

About 1,500 years ago, in the previously Roman city of Antiochia Hippos, a magnificent cathedral arose. It was decked out in the finest stone available, say the archaeologists who have now completed an excavation there that began seven decades ago. And what they found in its ruins may shed light on early Christian power politics in Byzantine Palestine.Now theoretically reconstructed (on paper) for the first time, its size and pomp suggest that this basilica and its presiding bishop commanded a monopoly over baptism of catechumens in much of what is today the southern Golan Heights and eastern side of the...

An ancient god has resurfaced in Israel thanks to what archaeologists say is a one-of-a-kind discovery. University of Haifa researchers were digging at what's believed to be an ancient basalt armory outside Sussita—which the Jerusalem Post reports was once the Roman city of Antiochia Hippos—when a ball from a ballista, an ancient missile weapon, appeared two weeks ago. As it was made of limestone rather than basalt, archaeologists suspected it was an enemy missile and turned to a metal detector to search for a coin that might date the projectile. It found something far bigger: a 2,000-year-old bronze mask larger...

An unexpected discovery awaited a team of Israeli archaeologists in a drainage canal dating from roughly 2,000 years ago: an aluminum bottlecap. From a beer bottle. No, the good people of ancient Sussita weren't producing aluminum metal. The meaning of the startling discovery is that millennia after its construction, the drainage canal was still working, centuries after the city's final destruction by earthquake. Made of aluminum and feather-light, the bottle-cap floated on rainwater that washed into the canal, says Dr. Michael Eisenberg, head of an Israeli archaeological team digging the site. This canal, or less romantically -- a sewer, passed...