Posted on 09/07/2023 12:40:30 PM PDT by Red Badger
(Israel Antiquities Authority/YouTube) Israeli researchers made a rare find during a survey of a Dead Sea cave: Four perfectly preserved Roman swords thought to have been used in battle 1,900 years ago.
The swords were likely "booty" hidden by rebels from an opposing faction, who would have been in danger if they were caught carrying the Roman weapons, Eitan Klein, one of the directors of the Judean Desert Survey Project who worked on the dig, said in a statement.
Four Roman-era swords, their wooden and leather hilts and scabbards and steel blades exquisitely preserved after 1,900 years in a desert cave. (Ilan Ben Zion/Associated Press) On Wednesday, the Israeli Antiquities Authority announced the discovery of the cache in a small, almost inaccessible Judean Desert cave near the Dead Sea. In a video detailing their expedition, researchers said they removed the swords from a tight crevice in the cave.
"We are talking about an extremely rare find, said Dr. Eithan Klein, a Judean Desert Survey researcher with the Israel Antiquities Authority, "The like of which has never been found in Israel."
VIDEO AT LINK.................
Scientists said the swords featured wooden and leather hilts, wooden scabbards, and steel blades that were amazingly preserved after spending almost 2,000 years in a remote desert cave.
Eli Escusido, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said the swords were as sharp "as if they had only just been hidden away today," the BBC reported.
The archaeologists also found a Roman pilum, a heavy javelin.
The swords, the archaeologists said, were weapons typically used by Roman soldiers stationed in Judea.
Researchers discover the ancient Roman-era swords in a small crack of a remote cave near the Dead Sea. (Emil Aladjem/Israel Antiquities Authority) "The hiding of the swords and the pilum in deep cracks in the isolated cave north of 'En Gedi, hints that the weapons were taken as booty from Roman soldiers or from the battlefield, and purposely hidden by the Judean rebels for reuse," Klein said.
Klein said it is possible the weapons may have been stashed at the time of the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132–135 BCE, but added that he and researchers are conducting further work to pinpoint who owned the weapons, where they were forged, and what historical events they could have been used in.
“teaching the peasants how to fight with their farm implements and scavenged swords and spears against the bandits who plagued them. Peasants won”
Gets repeated a bit in the movie Magnificent Seven. Not a bad remake of the Japan stuff. One of my favorite Westerns.
Very minor hobby of mine is studying Roman weapons and tactics. When used properly they were hard to beat.
Why not steel blades? The Romans used steel for lots of their weapons and armor. Steel of one kind or another has been around for a very long time.
Numerals! Who the heck doesn't love numerals?????
BCE
Before Christ Existed...
They can’t escape it...
Magnificent Seven was a western version of Seven Samurai, another Akira Kurosawa production.
Aqueducts, paved roads, non-idealized sculpture, a bureaucratic hierarchy later incorporated into the Catholic Church, linguistic influences from Moscow to Lisbon, the idea of an empire that had representative republican centralized government of all its provinces, and which adopted much of the culture of the conquered and enslaved Greeks and some of the conquered and enslaved Judaeans, the stripes on Jewish prayer shawls and the custom of leaning to the left while eating and drinking at the Passover feast...their version of slavery...drunken orgies and decadence...
What didn’t the Romans give the world.
Baseball?
Kung Fu and acupuncture, movies, TV, jazz, blues and the Internet.
But they did give us barbaric blood sports.
Swords short like that are deemed short swords and require NFA approval. These are illegal and must be destroyed, confiscated …
This means the people who hid the weapons probably were run thru by a sword.
I saw that too.
I don’t know when ‘steel’ was invented..............
What would Biggis Dikus use? A short gladius? You jest!
Which brings me to one of my hobby horses:
We already agree that our calendar is wrong, off by anywhere from 2 to 16 years, depending on who's doing the reckoning, and further in error because of the absence of a year zero.
The more fundamental point is that God did not intend us to mark His years by the birth of Jesus.
If He had intended this we would have a Biblical fixing of the date.
Further, the day of Jesus' birth is unremarkable as all men are born.
However, very few return from the dead, that event is remarkable, and it is the defining moment of Christianity, the very moment of proof that his sacrifice was not in vain. And the Bible gives a precise reference for when this happened!
Clearly this was the date the calendar was supposed to start!
For extra points, this makes our calendar off by anywhere from 17 to 30 years. That makes this something like Holy Year 1993 to Holy Year 2007, giving us at best 7 years to get our affairs in order before the real end of the millennium...
Well, I don’t want to use the Muslim or Jewish, or Chinese calendars, so people can call it whatever era they want. I know who Christ was/is so I’m not going to get triggered and my panties in a wad by BCE or CE; now if I had to use the Muslim calendar, it would be an issue.
Somewhere in ancient Roman records, there's a report of a boating accident.
Exactly so. If people want to interpret it as Before the Common Era, they can do so. I’ll continue to use, “Before the Christian Era.”
‘Face
;o]
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