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Pottery Artifacts From The Qumran Site

Hemispherical in shape, these bowls have a ring base and an inverted rim.

Qumran Reconstructed: Meals at Qumran

An overview of the Locus 100 mill, Locus 77 "dining hall", and the Locus 89 "pantry" at Khirbet Qumran, the site associated with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The 3D realtime digital archaeological reconstruction of Qumran and video were created by Robert R. Cargill of UCLA.

New Section of Ancient Sewer Discovered in Jerusalem

Israeli archaeologists have discovered a new section of an 2,000-year-old drainage channel that links the ancient City of David to the plaza in front of the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site.

“It connects the dots between the where Jews lived in the ancient city of Jerusalem, the city of David, and the plaza. For the first time, they connect,” said Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat in an interview on Fox News.

Archaeologist Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and his team first uncovered the sewer in 2007. The walls of the tunnel, made of ashlar stones 3 feet deep, reach a height of 10 feet in some places and are covered by heavy stone slabs that were the road's paving stones.

The channel also served as an escape hatch for Jews desperate to flee the conquering Romans after the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 CE. As the temple was being destroyed, people took shelter in the drainage channel and lived inside it until they fled Jerusalem through its southern end, the historian Josephus Flavius wrote in “The War of the Jews.”

Archaeology has been a politically explosive issue in Jerusalem. Palestinians including the late Yasser Arafat have even questioned a Jewish role in ancient Jerusalem. At the Camp David in 2000, Arafat insisted that there never were Jewish temples on the Temple Mount.

Barkat said no excavations had taken place under Muslim holy places. “There is no tunneling under the Temple Mount. There is not and there will not be,” he said.

The entire tunnel could be opened to the public within a year.

Artifacts from the Qumran Site: Cooking Pots

This flattened pot has a ribbed shoulder and a short, wide neck. The firing is metallic.

These two pots have a similar globular-shaped design. The surface of the body, from shoulder to base, is ribbed. Two ribbed handles span the vessel from the rim to the upper part of the shoulder. The firing is metallic. Traces of soot are discernable over the lower part.

Check Out Good Reads Review of My New Novel The Returned

From Dr. Laurence B. Brown, author of the critically acclaimed best-seller, The Eighth Scroll, comes an exhilarating adventure of surprising depth and extraordinary resonance. For brothers Nathan and Mark Jones, the best summer vacation they can imagine is one of wild adventure. That is why they join their college geochemistry professor on a prospecting trip to South America. But what begins as a simple expedition rapidly devolves into a life-altering trip into the darkest corners of the human soul. The brothers’ lives soon morph into a kaleidoscope of the best and worst that lawless human nature and untamed wilderness can dish out. They quickly realize that their survival depends not only upon one another, but upon the native Indians they have been taught to fear—the only ones who can lead them back to civilization. Forty years later, Nathan returns to uncover the truths behind the deadly expedition. In the process, he uncovers a secret that traps him in a terrifying collision of belief, superstition, and survival. In the vein of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man and John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest, Dr. Brown captures with primal ferocity the clash between the west’s fanciful myths of indigenous cultures, and the harsh reality we encounter when our worlds, ideals, and morals collide. Probing the deepest recesses of the human psyche, he lays bare the unadorned savagery not just of primitive cultures, but of all people who are forced into adrenaline-fueled battles of wits and wills to survive. The Returned is an insightful, scintillating, action-packed adventure that illuminates the survival-based instincts that lie dormant in us all—and how choices in desperate circumstances define our characters.

Photo Gallery: Dining Room at Qumran.

Blog Critic Review of The Returned

Author: Wesley Britton

From the author of The Eighth Scroll, Lawrence Brown’s new novel is an adventure story set in the jungles of the Amazon sketched with believable detail and well developed characters. While it’s not high adventure in the sense of mixing in fantastic para-normal elements nor multi-layered plots and sub-plots, it’s a slow cooker that builds to two climaxes in the same place but decades apart.

The story focuses on twin African-American brothers, Nathan and Mark Jones. Nathan is a star in every endeavor he engages in; Mark is a conspicuous under-achiever. For a summer vacation, they join their college geochemistry professor on a prospecting trip to collect soil samples deep in the Amazon. But the brothers begin to realize they can’t trust everyone in their party. Worse, the journey starts to descend into disaster when the native guides abandon them. Starting out as a group of 12, the adventurers suffer a series of fatal conflicts with nature and local tribes.

Uncertain of the correct course to take, the survivors break into two groups with different ideas on how to locate help. Then, the Jones brothers find themselves drawn into a vortex of religious, superstitious, and cultural issues with one isolated tribe that had no previous contact with outside civilization. There Nathan and his translator, Tonto, must find a balance between survival and escape. Decades later, Nathan returns to find out what had happened to this tribe in his absence. What he learns is yet another sad chapter of an ill-fated expedition.

This comparatively short novel is tightly woven despite its deep cast of characters. Little space is needed to flesh out the participants of the expedition with their different strengths and weaknesses, their motivations, their abilities to adapt to an increasingly hostile environment. Brown is equally successful capturing the personalities of the tribes people despite their being no common language between the outsiders and their rescuers. Brown allows the horror to build without over dramatizing the scenes, permitting some of the most poignant moments to occur off stage.

As a result of this sparse style, readers are free to make their own inferences on the themes that can be interpreted from this picturesque tableau. You’re not likely to be asking new questions, but readers may wonder about what their choices might have been if trapped in such life and death circumstances far from civilization and its codes of conduct.

http://blogcritics.org

Pottery Artifacts from the Qumran Site

Pottery First century B.C.E.-first century C.E.

Courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority

During the excavation of the Qumran ruin, these V-shaped drinking goblets were found stacked in what had been a storeroom.

The quality of their construction and craftsmanship leads some contemporary archaeologists to argue that the site was a Roman villa, because the presence of vessels of this quality would not be in keeping with the austerity of an ascetic community.

Pottery Artifacts from the Qumran Site

Plates, bowls, and goblets were found in one of the rooms at Qumran, with dozens of vessels piled one on top of the other. This room probably served as a "crockery" (storage area) near the assembly room, which may have functioned as the dining room. 

 Pottery First century B.C.E.-first century C.E. Courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority

These fifteen, wheel-made plates are shallow, with a ring base and upright rim. The firing is metallic. Hundreds of plates were recovered, most of them complete, some with traces of soot.

Reader's Review: A Must Read!

By 

avid reader

A must read for fictional and non-fictional categories. Fascinating plots, superb settings, highly attractive style and good suspense till the very end. It is a part of my exceptional collection of books.

James ossuary inscription.

( Israel Antiquities Authority/AP / June 13, 2012 )

An inscription in Hebrew reading "Ya'acov", the Hebrew name for James, is seen on an ancient box used to bury human bones, or ossuary.

Bones in Bulgaria might be John the Baptist's, new research says

By Thomas H. Maugh II

 

Bones found in a Bulgarian church are claimed to be from John the Baptist. The knucklebone that researchers dated is in the upper left. (Oxford University / June 15, 2012)

 A small collection of human bones found under a Bulgarian church are the right age and ethnicity to support the claim that they belonged to John the Baptist, researchers said. Radiocarbon dating indicates the bones came from the 1st century and mitochondrial DNA indicates they belonged to a person of Middle Eastern origin, the research team said. "Whether that person is John the Baptist is a question that we cannot yet definitely answer and probably never will," said archaeologist Thomas Higham of Oxford University, who conducted the radiocarbon dating.

John the Baptist was an early preacher who, according to the Gospels, foretold the coming of Jesus and baptized him in the River Jordan. He was ultimately beheaded at the order of King Herod. Oxford historian Georges Kazan has shown that, in the latter part of the 4th century, monks had taken relics of John out of Jerusalem, including portions of his skull. The Roman emperor at the time ordered them brought to Constantinople and had a church built to house them. Other records suggest that, perhaps one or two centuries later, some of the relics were sent to other churches as gifts.
 
The bones in question were discovered in 2010 by Bulgarian archaeologist Kazimir Popkonstantinov, who was excavating under an ancient church on the Bulgarian island known as Sveti Ivan, which translates into English as Saint John. He found six human bones, including a knucklebone, a tooth and the face part of a cranium, all in a small marble sarcophagus under the church floor near the altar. Animal bones were also in the sarcophagus. Higham and Oxford archaeologist Christopher Ramsey attempted to date all of them, but only the knucklebone contained enough cartilage for dating.

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Reader's Review: I couldn't put it down

By 

robin4good
Loved it from the beginning to end. I recommend it. The only book I know that links Judaism to Christianity to Islam in a way that makes you think...well, we all alike why don't the Catholics hug the Jews and the Jews Muslims! even if our rabbis, priests and imams don't think that is a good idea just yet. Very human, very real - yet the storyline is fiction...I hope you picked on that! deep theological messages though which I really believe are TRUE.