Marble bowl buried 1,300 years ago in Golan church sheds light on ancient baptisms |
Some 1,300 years ago, in 749 CE, an earthquake struck the Middle East, causing widespread destruction.
The earthquake sealed the fate of the ancient city of Hippos, once a thriving Christian center east of the Sea of Galilee in the southern Golan. There, among other structures, a cathedral hall featuring a baptismal font collapsed in the city’s south, burying its liturgical implements for over a millennium.
The room and its rare contents were recently rediscovered by a team of archaeologists from the University of Haifa, as revealed in a new study published in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly last month.
According to lead author Michael Eisenberg, co-director of excavation at Hippos, one of the artifacts, a marble item with three round indentations, has no known parallel and could offer new insights into unique baptismal practices in the ancient Byzantine city.
“Hippos was the main Christian city on that side of the Sea of Galilee, an area very connected to the ministry of Jesus in the region,” Eisenberg told The Times of Israel over the telephone. “We have recorded seven churches in Hippos. The largest of these churches, the cathedral, was also the seat of a bishop.”
All the churches were built between the fifth and the early sixth centuries CE.
Most of the cathedral was excavated at the beginning of the 1950s, decades before Eisenberg and his team began work at the site in 2000.
The early archaeologists had already unearthed a first hall with a baptismal font — a large, round structure where an adult could fully immerse, fed by a conduit bringing fresh water from a nearby source.
“The bishop and the cathedral were the only ones performing baptisms, not only in Hippos but in the whole region,” Eisenberg said, noting that no other church in Hippos included a baptistery. “They had a monopoly.”
“This baptistery, or photisterion, which in Greek means ‘hall of light,’ as it was referred to at the time, is the largest ever discovered in Israel,” he added.
The southern part of the church was not excavated until 2023. Eisenberg and his fellow archaeologists opened a small excavation area since the site’s paved road runs very close to the building. They were amazed by what they encountered.
“We found another baptismal font, and next to it, a whole archeological treasure of liturgical items exactly as they fell during the 749 earthquake.”
The newly exposed hall features the same type of flooring — red limestone and white marble tiles arranged in a geometric pattern — as other parts of the cathedral,........