The relative chronology of tomb façades in Early Roman Jerusalem and power displays by the élite

Abstract

In the Late Hellenistic and Early Roman periods Jerusalem experienced prosperity and expansion. Even when the city lost to Caesarea in A.D. 6 its status as the provincial capital of Judaea, it maintained its prominent economic and religious position. Monumental construction projects on the Temple Mount and in the Upper City financed by King Herod and the Hasmonean kings before him, described by Flavius Josephus, generated a livelihood for a large number of stone-cutters, transporters, masons and builders, as well as architects and engineers, and may have resulted in the establishment of one or more schools of artists specializing in the carving of architectural decoration, artists who were hired to decorate Hasmonaean and Herodian structures, as well as private dwellings and the tombs of the elite. It is the funerary art of Jerusalem, its tomb facades, ossuaries and sarcophagi, that preserve most of the examples of this art today. This paper considers in particular tomb facades and the artistic development and changes in fashion of stone decoration. Since most of the tombs of the Second Temple period around Jerusalem with decorated facades were looted in antiquity, few can be dated by their contents and have been dated only generally between the second half of the 2nd c. B.C. and the destruction of the city in A.D. 70 by their interior plans. 1 I suggest that the details of the carvings and their style, as well as of the repertoire of motifs used, facilitate a more precise relative dating of the tombs and a timeline for their evolution. First I will present the different types of decorated tomb facades preserved within the Jerusalem necropoleis. Then I will examine in greater detail the few tombs that are assigned clear dates. Next I will compare the decoration of earlier tombs with later ones to show the existence of several trends over time. These changes in composition and the style of carving aid the reconstruction of a relative chronology, while reflecting aspects of the lives of the elite prior to A.D. 70.