Three weeks through 2.75 meters of destruction fill brought the team to the stone floor of the main room of a domestic structure in F9/F10. A doorway to the northwest is in situ, including the lintel stone. Except for one stone, the entire project was dug by hand. A tremendous credit to the team.
The entrance inscription for the garden has now been cleaned. In addition to the text previously announced, one can now see a leaf and stem below the welcoming words.
Thanks to Jackie and Anna who spent the day in the tedious work of revealing the inscription so that it might be seen by human eyes for the first time in 1262 years.
Today, new mosaic floors appeared in the excavation areas of the NE zone. A mosaic floor is the third floor (earliest) identified in the northeast hall of the peristyle house. Only a small fragment is visible so far just inside the western entrance. Watch for more later in the week.
Further north in the entrance to the garden from the stepped street, a second mosaic floor is being uncovered. Anna Shaw and Dylan Olson did the detail work.
While Dylan was cleaning the floor, his supervisor, Darryl Schmidt, while looking down from above, noticed some writing in the floor. It is an inscription in tabula ansata, that reads
ΕΥΤΥΧΩΣ
ΤΩ ΚΤΗΣΤΗ
A rough translation is “Good fortune to the builder.”
Dylan continued the cleaning process that revealed the inscription.
In this same garden the team recovered last year a fresco of Tyche, the goddess of Fortune. Her name is the root of the first word of this inscription.
More cleaning is scheduled for tomorrow.
After a couple of weeks of digging through layer upon layer of soil and destruction fill, it is so very rewarding to reach a surface. In the case of the Alpha Building complex at Hippos of the Decapolis, floors of three rooms can now be seen.
In G10, the team revealed a small room with a bench and a watering vessel in the corner. In its last phase this room may have served as a pen for animals.
To the east is the main room of a house. It too has a bench on the south wall, and only today started to show its floor.
A window wall separates the main room of the house from a storage area likely under a sleeping loft. That storage area to the east in E10 has a rather crude stone floor.
In its final phase the alpha building complex was a typical home of the Byzantine/Umayyad period. However, the lower courses of the walls are built of large basalt ashlars, too large to be original to the house. So the next question arises, “What was the building previously?” It was great to reach these floors, but we must now look under them.
After two weeks of the 2011 season, the team is preparing to bid farewell to five team members. We do so sadly, as the team has accomplished much. Rooms in G10 and E9 and 10 are both complete. F10 is approaching the floor and the NE zone is getting more exciting by the day. But, before it is over, we wanted a team photo.
Here it is . . .
