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.
As we are trying to open the east doorway to the garden of the peristyle house, we have had to dig down rather deeply. In so doing, we discovered that the builder of the garden cut some stairs into the bedrock, using basalt ashlars as treads, to create a staircase to the garden. So far, five steps are visible along with the bedrock to the left. It is a lovely spot, and we still have some depth through which to dig.
In 2009, the Concordia Team discovered an inscription honoring Tarius Titianus, a governor of Syria Palestinae. On the third day of the 2011 season, a sharp-eyed volunteer, Concordia student Meghan O’Neill, spotted a stone with Greek writing on it in the area she was excavating. The find turned out to be another portion of the same inscription, providing the motive for so honoring Tarius Titianus … he was considered the “patron and builder of the fatherland.” Meghan’s discovery brings together the original inscription, an inscribed block found by the Haifa team in 2008, and this new piece to place Hippos well within the practice of Roman government and action in the Greek east which was honored by local citizens with such inscriptions.
Congratulations, Meghan!