Roman-Period and Byzantine Nazareth and its Hinterland by Ken Dark

Author:Ken Dark [Dark, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781032238623
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

A cellular perspective on the landscape

The analysis in this chapter has shown the existence of two settlement systems, focused respectively on Sepphoris and Nazareth. These systems both came into existence either in the Late Hellenistic period (but are mostly archaeologically undetectable during that period) or the beginning of the Roman period. The function of Nazareth as a focal place might suggest that it was more than another small settlement, especially as Moshav Zippori, ‘Illut and Reina seem to have attracted no similar system of satellite settlements. The presence of spatial groups of quarries probably originating in the Roman period near what is today central Nazareth and Sepphoris supports this interpretation.

The possibility that Nazareth was more than an impoverished hamlet raises the question of its relationship with both Sepphoris and the Roman-period town of Yafi’a. As discussed in Chapter 1, the proximity of Sepphoris to Nazareth has been the basis for supposing that Joseph and Jesus walked to Sepphoris to work there, while Trevor Harris has argued in a series of recent popular books (Harris 2014, 2017a, b) that Yafi’a was the principal Nazareth settlement in the first century. In his opinion, in the first century AD a settlement in the centre of modern Nazareth (see Chapters 5 and 6) was a subordinate village to Yafi’a (Figure 4.4).

FIGURE 4.4 Rock-cut features below the present church at Yafi’a (photo Trevor Harris).

Harris’s argument, although interesting, runs into the problem that although any of the otherwise unnamed settlements recorded in the survey or excavated by the IAA in the valley could hypothetically have been called Nazareth in antiquity, no ancient writer certainly assigned the name Nazareth to any of these or to the settlement now known as Yafi’a. Nor was Yafi’a, or anywhere else other than the area which is today central Nazareth, identified with the biblical Nazareth by Late Roman pilgrims. There are no grounds, then, for believing that Yafi’a was the biblical Nazareth, or even for considering the area of modern Nazareth and Yafi’a part of a single community. Nevertheless, Harris has drawn attention to the importance of Yafi’a in addition to Sepphoris as providing an urban context for Nazareth, and has highlighted how little we know about the relationship between Yafi’a and Nazareth in the Roman or Byzantine periods, questions which most other scholars have ignored.

The limited extent of Sepphoris’ reach in the valley demonstrated in Chapters 2 and 3 renders the interpretation that people from Nazareth worked in Sepphoris, or even travelled to market in Sepphoris, much more problematical than it might at first appear. Cultural separation may have created what was, in effect, an invisible barrier between Nazareth and Sepphoris, limiting interaction between them despite their proximity in terms of Cartesian geography. In this way, cognition rather than space may have been central to structuring interaction across this landscape.

As discussed earlier in this chapter, the lack of impact of Sepphoris on the cultural life of the valley to its south might also suggest that the town had a smaller territorium, at least in Nahal Zippori, than one might expect (Hopkins 1980).

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