Evening Star Newspaper, August 17, 1930, Page 86

THE . SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. dles - dell Digging an Irriga- tion Ditch in Pales- tine, Workmen Un- cover Perfectly Pre- served Foundations of a Temple Built 1,400 Years Ago, With Tile Mosaics of Bible History. BY FRANK THONE. OME time about the year 526 a con- tractor named Marianos and his son, Hanina, were given the job of laying an ornamental floor in the synagogue of & village in Northern Palestine, It wasn’t a very large town or a very distinguished one; its very nameé is now forgotten, and neither Roman nor Jewish history contains any reference to the place. It was just another of the innumerable Main street towns of the .world, whose inhabitants carried on their several businesses, assembled plously on the Sabbath, and in due time were gathered to their fathers, all without raising enough dust or shedding enough blood to earn a few penstrokes on parchment, Like the small-town folk of today, the peo- ple of this forgotten village were a really re- ligious lot, and they wanted their meeting house to be a place they could really be proud of; a place, moreover, that would instruct their chil- dven through- their eyes as the Torah reader instructed them through their ears. So Marianos and his son, Hanina, were com- missioned to cover the floor of the synagogue with pictures in stone—mosaics, we call them now. They did their workmanlike best, and were so well satisfied with what they had wrouoht that they put in an inscription telling who Jiey were and that they finished the job in the reign of the Emveror Justinus. ~his ased signeiure, written in bits of color- ed stones, (urus out to be one of the most im- portant things about their whole artistic effort, For this synagogue which they thus decorated is the only building of its kind in Palestine of whose date we can be at all certain. Ruins of other and more pretentious syna- gogues have been found, but of their time only an approximate notion has ever been gained. And synagogues in Palestine are obviously as important, in rebuilding our picture of the life of former times, as are churches or mosques or clasic temples, all of which are the sub- jects of increasingly active research. BUT. however much applause Marianos and Hahina may have had from their neigh- ~ bors for their artistic efforts on the floor of the synagogue, the immortality they sought for their names was relatively short-kved. For at some time during the troubled period of war and confusion that marked the later centuries of antiquity the village was abandoned or destroyed, and the synagogue died with it. The roof and walls fell in, and the debris of cen- turies piled deep over the tesselated floor. Greek and Saracen, Crusader and Turk, fought each other to the death, or made treaties and traded; all through the Middle Ages and mod- ern times life ebbed and flowed through the Plain of Esdraclon where the town had once stood, and the forgotten stones of its houses lay as dumb and unheeding as dead men’s bones. Then came the thunders of the World War, like the trumpet of resurrection, The land, long prone beneath the hand of the Turk, stirred and shook itself, Under a new regime, a people who had possessed it ages iefore sent back some of its scattered sons and daughters to till the land that their fathers had known. Under the banner of the Zionist movement Jewish colonies sprang up in many parts of the old kingdom of David and Solomon. One of these agricultural colonies settled on almost the exact site of the long-forgotten vil- lage in the Plain of Esdraelon. Its founders, yaung men and women from Galicia, Germany and Crezhoslovakia, called their town Beth Alpha, There were old stubs of walls sticking out of the soil here and there; but ruins are common in an old land like Palestine, and the new colonists were too busy wrestling with the pres- ent and providing for the future to dig much into the past. The problem of water was with them, as it had been with their ancestors in the wilderness, and they undertook to meet it by the construction of an irrigation ditch. That trench brought them into direct con- tact with the past, whether they would or no. Wherever you go a little beneath the surface of the ground in Palestine you are very likely to come face to face very suddenly with antiquity. The diggers uncovered a strip of the mosaic floor which Marianos and his son bad Jaid with careful fingers 14 centuries ago. Some of the stones were arranged to form Hebrew letters; the diggers nad, without intending it, made a find of major importance, had dug up a for- gotten ohapter from the past of their peaple. They made haste to notify the Hebrew Uni- versity at Jerusalem, and Dr. I« Sukenik, . archeologist, came: oub to-dnvesbigate. He ar- AUGUST 17, 1930. New Story of Ancient Wbrship How Marianos and Hanina depict;d the story of Abraham and Is One of the almost perfectly preserved mosaics found by the Zionist settlers. It depicts the month of Heshvan, or the Autumn season. The crude but intri- cate chardcter of the work is well shown. ranged for careful and complete excavation at once, though the season was unfavorable, so that the colomists might be able to finish their irrigation ditch, When at last Dr. Sukenik’s workmen had laid the whole ruin bare, he had the ground plan of the ancient synagogue in full, and the in- teresting mosaic pavement in a remarkably well preserved condition. The building had been in some respects typical of the synagogues of that time in Palestine; in others, it intro- duced new features. ‘The main portion had been divided into three naves by rows of pillars, the ground floor re- served for the men, with a gallery for the woman worshipers. The three entrances cus- tomary in synagogues were at the “wrong” end of the building, however; they were on the north end instead of on the side nearest Jerusa- lem, which in this instance happened to be the south. Furthermore, they did not open directly into the synagogue itself, but into & transverse anteroom known as a narthex, typi- cal of early Christian churches, but hitherto unknown in synagogues of that period. Ane other depatrture was the erection of an apse, or projecting enid, in which sfood the ‘ark which always faces toward the témple at Jerusalern. This again is more characteristic of' Christian than of Jewish places of worship.' There were stone benches around three wsalls, where the - people sat during prayers. ’ wac in mosaic stone, BUTthemnnndutmmdcm. This tells a colorful story of erthodox plety and faithfulness to Jewish history, tempered with a cheerful eclecticism that did not refuse a bit of decoratoon that savored of the Greek, so long as it did not introduce the hated and dreaded worship of idols. - There is also & curious contrast between the taste of the workers in selecting their stones and their technical skill in working out. their plctures and designs. For the bits of stone that are wrought into the figured floot are astonishingly assorted, showing no less than 22 nuances of color. But the figures them- selves are astonishingly, childishly naive, evem ~ crude: The faces on the human figures are ale most duplicates of the efforts of early Amer- ican tombstone sculptors, and the drawing ol their limbs and those of the animals i8 remi- niscent of that in children’s sketch books, But, regardless of their lack of skill, the father and son who laid the mosaics had their Bible history straight, and they also faithfully portrayed the various objects used in the ancient Jewish ritual: the ark, the perpetual lamp, the shofar, or ram’s-horn trumget, the luiab, or palm branch, the etrog, or citton uséd at the feast of the tabernacles. . The biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, as portrayed by @