Israeli archaeologists excavating what they believe is the tomb of biblical King Herod said yesterday they have unearthed lavish Roman-style wall paintings of a kind previously unseen in the Middle East and signs of a regal two-story mausoleum, bolstering their conviction that the Roman-Jewish monarch was buried here.
Ehud Netzer, head of the team from Hebrew University, which uncovered the site at the king's winter palace in the Judean desert in 2007, said his latest finds show work fit for a king.
Netzer said that what the digger have found, spread all around, are architectural fragments that enabled them to restore a very elegant monument 25 meters high that fits Herod's taste and status. He added that since finding fragments of one ornately carved sarcophagus in 2007, he and his team have found two more, suggesting that the monumental tomb may have been a royal family vault.
Herod is known for extensive building throughout the Holy Land.
"A mausoleum like the one which we have here was generally built by a king but not (necessarily) only for himself, many times for his children and his family, like the famous mausoleum of Augustus in Rome, of Hadrian in Rome," he said. "It's not a surprise that we found here more than one sarcophagus."
Herod was the proxy ruler of the Holy Land under imperial Roman occupation from 37 B.C.E. and reigned for more than six decades.
Netzer described the winter palace, built on a largely man-made hill 680 meters high, as a kind of country club, with baths, gardens fed by pools and aqueducts and a 650-seat theater.
In Herod's private box at the auditorium, the diggers discovered delicate frescoes depicting windows opening onto painted landscapes, one of which showed what appeared to be a southern Italian farm, said Roi Porat, one of Netzer's assistants on the digs
Site surveyor Rachel Chachy-Laureys said they were executed using techniques unknown in the Holy Land at the time and must have been done by artisans imported from Italy. There has been no other discovery of this type of painting in the Middle East, as far as we know, until now, she said.
Gidon Foerster, a professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University not connected with this dig, agreed that the art is unique here. The artists were most likely brought in from Italy, he said. "This kind of art has never been found in Israel before. King Herod is said to have been buried there and this proves it as much as it can possibly be proved."
No human remains or inscriptions proving conclusively that the tomb was the king's have been found, but excavation work continues.
