Zippori National Park

Zippori is first mentioned in the reign of Alexander Jannaeus, in 103 BCE. In 55 BCE Gabinius, the Roman governor of Syria, declared it the capital of the Galilee. Herod the Great was appointed governor of the Galilee in 47 BCE and, on the Parks Authority's account, had to take the city by force in a snowstorm.

When Herod died in 4 BCE the Jews of the Galilee revolted and captured Zippori. The Roman general Varus put the revolt down, burned the city and sold its Jewish inhabitants into slavery. Herod's son Antipas rebuilt and fortified it, and Josephus called the result the ornament of all Galilee. Because that rebuilding went on an hour's walk from Nazareth, guides often raise the possibility that Joseph worked on it; that is an inference from geography, and Zippori appears nowhere in the New Testament.

In 66 CE, when the First Revolt broke out, the people of Zippori made a treaty with the Roman army instead of joining it, and the city escaped the destruction visited on other Galilean centres. Its part in the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 to 135 CE is unclear; afterwards the name was changed to Diocaesarea, for Zeus and Caesar, and the Jewish leadership was replaced by pagan rulers.

The city was rebuilt on a grid, apparently in the early second century CE, with a colonnaded cardo running north to south and a decumanus crossing it east to west, both paved in hard limestone and carrying mosaic under the porticoes. Small shops lined the street, part of what the Talmud calls Zippori's lower market. Zeev Weiss, who has directed the Hebrew University excavation since 1990, puts the population at its height at 15,000 to 20,000 people.

At the beginning of the third century CE, with the leadership of the town back in Jewish hands, Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi moved to Zippori and the Sanhedrin moved with him. He lived here for seventeen years until his death, and it was here, around 200 CE, that the Mishnah was redacted. The Talmud remembers Zippori as a city of eighteen synagogues with a number of named study houses. The Sanhedrin stayed until the second half of the third century, then moved on to Tiberias.

The archaeology of that Jewish city is on the western part of the hill: houses beside a paved street, in use from the first century BCE to the sixth century CE, including a first-century building with massive walls and two ritual baths. The number of mikva'ot across the quarter is high enough that the Parks Authority suggests the priestly course of Yedaya lived there. In 2016 Weiss's team also found hundreds of fragments of wall painting, with lion heads, birds and a tiger among the figures, dated to the early second century CE: the earliest figurative images at the site, a century older than the mosaics.

The theatre is the other half of the town, about seventy metres across, holding some 4,500 stone seats. Who built it is not settled: several reference accounts credit Herod Antipas, on the strength of his rebuilding programme, while the Parks Authority dates it to the end of the first century or the beginning of the second century CE, well after Antipas, who died in 39 CE. The Parks Authority's own brochure prints the rabbinic view of such buildings, quoting Rabbi Shimon ben Pazi on Psalm 1: happy is the man who did not go to theatres.

The Dionysus House stands at the top of the hill near the theatre, built in the third century CE and destroyed in the earthquake of 363, which is exactly why its dining-room floor survives: the rubble sealed it. The decorated part is laid out so that guests reclining on three sides could read the panels, which run through the life and worship of the wine god. In the border, in one medallion, is the head of a woman, the prize find of the 1987 season of the joint Duke and Hebrew University expedition. The Parks Authority calls her the Mona Lisa of Zippori; everyone else the Mona Lisa of the Galilee. Who she represents is not known.

The Nile House lies east of the cardo. Its largest floor shows the celebrations held in Egypt when the Nile rose, with a Nilometer marked at fifteen, sixteen and seventeen cubits, the gate of Alexandria and the Pharos lighthouse, and hunting scenes alongside. Ehud Netzer and Zeev Weiss, who uncovered it, dated the mosaic to the fifth or sixth century CE on its composition, which they connected to mosaics from Antioch, Apamea and Beirut. The Parks Authority counts eleven floors in the building, and one by the western entrance names the mosaicists themselves.

The synagogue is a long, narrow hall of about 7 by 15 metres in the north of the site, built at the beginning of the fifth century CE, with its direction of prayer facing away from Jerusalem rather than towards it. Its floor runs in bands: the binding of Isaac, a zodiac wheel, the tabernacle in the wilderness and the Ark in the Temple, read by the excavators as one argument about redemption. It carries more than twenty Greek and Aramaic inscriptions. The published discovery dates disagree: the Parks Authority says 1994, the excavation team's own accounts 1993.

The fourth great floor is one visitors often cannot see. The Orpheus House, of the later third century CE, has a dining-hall mosaic of four panels with Orpheus at the centre, and around 500 CE a church was built over it. The Parks Authority currently lists that lookout as closed for safety work.

• Dionysus House: third century CE, sealed by the 363 earthquake, with the Mona Lisa medallion in the border
• Nile House: the Nile flood celebrations, a Nilometer, the Pharos of Alexandria and hunting scenes
• The synagogue: early fifth century, four registers, more than twenty Greek and Aramaic inscriptions
• Orpheus House and the western church: currently behind a closed lookout
• The cardo: cartwheel ruts in the paving and a seven-branched candelabrum carved into one stone

There is no spring on the hill, and the whole city depended on water carried to it. The supply began at springs in the Nazareth hills near Mashhad and Reineh, with a discharge the Parks Authority puts at about 40 cubic metres an hour, and came in along two aqueducts, one cut into rock and one built. The Reineh line fed the great reservoir east of the city.

That reservoir is the reason many people come. It is 260 metres long, between two and four metres wide and about ten metres high, with a capacity of 4,300 cubic metres, which the Parks Authority reckons was two weeks' water for 18,000 people. It was cut where it is because that is the only high ground near Zippori in chalk, soft enough to hew. Water arrived through a settling basin five metres deep, and a valve at the outlet regulated the flow into town. There are two building phases, the second century CE and the fourth, and it stayed in use until the seventh. Below the valve a tunnel 235 metres long, driven using six vertical shafts, carried the water in.

The system before it is easy to miss. Two rock-cut reservoirs roofed on arches sit near the visitor centre, excavated between 2002 and 2018 by Tsvika Tsuk and colleagues, with a combined volume of 235 cubic metres and wall plaster dating them to the first or early second century CE. On Tsuk's reading they served the city until it grew and the great reservoir was cut; they were abandoned by the sixth century, one of them as a Byzantine winepress.

The theatre is the clearest case, and the operator says so. The Parks Authority's Hebrew page describes it as a restored remnant of a Roman theatre; its English brochure is blunter, noting that some seats were robbed in antiquity and that those which remained were not found in their original position. The bowl cut into the rock slope is ancient. The tidy semicircle of seating a visitor walks into is a modern arrangement of ancient stone.

The fortress on the summit is a stack of periods rather than one building. It was raised in the Crusader period on the remains of something earlier, out of dressed stones robbed from older structures, with Roman sarcophagi set into its corners. The doorway with its decorative arch, and the wall to its right, were built in the eighteenth century by Daher el-Omar, the Bedouin ruler of the Galilee. At the end of the nineteenth century it was refurbished as a school for the children of Saffuriyya, and served as one until 1948. It now holds the site's exhibition, and the roof is the lookout.

The mosaics are original and in place, which is why the park's safety rules about them are unusually specific: do not walk on them, do not pour liquid on them, and do not touch, write on or scratch the plaster in the reservoir. Several floors sit under roofs built to shelter them. The residential quarter, by contrast, is presented as reconstructed, its lanes restored so that visitors can walk through them.

One Crusader building sits outside the circuit: the church over the traditional house of Anne and Joachim, the parents of Mary, beside the convent of the Sisters of St Anne. It holds Crusader remains along with granite columns, capitals, inscriptions from the synagogue, an ossuary and a stone tomb door. A lookout inside the park is where the Parks Authority sends visitors to see it, with the tomb attributed to Rabbi Yudan Nesiah below.

The ancient name survived on the hill in Arabic. The Crusaders knew the place as Le Saphourie, and the Arab village here was Saffuriyya. When Leroy Waterman of the University of Michigan opened the first excavation at the site in 1931, he dug into ground beside the fortress that was then the village school's playground.

The village ended in the summer of 1948. The Parks Authority's own account states that during Operation Dekel, on the night of 15 July 1948, Saffuriyya was conquered and its residents abandoned the place, and adds that in 1936 to 1939 and again in 1948 the village housed Arab fighters acting against the local Jewish population. Middle East Eye, interviewing people displaced from the village, describes aircraft bombing the houses that July as families broke the Ramadan fast, expulsions at dawn, a village of more than 5,000, and a pine forest later planted over the levelled houses. The accounts differ on compulsion and sequence; they agree on the date and the outcome.

Moshav Zippori was founded in 1949 beside the site and took the ancient Hebrew name back. The national park covers 16 square kilometres and opened to the public in 1992. Excavation has never really stopped: Waterman in 1931, Tsvika Tsuk on the water system from 1975, James Strange for South Florida from 1983 to 2003, Duke with the Hebrew University from 1985, and the Hebrew University under Ehud Netzer and Zeev Weiss from 1990.