[Archport] Ancient Escape Tunnel Found in Israel - AOL News - em especial, para a Prof. Helena Catarino

[Graca Cravinho <fcsilva@ptmat.fc.ul.pt>]

>  Ancient Escape Tunnel Found in Israel
> By AMY TEIBEL, AP
> Posted: 2007-09-09 14:01:42
> Filed Under: Science News <http://news.aol.com/science>
>
>  JERUSALEM (Sept. 9) - Under threat from Romans ransacking Jerusalem 2,000
> years ago, many of the city's Jewish residents crowded into an underground
> drainage channel to hide and later flee the chaos through Jerusalem's
> southern end unnoticed.
>
>
>   Photo Gallery: 'People Hid and Fled'
>    Emilio Morenatti, AP
>
> Two weeks ago, while searching for ancient Jerusalem's main road, Israeli
> archeologists stumbled across the drainage channel that the Jews used to
> escape the invading Romans in 70 A.D.
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  The ancient tunnel was recently discovered buried beneath rubble, a
> monument to one of the great dramatic scenes of the destruction of the
> Second Temple in the year 70 A.D.
>
> The channel was dug beneath what would become the main road of Jerusalem,
> the archaeology dig's directors, Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and
> Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said Sunday. Shukron said
> excavators looking for the road happened upon a small drainage channel that
> led them to the discovery of the massive tunnel two weeks ago.
>
> "We were looking for the road and suddenly we discovered it," Shukron said.
> "And the first thing we said was, 'Wow.'"
>
> The walls of the tunnel - made of ashlar stones 3 feet deep - reach a height
> of 10 feet in some places and are covered by heavy stone slabs that were the
> road's paving stones, Shukron said. Several manholes are visible, and
> portions of the original plastering remain, he said.
>
> Pottery shards, vessel fragments and coins from the end of the Second Temple
> period were also discovered inside the channel, attesting to its age, Reich
> said.
>
> The discovery of the drainage channel was momentous in itself, a sign of how
> the city's rulers looked out for the welfare of their citizens by developing
> an infrastructure that drained the rainfall and prevented flooding, Reich
> said.
>
> The discovery "shows you planning on a grand scale, unlike other cities in
> the ancient Near East," said Joe Zias, an expert in the Second Temple period
> who was not involved in the dig.
>
> But what makes the channel doubly significant is its role as an escape hatch
> for Jews desperate to flee the conquering Romans, the dig's directors said.
>
> The Second Temple was the center of Jewish worship during the second Jewish
> Commonwealth, which spanned the six centuries preceding the Roman conquest
> of Jerusalem. Its expansion was the most famous construction project of
> Herod, the Jewish proxy ruler of the Holy Land under imperial Roman
> occupation from 37 B.C.
>
> As the temple was being destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D., numerous people
> took shelter in the drainage channel and lived inside it until they fled
> Jerusalem through its southern end, the historian Josephus Flavius wrote in
> "The War of the Jews."
>
> "It was a place where people hid and fled to from burning, destroyed
> Jerusalem," Shukron said.
>
> Tens of thousands of people lived in Jerusalem at the time, but it is not
> clear how many used the channel to escape, he said.
>
> About 100 yards of the channel have been uncovered so far. Reich estimates
> its total length will reach more than a half-mile, stretching north from the
> Shiloah Pool at Jerusalem's southern end to the disputed holy shrine known
> to Jews as Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Al Aqsa Mosque compound. The
> shrine is the site of the two biblical Jewish temples.
>
> Archeologists think the tunnel leads to the Kidron River, which empties into
> the Dead Sea.
>
>
> Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP
> news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise
> distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. All
> active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
> 2007-09-09 11:50:22
>
> ___________________________________________________________
> Source:
> http://news.aol.com/story/ar/_a/ancient-escape-tunnel-found-in-israel/20070909115009990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001