Masada.... continued

Did you enjoy what you learned in the last post about Masada?  Well, refill your water bottle, there's more coming.

First, let's take a look at the inside of a bathhouse.  It seems like we were looking at a LOT of bathhouses while in Israel.  What's different about this one?  Ooh.. look at the artwork that was found.  Imagine being there with the artist while he was painting the walls.  It's so cool that some of it survived.  These are three different corners in different rooms of the bathhouse

While looking at the picture, do you notice the black line, especially in the middle image?  That line indicates the line of restoration.  Below the line, the walls were in tact when excavation was done.  This is true of all of the archaeological sites, in Israel at least.  Above the line, the walls were reconstructed from the fallen stones.

Here's a model of the bathhouse on the left.
I don't know if I told you how the bathhouses worked back then.   There were three main rooms, a steam room, a lukewarm room and a cold room.  Well, there were changing rooms as well.  The bather would go to the steam room first where they would sweat thoroughly.  They were rubbed with olive oil then used a sort of scraper called a strigil to scrape off the dirt.  With the pores nice and open from the steam, the dirt was easy to scrape off.  Once the bather was nice and clean, he would move to the lukewarm room for a dip.  This prepped him for the final room, the cold room, for a chilling dip closing the pores.  After that he would dry off and get dressed.

Here's a picture of one room of the bathhouse.  The portion below the floor was where they would build fires around the edges to heat water.  The steam would rise through the pipes.  See the pipes in the picture to the right?  That's how they got the steam into the bathhouse.

Another interesting thing about Masada.  In the writings of Josephus Flavius, he talks about marble being used for construction in Masada.  Marble?  Up there?  First of all, below is the quarry where they got the stones for building the structures on Masada.
That doesn't look like marble to me.  Does it look like marble to you?  Well, why would Josephus, who is known for being a good historian, say marble if it wasn't marble?
Take a look at this picture on the right.  Although it's faded, you can see it looks like marble.  But the stone isn't marble.  What?  They used marble dust mixed with stucco to make a facade on the stone.  Now, isn't that just so flipping clever?   There are so many areas of Masada that reveal the ingenuity of the builders and architects.

Moving on, let's take a look at the storage rooms that they had on Masada.  Here we have.. oh wait... that's my bud Sue and I near the water gate.  The water gate was a gate to a path down to some of the cisterns where the water was collected.






Oh, where was I?  Ah.. storage rooms.  Here is a panoramic showing rows of the storage rooms.

Well, you have to use your imagination a bit since the walls have pretty much tumbled down.
Wait, here's a shot courtesy of Marc.  Thanks Marc.

These walls were not knocked down by marauders but by an earthquake.  To the left is a shot of one of the storage rooms that is still fairly intact.   Check out the holes.  Guess what they are for?  Not sure?  Here's a clue.  See the jug to the right?  Although you can't see it, the bottom of that jug is not flat.  So, how does one keep a jug upright that doesn't have a flat bottom?  With a hole in the floor!  Personally, I would think making the jug with a flat bottom would have been easier but this worked for them.  This particular room was for liquids.  They mush have had some jars with flat bottoms since there's only two holes in the floor.  One thing about it, they had a LOT of storage area on Masada.

Oh look, here is one of those flat bottom jugs.  Isn't it amazing that, what with all those fallen down walls and such that something like this jug survived?
Below is the path to one of the lower cisterns from the water gate.  Can you imagine trucking down this path with a donkey?  See the drop off?  Mind you, I am pretty sure that the railing wasn't there then although the path was paved with stones to protect the surface from the animal hooves.

Okay, time to take a break and sit in the shade for a bit.  Next post. We will look at the synagogue of Masada as well as the structure of the fortress walls.