Bet Guvrin-Maresha and answers to Mr. C's questions

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Bet Guvrin-Maresha

The other day we went to Bet Guvrin-Maresha. There we went to the fallowing places…

• The Polish Cave.
• The Columbarium cave also known as the Pigeon coop cave.
• The bath cave.
• The olive oil plant.
• The dwelling house
• Dwelling house and underground system.
• The church of “Sandahanna”
• The bell caves.

It was very fun to see all of these places but I think the best part was exploring the Dwelling house and underground system. These are a series of about 20 to 30 cave’s that were at first used as quarries when the stone was soft. Eventually they were used for many prepossess including storage, dwelling and oil making and even bathing! It was amazing how much area these caves took up. It seemed almost never ending. Every time you thought that you had come to the end there was another turn, possibly even two! I would love to make a movie set in there one day. The caves reminded of me of when in the book “Tom Sawyer” they get lost in the cave. There was even a wobbly underground bridge just like in the movies. It was so cool! There was also steep stairway that went down a long way into the darkness. You could not even see where you were stepping! It was awesome!

It was really fun going there. We even got to see a cave in which they raised thousands of pigeons. The Pigeons were used for food fertilizer and to sacrifice to the gods. (The people who lived here were Hellenistic). The cave was filled with little holes were the Pigeons would roost and in which some still do today lucky for them people don’t really eat pigeons or sacrifice them anymore.

Next we went to a burial cave. It had paintings of real and mythological animals and monsters around niches that were carved out of the rock where the people were laid to rest.

We hiked for about 8KM to the Bell caves which were used only as quarries all the way up to the Arab period... We also saw the ruins of a Byzantine church from a later period. We were going to go see an amphitheatre built by the Romans, but we ran out of time.

I really had a great time at Bet Guvrin- Maresha.


Answers to Mr. C’s questions:
King Herod the great got the water to Masada by damming two wadis which created to reservoir which were filled up in heavy rain. Next it was brought to a clay lined canal. Slaves and animals were used to get water to the top.
For the building he had no need to have rock slabs brought up because it was easy to just quarry there. Using a almost cane like contraption using pulleys the palace was built using the rock slabs.

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Photos

The Bell Caves
Called the bell caves becasue of the shape they formed when they dug out the rock.

Flowers
Everthing was in bloom on the hiltop.

Oliive grinding wheel.
They made Olive oil in the caves.

The Bell Caves
They were HUGE!

Climbing
There were huge stairs carved into the stone thoughout many of the residential caves

A place for pigeons
Thousands of little roosting nitches were carved into the rocks.

The Main Tomb
In the burial cave

Above Ground
The people had houses above ground. Then they had stairs that led to the caves below.

Comments

[J. Kinghorn]

Caves
All those stairs! I'm thinking it probably remained cooler underground than above ground, eh? Finding nature's answer to climate control.