Current Issue
Past Issues
Editoral Policy
About Us
Guide to Contributors
Call for Papers
Submission
‘Atiqot 54 (2006)
ISBN 2948-040X
A Burial Cave from the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods in Horbat Gores, The Gonen Quarter, Jerusalem
(Hebrew, pp. 87*–94*; English summary, pp. 161–163)
Gideon Solimany, Tamar Winter and Anna de Vincenz
Keywords: cemetery, burial goods, rural settlement, agricultural hinterland, anthropology
The excavation revealed a burial cave containing three arcosolia, each with two or three burial troughs. Twenty-one complete clay candlestick lamps and numerous fragments of other lamps were retrieved, all of them dating to the Byzantine–early Umayyad periods. Two of the lamps bear Greek inscriptions. Also found were 300 fragments of glass vessels, of which only 23 were diagnostic. The glass vessels, free-blown and decorated in a variety of techniques, are characteristic of Byzantine-era Jerusalem; several vessels might also date later, to the early Umayyad period. Thirty glass beads were retrieved, one of which was made of mosaic glass (
millefiori
). Although they are typical of the Late Roman period, the beads seem to have been interred in the cave during the Byzantine period. The burial cave was probably part of the cemetery of Horbat Gores (Khirbat al-Juarish), which was a small village in the agricultural settlement along Nahal Refa’im during the Byzantine–Early Islamic periods.