Me'arat haTe'omim
Me'arat haTe'omim , Hebrew מערת התאומים"Twin Cave" is a natural cave ( karst cave ) in Israel. It is located in the Judean Mountains southeast of Bet Shemesh . The Arabic name of the cave isمغارة أم التوأمين / Maġārat Umm at-Tauʾamīn , “Cave of the mother of twins”.
The cave entrance is located on the north side of Wadi Nahal haMe'arah נהל המערה at a height of about 4 meters. Behind it, a spacious hall opens up, measuring around 50 × 70 meters and 11 meters high. A lot of debris from an earlier collapse of the cave ceiling is piled on the floor, mixed with pigeon droppings and bat guano . Stalagmites and stalactitesformed in different parts of the cave. In the southwest corner there is a human-carved, square water basin with a side length of 2 meters and a depth of 0.5 meters. On the north side of the entrance hall there is a passage, which is blocked after about 20 meters by a deep pit formed by the karst. Only by abseiling into this pit can you get to three narrow, hard-to-reach openings on the opposite side. Behind it are Halls F and G, in which finds from the time of the Bar Kochba uprising were made.
The first description of the cave was written by Claude Reignier Conder and Herbert Kitchener in 1873. They explored the wide entrance hall and penetrated to the deep pit, into which they did not descend; nor did they notice that the cave continued beyond it. In the 1920s, René Neuville , the French consul in Jerusalem, arranged an archaeological investigation of the cave floor. Neolithic, Chalcolithic ( Ghassulia ), Bronze and Iron Age, Roman and Byzantine finds were recovered from the rubble . From 1970 to 1974 Gideon Mann investigated the cave on behalf of the Israeli Society for Nature Conservation. In the deep pit where Conder and Kitchener had turned back, he discovered accesses to the rear chambers of the cave. A team of archaeologists from Bar Ilan University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem began exploring the cave in 2009.
literature
- Boaz Zissu , Ro'i Porat, Boaz Langford, Amos Frumkin: Archaeological remains of the Bar Kokhba Revolt in the Te'omim Cave (Mŭghâret Umm et Tûeimîn), Western Jerusalem Hills. In: Journal of Jewish Studies 62/2, autumn 2011, pp. 262–283. ( PDF )
- Boaz Zissu, Hanan Eshel : Coins and Hoards from the Time of the Bar Kokhba Revolt . In: Hoards and Genizot as Chapters in History , Hecht Museum Haifa, spring 2013, pp. 31–40. ( PDF )
Web links
- Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire: Te'omim Cave (A)
- showcaves.com: Me'arat HaTeomim
Coordinates: 31 ° 43 ′ 35.1 ″ N , 35 ° 1 ′ 20 ″ E