Archeologists recreate stone floor that Jesus walked on in Herod’s sanctuary

Frankie Snyder, a mathematician and expert in ancient Herodian flooring, created this template to illustrate what the floor in Herod’s sanctuary looked like. Photo courtesy of Synder.

JERUSALEM– Just in time for Christmas, archaeologists at the Temple Mount Sifting Project (TMSP) have sorted through tons of ancient garbage and landfill illegally dumped by the Muslim Waqf to recreate the ornate floor tiles which Jesus trod on when he came on pilgrimage to King Herod’s Second Temple.

His sandals walked across courtyards decorated with geometric, hewn-stone, red, white and black tiles that had been scuffed by the feet of millions of other Jews who ascended to the tenemos (holy precinct) during the three annual pilgrimage festivals of Passover, Shavuot (Pentecost) and Sukkot (Tabernacles).

The New Testament records Jesus went to the Temple as a boy to celebrate his bar mitzvah. He returned at the end of his life as an itinerant preacher, and cast out its money-changers who were selling silver half-shekels to the pilgrims. The Gospel of John describes him “walking in the Temple in the portico of Solomon.”

The courts were “laid with stones of all sorts,” wrote historian Josephus Flavius, who witnessed the Temple cult and the holy site’s destruction by Titus in 70 CE when the Romans crushed the Judean Revolt.

The TMSP’s square-meter replica was created by local archaeologists and stonemasons who studied the 2,000-year-old broken tiles. Since 1999, the TMSP team headed by archaeologist Gabriel Barkay, has uncovered fragments of more than 600 colored stone floor tiles – sacred flooring, as it were – dating from King Herod’s reign from 37 to c. 4 BCE. The tiles are similar to the flooring found at Herod’s desert palaces at Masada, Herodian and Jericho. They also match those found in majestic villas in Rome during the same period, attesting to the vassal king’s cultural affinity for imperial grandeur.

The team also studied historical texts including Vitruvius's treatise De Architectura dedicated to his patron, the emperor Caesar Augustus. The replica went on exhibit recently at the archaeology salvage organization’s sifting site at Mitzpe Hamasu’ot on the slopes of the Mount of Olives three kilometers east of the Temple Mount. It offers a striking reconstruction of the luxurious decoration of Herod the Great’s Temple – a long-lost edifice central to Jewish and Christian history.

“We even made the scratches and all kinds of marks that created the same appearance as it used to look like at the time,” archaeologist Assaf Avraham, part of the TMSP initiative run under the auspices of Bar-Ilan University and the Israel Parks and Nature Authority, told Reuters.

Recreating the floor was “very tough work” that took seven months, said Avi Tavisal, manager of the team of artisans.

“But it was very interesting, and we made it with all our hearts,” he said. “We hope that this will be something that the people can come and see and feel and touch and feel the feeling how it was 2,000 years before.”

“Using geometric principles, and through similarities found in tile design used by Herod at other sites,” said Frankie Snyder, a mathematician and expert in ancient Herodian flooring, the team put the puzzle together. Notwithstanding that most of the tile pieces were missing, she was able to use the remaining broken fragments to make templates recreating the original ornate patterns. “This type of flooring, called ‘opus sectile,’ Latin for ‘cut work,’ is very expensive and was considered to be far more prestigious than mosaic tiled floors,” the 72 year-old retired mathematician turned archeologist told Religion Unplugged.

There were no opus sectile floors in Israel prior to Herod, she noted. “The tile segments were perfectly inlaid such that one could not even insert a sharp blade between them.”

Born in Richmond, Virginia and raised Roman Catholic, when Snyder was 30 she discovered she is halachically Jewish because of her maternal grandmother. That information changed her identity, and in 2007 she moved to Israel where she began working for the TMSP.

Snyder told Religion Unplugged the floor recreated from one of her templates is a “Q4” fractal of four squares inside each other. That quadrato four square pattern was first discerned by Italian archaeologist and geologist Guido Baldi.

The tiles measure 29.6 sq. cm, corresponding to the Roman foot. They were manufactured locally, Snyder explained. Blocks of marble and other expensive stone for the tiles were imported from Asia Minor, Greece, Tunisia and Egypt. Locally quarried materials including limestone, bitumen from the Dead Sea, and calcite-alabaster. The polished geometric cuts were set into grey ash-lime plaster. Alternatively, the pattern was set into opus signanum, lime mixed with crushed pottery and broken dishes giving the grout a pink tinge.

Unlike tessellated mosaic techniques, where the placement of tiny uniformly-sized pieces forms a picture, opus sectile pieces are much larger and can be shaped to define large parts of the design, she explained.

In 2004 the TMSP received a license from the Israel Antiquities Authority to sift antiquities-rich rubble. Initially staff sifted the dirt from the Temple Mount dumped by the Waqf in 1999. Over time the TMSP linked up with the City of David, which is nominally a national park but is run by the Ir David Foundation. Known in Hebrew as Amutat EL-AD, the non-profit right-wing organization was established in 1986 to preserve and develop the hill which King David captured from the Jebusites in c.1000 BCE. The TMSP then began sifting other “contract material” from various sites, including the Ophel at the City of David.

In June 2019, buoyed by a stream of tourists paying to be archaeologists for a day, the TMSP moved from Emek Tzurim to a larger locale at Mitzpe Hamasu’ot. But the COVID-19 pandemic froze incoming tourism. In March 2000 Snyder was put on unpaid leave, and then let go. When National Insurance refused to pay her unemployment benefits because she is older than 67, she filed for her pension and officially retired in October.

Snyder’s legacy to her adopted city includes another opus sectile recreation based on her templates that went on display in 2016 at the nearby City of David National Park. Those highly polished panels of diamond-cut granite and marble offer a precision the Romans would appreciate.

Gil Zohar was born in Toronto, Canada and moved to Jerusalem, Israel in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine, and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.