10007442 - Times of transition: Sundials from Early Roman Jerusalem

The last century in the life of the Jerusalem Temple until its destruction in 70 CE has been an axial age for world history. The religious dynamics of this century with the forming of Judaism and the beginning of Christianity heavily impacted the entire western world. While this century and its dynamic were studied in numerous studies of various methods, the present study suggests a new, yet unexpected way to address its cultural processes and interactions. This is achieved by combining intellectual history, material culture, and the history of science and technology. We suggest an inherently interdisciplinary study about a medium-sized corpus of sundials, i.e., time-reckoning devices from Early Roman Jerusalem, found in archaeological excavations. While achieving only marginal attention in previous studies, we suggest that this corpus, second in size only to the corpus of sundials found in contemporary Roman Pompeii, offers an efficient test-case for evaluating the Roman-Judaean cultural encounter. This corpus is greatly indicative of high culture, shedding light on conceptions of nature, cultural hegemony and hybridity, transmission of knowledge, the development of religious practice, priestly ideals, global interaction in technology, centre vs periphery, cultural acceptance, expression of status, and many more. When examined with the right combination of expertise and collaboration the corpus will have a significant effect.

Over a dozen ancient sundials from the Early Roman period have been discovered in Jerusalem, and about seven items in surrounding regions. These items provide insight about conceptions of temporality and technicalities of time measuring in this turbulent period, at the cradle of Christianity and just before the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Many of the finds stem from the temple environment and the houses of priests, which suggests a religious backdrop for them. Others may have been used in elite mansions, or specifically in gardens, horticulture being a prime expression of prestige in the Roman empire. We study these yet unexplored finds using a combination of methods: the history of geometry and technology, archaeology of Roman Jerusalem, material culture, and religious history of Second Temple Judaea. We explore the relationship of Judaism and Roman culture, whether by influence, assimilation, subversion or resistance. The seemingly modest collection of sundials provides an efficient, indicative and original way to address these grand cultural questions through a manageable dataset that remains hitherto unstudied.

The development and different types of sundials reflect increased geometrical skills and familiarity with projecting the celestial sphere onto different surfaces over time, but they equally reflect the cultural concepts of time, space, order, and religious practice. Furthermore, sundials were not merely tools of practical utility in the Roman world. Rather, they were also ideological instruments, encoding Roman virtues of discipline, order, and domination.

From the mid-1st century BCE (63 BCE) and until the destruction in 70 CE, Jerusalem growingly became a part of the Roman empire and Roman culture, albeit with local inhibitions against full integration. While Judaea was reluctant to integrate Roman policy into its age-old religious tradition, some factors were indeed accepted. Judaeans resisted the Roman Julian calendar, a cornerstone of imperial ideology under Augustus and his heirs, but Roman-type sundials seem to have evoked no resistance in Judaea, which makes them a telling test-case for the study of influence and resistance. King Herod the Great and the subsequent provincial procurators promoted Roman cultural patterns in Judaea. At the same time, Jerusalem went through an enormous wave of growth and expansion, with mansions and private houses following the latest Roman fashion.