1,800-Year-Old Roman Road Unearthed in Israel
A section of a 1,800-year-old ancient road from the Roman period running from Jerusalem to Jaffa was uncovered in northern Jerusalem.
The road was discovered during excavations by the Israel Antiquities Authority in the Israeli-Arab neighborhood of Beit Hanina in advance of the installation of a drainage pipe.
The road made of large, flat stones and bound on both sides by curbstones is badly worn in some areas, indicating that it was used extensively and repaired several times.
Other segments of the road had been excavated previously by the Antiquities Authority, but nothing as well preserved as the section recently uncovered in Jerusalem, David Yeger, excavation director on behalf of the authority, said in a statement.
“The Romans attached great importance to the roads in the empire,” he said. “They invested large sums of money and utilized the most advanced technological aids of the period in order to crisscross the empire with roads.”
The Beit Hanina section was part of a Roman road that ran to the coast following the same path as the modern Route 443.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO