Ancient World Seminar: Jürgen Zangenberg (Leiden), “A Hill with a View. Ten years of Kinneret Regional Project's excavations at Horvat Kur / Galilee”

Abstract

Since 2007, Kinneret Regional Project conducted archaeological explorations on the Galilean hill site at Horvat Kur 2km northwest of the Lake of Galilee. Searching for a Hellenistic-Roman village, the team discovered a Late Roman-Byzantine synagogue in 2010 which has been fully excavated until 2018. Apart from several building phases that add to our knowledge of the design of Galilean synagogues, excavations brought very interesting finds to light: remains of a bemah, a stone table with strange decoration, a stone seat of the community leader, indications for a balcony, fragments of a mosaic with the depiction of a menorah and a few surprises that only the presentation will disclose. Kinneret Regional Project's excavations at Horvat Kur have brought Jewish village life in the Byzantine period back to light.

About the speaker

Jürgen K. Zangenberg is Professor for the History and Culture of Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity at Leiden University. He earned PhD and Habilitation degrees in New Testament Studies and held positions in New Testament, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity in Germany, the US and the Netherlands. Since being a student in Heidelberg, Zangenberg has been active as archaeologist at several sites in Jordan and Israel. For more than 15 years he co-directed excavations at Tel Kinrot and Horvat Kur in the Galilee conducted by Kinneret Regional Project with colleagues from Switzerland, Finland and the US . Convinced that texts only tell us "half the story" about ancient societies (if at all), his research interests cover literary as well as material culture, on both of which he has published widely.