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Professor Reich standing in the ancient tunnel (photo: Flash90)
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| By Israel Insider staff September 10, 2007 |
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Israeli archeologists on Sunday said they discovered, by chance, the site of one of the great arenas of the Roman sacking of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago -- the subterranean drainage channel that Jews used to escape from the city's Roman conquerors, according to the Jerusalem Post.
"According to Josephus, the historian who recorded the siege, occupation and destruction of Jerusalem, people found refuge in the drain until they managed to escape through the city's southern gate," the Israel Antiquities Authority said, Haaretz reported.
The ancient tunnel was dug beneath what would become the main road of Jerusalem in the days of the second biblical Temple, which the Romans destroyed in the year 70, according to the dig's directors, archaeology Professor Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli Shukron.
According to Reich, pottery shards, archeologists found vessel fragments and coins from the end of the Second Temple period inside the channel, attesting to its age.
The discovery "shows you planning on a grand scale, unlike other cities in the ancient Near East," anthropologist Joe Zias said, an expert in the Second Temple period.
Adding to the channel's significance is its role as an escape hatch for Jews desperate to flee the conquering Romans, according to the dig's directors.
"It was a place where people hid and fled to from burning, destroyed Jerusalem," Shukron said.
The archeologists said that the discovery was purely accidental.
"We were looking for the road and suddenly we discovered it," Shukron said. "And the first thing we said was, 'Wow.'"
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