Fascinating Biblical and Biblical Era Archaeology

20. A Bookworm King

The Neo Assyrian Empire, founded in the tenth century BC, became the world’s biggest state until then, and dominated the Middle East before it collapsed in 609 BC. Ashurbanipal was not just a great military commander, but also an intellectual, which was rare for rulers back then. He was literate, mastered multiple languages, and passionately collected texts and tablets. He hired scribes to copy writings, and sent others across the empire to find more. Ashurbanipal seized texts from defeated enemies as booty, and used military threats to convince neighbors to send him writings from their countries.

19. Finding an Ancient Library

In 1849, British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard excavated Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh, in today’s Iraq. It contained more than 30,000 tablets and writing boards. Many were severely fragmented, but many were still recoverable and legible. They included financial and religious documents, diplomatic correspondence, laws, plus texts on literature, medicine, and astronomy. The greatest discovery in the library was The Epic of Gilgamesh. A masterpiece of ancient Babylonian poetry, it dates to the third millennium BC, and is considered to be humanity’s oldest known literary work.

18. Were the Pyramids Built by Ancient Israelite Slaves?

In a 1977 Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin raised hackles when, during a visit to Egypt’s National Museum, he stated: “We built the pyramids“. Begin voiced a common perception held by many who extrapolated from the Old Testament’s Book of Exodus about the enslavement of Jews in Egypt, that ancient Israelites had built the Pyramids. That narrative has been expressed frequently in fiction, film, and sundry cultural references from comics to cartoons to songs.

It is, however, a myth. The Pyramids were not constructed by slaves. As seen below, they were built by professional builders, aided by armies of peasant laborers working in the off season. All were compensated – and in the case of the professional builders, well compensated – for their work. As to the claim that they were built by Jewish slaves, Jews were not even in Egypt at the time the Pyramids were built.

17. Did Slaves Build the Pyramids?

Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza, built around 2530 BC for the Pharaoh Khufu, was the world’s biggest building until the early twentieth century. Its construction had been a massive endeavor that involved moving and piling up six and a half million tons of stone, in blocks weighing as much as nine tons each. All of that was accomplished via manual labor, using little more than ropes and wood. The Old Testament’s portrayal of the Ancient Israelites’ forced labor for Pharaoh popularized the notion that widespread slave labor was common in Ancient Egypt.

Ancient Greek writers such as Herodotus and subsequent historians, fiction, as well as film in the modern era, further cemented the perception that the Pharaohs used slave labor for their great building projects. As a result, the notion that slaves – and specifically, ancient Israelite slaves – had built the Egyptian pyramids became entrenched in the popular imagination.

16. Debunking a Myth

Inside the Great Pyramids there is graffiti by the workers who built the monuments that has long suggested the builders were not slaves. Still, the idea that the pyramids were built by slaves remained widespread until Egyptologists discovered the city of the Great Pyramids’ builders in 1977. Excavations at the site further demonstrated that the builders were not slaves.

Then, in 2010, archaeologists unearthed the tombs of the Great Pyramids’ builders. Their contents finally and conclusively debunked the notion that the edifices had been built by slave labor. The modest tombs, which held the perfectly preserved skeletons of about a dozen pyramid workers, showed that their occupants were paid laborers, not slaves.

15. The Real Pyramid Builders

The people who built the Great Pyramids hailed from poor families from all over Egypt. They were not only paid for their work, but were so respected for that work that those who died during construction were honored by burial near the tombs of the sacred pharaohs. The proximity of their burial to the sacred sites, and the care taken in preparing their bodies for their journeys to the afterlife, disproves the notion that the builders were slaves. Slaves would simply never have been afforded such honors.

14. A Civilization That Spanned Thousands of Years

Ancient Egypt’s civilization lasted for a seriously long time, from before the Great Pyramids construction to the annexation of Egypt by the Romans, circa 30 BC. To put it into perspective, consider this: we are temporally closer to Ancient Egypt’s queen Cleopatra than she was to the Great Pyramids. Fewer years separate us from Cleopatra (69 – 30 BC), than separate Cleopatra from the Great Pyramid’s construction.

Cleopatra committed suicide in 30 BC, or 2055 years ago at the time of this writing in 2025. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2580 BC, about 2510 years before Cleopatra was born. So in 2025 Cleopatra is roughly 455 years closer to us than she was to the construction of the Great Pyramid. And the Great Pyramid was not built at the start of the ancient Egyptian civilization, but more than five centuries after it began, sometime around 3150 BC.

13. The Great Pyramids and Ice Age Denizens

The Great Pyramids are so old that they coexisted with the Ice Age’s most famous extinct animal. When, actually, did woolly mammoths go extinct? The Ice Age ended about twelve thousand years ago, circa 9700 BC. It is widely assumed that woolly mammoths must have gone extinct sometime around then, if not sooner.

However, woolly mammoths did not completely vanish at the end of the Ice Age. While no man ever saw a live dinosaur, mankind and its hominid ancestors did share the planet with woolly mammoths for hundreds of thousands of years. The hairy pachyderms were still around while the Ancient Egyptians were busy building the Great Pyramids.

12. Woolly Mammoths Were Still Around When the Pyramids Were Built

Most woolly mammoths were hunted by humans into extinction and disappeared from the continental mainland of Eurasia and North America between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago. The last mainland population, in the Kyttyk Peninsula in Siberia, vanished about 9650 years ago. However, small populations survived in offshore islands, such as Saint Paul Island in Alaska, where woolly mammoths existed until 5600 years ago.

The last known population survived in Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, until 4000 years ago, or roughly 2000 BC. That was well into the era of human civilization and recorded human history. By the time the last woolly mammoth died, the ancient Egyptian civilization had been around for more than a thousand years. The Great Pyramids of Giza, whose construction concluded around 2560 BC, were already centuries old before woolly mammoths finally went extinct.

11. The Death of the Ancient Egyptian Language

Ancient Egypt was a great and highly influential civilization, but for centuries, little was known about its history. It was not because the ancient Egyptian did not leave behind written records, but because nobody could read those records. After Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BC, Greek became the language of the ruling elite. Native Egyptian writing, whether colorfully picturesque hieroglyphs found on the walls of temples and monuments, or the simpler daily use demotic script, went into a steady decline.

For a while, hieroglyphs continued to be used by priests, and demotic continued to be used by commoners. However, as century succeeded century with Egypt being ruled by foreigners who used their own languages, native Egyptian writing waned. The spread of Christianity eventually killed off the ancient Egyptian religion, and as the old gods’ priests vanished, so did their knowledge of hieroglyphs.

10. The Undecipherable Hieroglyphics

Centuries after Christianity reached Egypt, Islam arrived with Arabs and the Arabic language, which killed off Egypt’s demotic language and script as well. Eventually, knowledge of ancient Egyptian writing vanished. What was left was a country full of ancient monuments, covered with colorful and intriguing texts and symbols that nobody could make head or tails of.

Then Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798. Pierre Bouchard was a French army captain who accompanied the expedition to Egypt. On August 21^st, 1799, as he supervised the restoration of an old fort near the town of Rosetta, Bouchard’s men uncovered a block of basalt three feet and nine inches high, and two feet and four inches wide. It was inscribed with three different types of writing – Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Egyptian demotic scripts.

9. Unraveling the Secrets of a Dead Language

Captain Bouchard immediately grasped the significance of what came to be known as the Rosetta Stone. He promptly alerted a team of French scholars who had accompanied Napoleon to Egypt. Nobody knew how to read hieroglyphs or demotic, but scholars could read Greek, and the Greek text informed archaeologists that the stone honored second century BC King Ptolemy V.

More importantly, the Greek text declared that the three scripts contained the identical message. The Rosetta Stone thus held the key to solving the riddle of the hitherto unreadable ancient Egyptian writing. Several scholars made initial progress in cracking the hieroglyphs, until Jean-Francois Champollion conclusively cracked the code in 1822. From then on, the language, history, and culture of ancient Egypt was opened to scholars as never before.

8. A Biblical King’s Fortress

In his history of the Great Jewish Revolt, the Romanized Jewish historian Josephus describes a last stand by a band of Jewish fanatics who holed up in a hilltop fortress known as the Masada. About to get overrun by Roman besiegers, its defenders refused to surrender and instead slew their families, and then themselves.

Built in the first century BC atop on high ground that rises about 1300 feet above the surrounding terrain, Masada is located in the Judean Desert overlooking the Dead Sea’s western shore, about twelve miles from modern Arad in Israel. King Herod the Great of Judea – the one to whom the New Testament’s Massacre of the Innocents at the time of Jesus’ birth is ascribed – enclosed its summit with walls and towers, and built store rooms, intending it to serve as a refuge in case of trouble.

7. The Ruins of the Masada

Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin oversaw excavations in the 1960s that uncovered Herod’s palaces, ritual baths, a funerary urn storage, storerooms that still had food traces, a synagogue, a chapel, and given how much time had passed since it was last used, some well-preserved remains. As things turned out, Herod did not need his hilltop desert fortress.

A century later, however, Masada became famous – or at the time, infamous – as the site of a last stand of ancient terrorists. In the modern era, the last stand at the Masada has been reinterpreted as a heroic symbol of defiance, and played and still plays a prominent role in Israeli national identity. At the end of their basic training, soldiers of the Israeli Armored Corps perform their swearing in at top of the hilltop fortresses’ ruins, in a ceremony that ends with the vow: “Masada shall not fall again“.

6. From a Biblical King’s Fortress to UNESCO World Heritage Site

Today, Masada’s ruins are a UNESCO World Heritage Site and popular tourist destination that draws about 750,000 visitors yearly. Its legend began when the Romans besieged the fortress, and their engineers began a ramp that daily brought the legionaries closer to the rebels. When it became clear that the fortress was bound to fall, the defenders committed mass suicide, killing their wives and children, then each other. 960 people died, and when the Romans finally entered Masada, only two women and five children were still alive.

The defenders, known as the Sicarii, were a militant faction of the Zealots, a first century AD Jewish faction that sought to launch a rebellion to free Judea from Rome’s yoke. Their efforts led to the Great Jewish Revolt of 66 – 73 AD. While the Zealots were radical, their Sicarii splinter went to extremes that qualify them as history’s earliest identifiable terrorists.

5. The Radicals Forever Associated With the Masada

Sicarii, meaning “dagger men” in Latin, got their name from the kind of knife known as the sica (plural sicae) that they used to slay their victims. They aimed to rid Judea of the Romans and their Jewish collaborators, and resorted to terrorism and assassination to accomplish their goal. They hid in crowds at public gatherings, waited for opportune moments, then charged their targets, stabbed them, and escaped in the resulstant confusion and panic by blending into the crowd.

They chiefly targeted the pro-Roman Jewish aristocracy, whom they slaughtered and whose estates they torched. Eventually, the Sicarii turned to kidnapping and hostage taking for ransom. Their prominent victims included a High Priest of the Jewish Temple, after whose killing they went on an assassination spree that terrorized Judea’s upper strata of Jews and Romans.

4. Terrorism in the Biblical Era

Sicarii victims, particularly Imperial officials, were often targeted in a deliberate attempt to provoke the Romans, who needed little provocation to massacre and collectively punish the Jewish population. That kept the embers of discontent smoldering, lit new flames of resentment, and ensured a steady stream of new recruits and sympathizers from the families and friends of the Romans’ victims.

Sicarii terrorism had many modern traits. They engaged in sabotage to worsen the populace’s living conditions and keep them disgruntled. Faced with an occupier prone to indiscriminate violence, the Sicarii deliberately provoked the Romans by committing atrocities that all but guaranteed massive Roman retaliation. As seen below, that forced the hands of many fence sitters by presenting them with unenviable choices.

3. The Great Jewish Revolt

After Sicarii depredations aroused Rome’s ire, uncommitted Jews had to get off the fence. Doing nothing would not have kept them from getting massacred or enslaved by angry Romans, in no mood to distinguish “good” Jews from bad. Alternatively, they could join the resistance and hope to gain freedom, or at least the dignity of dying while fighting.

In the run up to the Jewish Revolt, the Roman governor responded to tax protests by arresting prominent Jews and looting Jerusalem’s Temple. The protests escalated into a full blown revolt that forced the Romans and their pet king to flee Judea. Early on, the Sicarii attacked and seized the fortress of Masada near the Dead Sea, then descended upon nearby Roman enclaves to massacre whomever they could find. They slew over 700 Roman women and children.

2. Ancient Extremists

Massacring Romans ensured that there could be no turning back, and thus solidified Sicarii ranks. It also confronted other Jews with the prospect of massive retaliation and collective punishment of the innocent and guilty alike if the Romans won. The Sicarii then joined the Zealots and other rebels to attack Jerusalem, which they liberated in 66 AD. They then began to slaughter known and suspected collaborators en masse.

Sicarii victims included opponents, suspected opponents, and those who failed to display sufficient enthusiasm in supporting the Sicarii. Their extremism led to a backlash and uprising by the city’s population, and a falling out with the other rebels. The popular uprising ended in Sicarii defeat, the capture, torture, and execution of their leader, and the group’s expulsion from Jerusalem. The survivors fled to the fortress of Masada.

1. The Legend of the Masada

The Sicarii remnants holed up in the Masada contented themselves with plundering the surrounding countryside. In the meantime, the Zealots and other radicals managed to crush the popular backlash and retained control of Jerusalem until it was besieged, conquered, and razed by the Romans in 70 AD. The Romans then began mopping up operations, and eventually reached the final holdouts in Masada. Considering all they had done, the prospects of leniency were slim if the Romans got a hold of the Sicarii. Rather than face what was bound to be an unenviable fate if they were captured alive, the defenders opted for mass suicide.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Ahmed, Sami Said – Southern Mesopotamia in the Time of Ashurbanipal (2018)

Ben-Yehuda, Nachman – Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (1996)

British Museum – Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Rosetta Stone

Discovering Ancient Egypt – Mystery of the Rosetta Stone

Encyclopedia Britannica – Cleopatra

Encyclopedia Britannica – Sicarii

Encyclopedia Britannica – Sir Austen Henry Layard

Freud’s Butcher – The Jews, the Pyramids, and the Importance of Questioning

Gonick, Larry – The Cartoon History of the Universe: Volumes 1 – 7, From the Big Bang to Alexander the Great (1990)

Guardian, The, January 11^th, 2010 – Great Pyramid Tombs Unearth Proof Workers Were Not Slaves

Harvard Magazine, July-August 2003 – Who Built the Pyramids?

History Collection – Every Day Life in Ancient Rome Was Funnier and More Scandalous Than Historians Let On

Jewish Chronicle, September 17^th, 2018 – I Told Menachem Begin: The Pyramids Were Not Built by the Israelites

Jewish News of Northern California, January 15^th, 2010 – Egypt Unveils More Proof That Jews Did Not Build Pyramids

Josephus – The Wars of the Jews

National Geographic, July 9^th, 2017 – We Could Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth: Here’s How

Pearlman, Yoshe – The Zealots of Masada: Story of a Dig (1967)

Smallwood, Edith Mary – The Jews Under Roman Rule: From Pompey to Diocletian (1976)

World Atlas – Did Woolly Mammoths Still Roam Parts of the Earth When the Great Pyramids Were Built?