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Fortress

Herodium

heh-ROH-dee-um · Modern Herodium, West Bank · 31.6658° N, 35.2414° E

Herodium was a palace-fortress built by Herod the Great starting around 23 BC, chosen by him as the site of his own tomb — contemporary with his reign at the time of Jesus's birth (Matthew 2). The site is instantly recognizable by its distinctive truncated-cone, volcano-like shape, artificially raised by Herod's engineers and visible from both Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

Archaeology

V. Corbo of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum led the first excavations from 1962 to 1967, uncovering the hilltop palace-fortress and its defensive towers; G. Foerster followed in 1968-69, and it is that season which produced the small copper-alloy ring later published as the Pilate Ring. E. Netzer of the Hebrew University then dug here across four decades from 1972. Finding Herod's burial place was the work of his career, and in May 2007, a month after the remains began to emerge, he announced at a press conference that he had found it: a ruined two-storey mausoleum on the slope, with fragments of three sarcophagi, one of them a reddish stone smashed into hundreds of pieces. Netzer died in October 2010 after a railing gave way at the site, three days after the fall, at the age of 76. R. Porat, who took over the excavation, has maintained the identification. It is disputed, and the dispute deserves stating rather than gesturing at. J. Patrich and B. Arubas set out four objections in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly in 2015: the mausoleum's dimensions are modest, roughly ten metres square and some twenty-five metres high, for the tomb of a king of Herod's reputation after more than thirty years on the throne; there is no appropriate gateway or assembly space in front of it; it stands in the shadow of the monumental stairway and off every axis of symmetry, invisible from Lower Herodium and from the direction of Jerusalem, which is not how Herod built; and a stratigraphic argument tells against it as well. Their own framing is that Netzer's account of Herodian architecture is right, and that this monument does not fit it. They add that they had hoped to walk the site with him and put the case in person, and that he died before they could. Their paper is hosted on the excavation project's own website, which is worth knowing about a dispute of this kind. Where the matter stands: a monumental Herodian-period mausoleum was certainly found, and whether it is Herod's own tomb is an open question between serious people.

Aerial view of Herodium showing its distinctive volcano-like conical mound with excavated palace ruins at the summit.
Aerial view of Herodium showing its distinctive volcano-like conical mound with excavated palace ruins at the summit. — source & licence
Ground-level view of excavated palace ruins at Herodium, showing stone walls and structural remains of Herod's fortress complex.
Ground-level view of excavated palace ruins at Herodium, showing stone walls and structural remains of Herod's fortress complex. — source & licence

On a modern map

Herodium today

Further reading

Reflect

Herod moved a hill to build a monument to himself, and it stands today as a ruin — what are you building, and how long will it matter?

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