Ian Stern

A molded bronze ornament of a mouse was discovered within one of the thousands of subterranean chambers in the Hellenistic period city of Maresha. Excavations in this city, located in the Judean lowlands have revealed a material culture that reflects a multicultural population with a high standard of living and a keen sense of aesthetics. The artifact under discussion was found within the excavated debris of Subterranean Complex 97. The function of this small statuette may have been simply ornamental, but cultic associations with mice in the Hellenistic world abound. This paper will explore archaeological parallels as well as contemporary literary sources in order to better understand the potential functions of this discovery.

The Phalli of Maresha ( Paper given May 28, 2015 at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, at the conference "Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll in Archaeology"

In the Hellenistic World great importance was attached to physical beauty. Many iconographic representations of male beauty can be found from this period of time with special value accorded to the foreskin of the penis.
The intensity with which the Greeks esteemed the foreskin was equaled by the passion with which they deplored circumcision. Recent excavations at Maresha have revealed 18 chalk and one ceramic phallus. All of them apparently circumcised. In this paper I will relate to the Hellenistic perspective of the male phallus, how it is depicted in their art and literature, and how this relates to their perspective on circumcision.  Furthermore, I wish to look at how this impacts on our understanding of the inhabitants of Maresha at this time as well as Josephus vis a vis the conversion of the Idumeans by John Hyrcanus.

Excavations at Hellenistic Maresha have revealed an eclectic material culture which includes, on the one hand, generic Levantine characteristics, such as pig avoidance, ossilegium, circumcision and even certain aniconic tendencies, and, on the other hand, features with a distinctly Judean affiliation: ritual bathing facilities and the hundreds of punctured vessels which seem to suggest Judean purity laws.  In harsh contrast, there is an almost total disconnect between Maresha and Judea with respect to the ceramic repertoire.  Ceramic parallels are primarily from coastal Hellenistic-period pagan sites; Phoenician, Greek and Egyptian influences are prevalent as well.  This suggests a lack of exchange and even deliberate isolation from Judea. This hybridized material culture assemblage would appear to reflect a hybridized group identity—a Maresha/Idumean identity.  This paper will discuss this identity in its historical context from Iron Age Edom to the second half of the second century BCE, up until the conquest of Maresha by John Hyrcanus I.

Four engravings (graffiti) of ships dating from the end of the 4th to the 3rd century BCE were recently uncovered in Subterranean Complex 89, located in the southeastern part of lower Maresha. Three of the engravings represent battleships and the fourth is a merchant ship. In addition to the four engravings, three other engravings were previously discovered at Maresha. While images of merchant ships have been documented in the past, this is the first time that warships have been documented from Maresha. The highlight is an engraving depicting a very long warship (190 cm), the largest ever found in the world. The artist focused mainly on the bow and ram similar to that found in the sea at ʿAtlit. The bow of the ship is typical of a Macedonian warship. This type of bow first appears on coins minted in Arados in honor of Alexander the
Great after 332 BCE and on the coins of Demetrius Poliorcetes following his victory over Ptolemy I Soter at the Battle of Salamis in 306 BCE.
What do these engravings of the ships at Maresha describe and what is their backstory? Maresha, which is approximately 35 km away from the sea, became a cosmopolitan city with vast commercial connections during the Hellenistic period (and perhaps even earlier at the end of the Persian period). It is safe to assume that Phoenicians from Sidon, possibly seafarers, were included in its population. Some of the engravings of ships may be commemorating an event or events that were the fate of their creators, and some may even have been dedicated as ex-voto.
Many of the details of the ships were made with such great skill that only a talented seafarer, combining visual and experiential memory, could have been so precise in their portrayal. The choice to engrave a depiction of ships may have been a commemoration of a memory that extends beyond the physical boundaries of Maresha and reflects a connection with the world beyond the sea.

Literally thousands of subterranean chambers honeycomb the rock below the lower city of Maresha. While the vast majority of these chambers were quarries, hewn to provide building material for the construction of dwellings and other structures above, a fair number of them were accommodated to serve other purposes. To date, excavations and surveys recorded 336 cisterns, 27 olive presses, 85 columbaria, 60 baths, seven stables, as well as countless silos, tombs, cultic areas, and quarries. In this preliminary study, I wish to present a number of observations that reflect the city's high standard of living and demonstrate that it extended to the subterranean work areas as well. Next, I consider more closely the evidence for the later repurposing of these spaces and deliberate on historical and economic factors that may have driven these transformations.

Excavations at Hellenistic Maresha have revealed an eclectic material culture which includes, on the one hand, generic Levantine characteristics, such as pig avoidance, ossilegium, circumcision and even certain aniconic tendencies, and, on the other hand, features with a distinctly Judean affiliation: ritual bathing facilities and the hundreds of punctured vessels which seem to suggest Judean purity laws.  In harsh contrast, there is an almost total disconnect between Maresha and Judea with respect to the ceramic repertoire.  Ceramic parallels are primarily from coastal Hellenistic-period pagan sites; Phoenician, Greek and Egyptian influences are prevalent as well.  This suggests a lack of exchange and even deliberate isolation from Judea. This hybridized material culture assemblage would appear to reflect a hybridized group identity—a Maresha/Idumean identity.  This paper will discuss this identity in its historical context from Iron Age Edom to the second half of the second century BCE, up until the conquest of Maresha by John Hyrcanus I.

A number of stone fragments from portable game boards were discovered in the excavations at Maresha. The fragmentary nature and poor state of preservation of the boards limit us to only tentative identification of the specific games. Most of our game boards were discovered in contexts that contained astragals, pessoi, counters, as well as divination material. Games in antiquity are known to have been both a means of entertainment as well as a tangible medium through which to communicate with the gods. Murray expressed the general conundrum regarding the use of such boards: "Implements of chance by themselves establish nothing since they have been used from the earliest times for divination or simple gambling2." Or, to put it differently, game boards could certainly be used for entertainment purposes but their actual use in any particular situation can be better understood from their context. The discovery of an extraordinary number of other cultic finds such as altars, stone phalli, votive stamps, kernos lamps, and figurines, in the same archaeological context along with most of these boards, points to a cultic connection. However, we must bear in mind that these activities were not mutually exclusive. This paper will discuss the different game boards and other "gaming" items discovered at Maresha and suggest their possible functions within the contexts they were found.