A LONG WAY DOWN

The soil was loose. I lay against the slope, feeling like nothing so much as a one-man, half-mile landslide waiting to happen.

But Michael Eisenberg seems quite at home on this steep incline 1,000 meters up — even under tons of rock ready to fall if you so much as look at it the wrong way.

The last time an enemy managed to breach these walls and conquer ancient Hippos was probably 2,200 years ago.

Now, however, time and the elements are undermining the formidable defenses of this mountaintop city.

At a western extremity, the endmost of the 1.5-meter-long basalt beams supporting the wall remain implanted only about 10 centimeters into the Roman support matrix — most of which has long since fallen away.

This gives us a great look at how the Romans built walls — but Eisenberg knows he’d better get that corner shored up fast. One little earthquake will collapse it, he thinks — or it may even come down with a few winter rains.


FORBIDDING MOUNTAINTOP

Eisenberg, assistant director at the Hippos dig, leads excavation of the city walls ringing the mountain fortress like a headband.

Its defenses mirror the city’s history: Sturdy Roman walls cut earlier Hellenistic fortifications. In turn, later and flimsier Byzantine walls overlay the Roman defenses.

Hippos is such a forbidding mountaintop you wouldn’t think it would need fortification. Nevertheless, for centuries it had sophisticated defenses.

“It would have been almost the perfect choice to locate a fort or a city during the Hellenistic period,” says Eisenberg. “But such natural conditions could be easily bridged by the enemy. The plateau on which the city was established must have a surrounding wall.”

Its defenses worked, for the most part. Hippos was captured only once that we know of, according to Josephus — in about 100 BCE by the Jewish leader Alexander Jannaeus. We think we have a well-stratified burn layer at about that time.

Historical sources say the city was seized by Jannaeus the Hasmonean king during his second conquest expedition to the region in around 83 BCE.

The cities of the Decapolis, one of them Hippos, fought to keep their freedom and their pagan culture. At Hippos, however, Jannaeus prevailed — and probably forced the losers to convert to Judaism or get out of town.

At that point, probably, many inhabitants departed. But the conquerer left his mark: In 2006, we found our first coin of Jannaeus at the site.


MUSCLED UP

All this was before the Romans entered Judaea and muscled up the city’s defenses. Excavators have exposed a 6.2-meter wide vaulted chamber on the southern wall, its only access facing outward. Eisenberg’s guess is that it’s a catapult garage.

These stern Roman defenses relaxed over the centuries. In fact, luxury-loving Byzantines took out part of the Roman fortification to build a bathhouse on the south city wall.

Why a bathhouse here? “Consider the view!” says square leader Ranin Noufi of the University of Haifa with a sweep of her arm. The city’s southern wall overlooks the hazy blue of the Sea of Galilee.

In its later phases, Hippos may have barely risen to the level of a fortified city. “We have towers, so I wouldn’t go as far as to say during Byzantine times the city wasn’t fortified,” says Eisenberg, “but the fortifications were much less sophisticated.”


FEAR OF HEIGHTS

The big mystery for Eisenberg is the plan for the fortifications in Roman and Hellenistic times. He has glimpses but not the big picture — and it doesn’t help that the businesslike Romans rooted out Hellenistic walls to build their own sturdy fortifications.

Clues may come from ongoing excavation at the south wall — and new squares on the northern side of the city just opened last week.

The northern approaches are even steeper and more formidable than the south. If you want to excavate these walls — you’d better not be afraid of heights.

A prankish volunteer christened a northern square this week by throwing a 15-kilo lunk of limestone into the abyss below.

It shattered on the first bounce and we watched the pieces bound down the fearsome slope until we could no longer see them.

It seemed like a very long time before we heard the final, sharp stone-on-stone crash from far, far below. We hope they’re careful over there.