NAILED SHOE

Every so often someone who lived in the ancient city of Hippos steps right up in front of us.

It happened against last week.

As a result, we could almost hear Roman legions on the march.

The Roman soldier trod much of the world, enforced the Pax Romana and defended the Empire at its height.

He was fiercely loyal to his commander and helped decide who would be emperor.

He could fight hand-to-hand with unsurpassed courage — but he also sometimes fled in terror.

He stood long, lonely hours of guard duty dreaming about retiring to a small farm where he could live peacefully with his wife and children.

And this is the footgear he laced on daily.

It doesn’t put a face on him. It does, however, give him — well, a sole.


SLOW WORK

Ranin Noufi, a graduate student at the University of Haifa, wasn’t even sure she was seeing what she saw. She swept off the dust — and there he was.

Yet like a good scientist she asked for another opinion. She called for Micahel Eisenberg, assistant dig director at Hippos.

He agreed it was a footprint. “My first big find,” says Ranin quietly.

Slow work becomes standard at this stage of the season, and Ranin was going slowly. “I was brushing the head of the wall plaster,” she says.

She discerned some order in the dust — two rows of dot-like impressions. “I asked someone, ‘Doesn’t it look like a footprint?’” she says. The other observer agreed. “I cleaned it some more and then I called Micahel.”

It’s a little hard to see. You have to look carefully. And yet amid the monumental architecture of Hippos, this footprint stands out. It’s very human. “Yes, it is,” Ranin agrees. “And it’s almost my size — two centimeters longer.”

It means that someone atop the city wall at Hippos — probably a soldier, perhaps a soldier-builder — stepped toward the Sea of Galilee to the southwest. It would have been during or after the first century BCE, when such footgear came into use for soldiers.

We have only one certain footprint — as though our soldier quickly realized the plaster was wet and pulled back.


POOR FOOTING

These nailed soles conquered and held an empire — but failed a centurion on the smooth stones of the Temple floor in Jerusalem.

In his Wars of the Jews, Josephus writes that in the siege of Jerusalem of 70 CE a Roman centurion named Julian was shut up with his commander, the future emperor Titus, in the tower of Antonia.

Julian launched a one-man counterattack against the counter-besieging defenders.

Julian “of himself alone put the Jews to flight, when they were already conquerors, and made them retire as far as the corner of the inner court of the temple,” writes Josephus.

“From him the multitude fled away in crowds, as supposing that neither his strength nor his violent attacks could be those of a mere man.”

But Julian’s shoes had “thick and sharp nails, as had every one of the other soldiers, so when he ran on the pavement of the temple, he slipped, and fell down upon his back with a very great noise, which was made by his armor.”

Julian fought heroically but the city’s defenders overwhelmed him, says Josephus.


OUT OF THE MIST

That’s our footprint. Ranin’s find, however, changes nothing about the plan for excavating along the southern fortifications.

She has no room to dig further back from the wall just here because the ridge of earth her excavators have already taken out of the mountain is too near and the tractor has no time to come and haul it away this season.

At Hippos, others who have stepped out of the mists include the beloved Antona, a deaconess honored in an inscription in the mosaic of the North West Church. Excavation of that church by a Polish team is nearly complete.

We know nothing else about Antona. It’s tempting to think she’s the tiny old woman afflicted with osteoporosis who was buried in a sacred place in the nearby North East Church under excavation by an American team. But we don’t know.

Another inscription carved into a column found in the Forum reports that a rich couple — a man and his “synbios” — his “life-together,” his wife — provided the funds for something in this remarkable city, also called Susita, in about 230 CE.

We wonder if someone else will step out of the mists of time. “Maybe we’ll find a handprint,” muses Ranin.

It’s the last week of our short, four-week season here — and archaeologists hint darkly that interesting things tend to happen at the very end of the season.