Image and Reality: The Hasmoneans and Their Fortresses

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.

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The emergence of the Hasmonean dynasty in late Hellenistic Judea is well recorded in both 1 Maccabees and Flavius Josephus’s accounts. The narratives highlight their evolution from rebels against the Seleucid regime (170s BCE) to rulers of an independent Jewish state (late 140s BCE) and later a kingdom (late second/early first century BCE). One aspect of their rise, that these narratives highlight, is their many fortresses. Some of these fortresses have been identified but many remain unknown, and they have never been studied as a single system.

In this talk I will use the physical remains of the fortresses to compare the image and the reality of the Hasmoneans as builders. I will use results from my own excavations and studies of two fortresses in the Upper Galilee of northern Israel, which I identify as border posts built by King Alexander Jannaeus (r. 104–76 BCE). These results shed new light on several fortresses across the Jordan River, on the eastern margins of the Hasmonean realm. Together these remains reveal a strategy of monumental building projects on the kingdom’s peripheries.

Roi Sabar is an archaeologist specializing in classical archaeology of the southern Levant, and northern Israel in particular. His primary research interests revolve around socio-political processes and interactions as they are recorded and reflected in the material culture vis-à-vis historical accounts. He received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2023). His dissertation, The Galilee during the Hellenistic Period (Fourth – First c. BCE): Geopolitical Changes in Light of the Fortified Sites and Settlement History, examined the dynamics of a complex geopolitical system from a regional archaeological perspective. His current research endeavor is focused on archaeological data as proxies for state formation and identity formation processes. As a postdoc fellow in the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies Sabar’s project, State and Identity in Time and Space: A View from the Hasmonean Kingdom, is set to establish an international interdisciplinary scholarly network to study the heyday of the Hasmonean Kingdom.

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