Islamic-era Roman Bathhouse Found

Only it was totally out of place and smack in the middle of the remains of a fortress from the Early Islamic period of the ninth century, over half a millennium after the Romans had been forcibly removed from the Holy Land by Muslim warriors. “I thought perhaps we had reached a Byzantine layer, but the pottery shards we found and the edifice we were in were definitely from the Islamic period,” Moshe Fischer, a professor of archaeology at the university, said. “It was unusual because whoever built it used the technology from an earlier era, and it could be one of the last uses of this technology we find,” Fischer said.

Yavneh-Yam was a port that served inland settlements almost without interruption between the Bronze Age (mid-second millennium BC) until the Middle Ages. Fischer said the promontory that it sits on forms the southern boundary of a natural harbor.

He said they uncovered the remains of a bathhouse which was the only example he knew in the region of the use of a Roman-style bathhouse during the Early Islamic period and also the only example, so far, of the existence of a bathhouse in a military fortress. “It could be that some local commander who behaved like a Don Juan decided to build this style of bathhouse,” Fischer said. “It wasn’t that they didn’t take baths—they did for sure—but that they used a Roman-style bathhouse was a surprise.”

According to Fischer, both the fortification and the bathhouse discovered this year add to the archaeological evidence connecting Yavneh-Yam to the marine fortress of “Mahoz Yubna” (The Harbor of Yavneh), which served among other things to protect the coastal region. It was also used as a transit point for exchanging prisoners between Muslims and Christians in the Early Islamic Period.