August 2012: The remains of thousands of Jews massacred by the Romans on the Temple Mount during the destruction of the Second Temple may have been uncovered, according to veteran archaeological journalist Benny Liss. Liss screened a video clearly showing thousands of human skeletons in what appears to be a mass grave. Liss stated that the film had been shot in a spacious, underground cavern in the area of the Mercy Gate [Sha'ar Harachamim in Hebrew, a sealed gate in the wall of the Old City, opposite the Mount of Olives, ed.], near the eastern wall of the Temple Mount, but just outside it.

The movie shows Liss entering the cave, followed by a lighting technician and cameraman. The three first pass through a narrow passage and then enter the cave with the skeletal remains. As soon as Liss left the cave, Antiquities Authority (IAA) staff resealed the entrance to it. Samples need to be taken from the site and dated. Liss raised the possibility that the skeletons were the remains of 6,000 Jews, mostly women and children, killed on the Temple Mount when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple.

The massacre is described in the writings of Josephus Flavius, who defected from the Jewish to the Roman side and witnessed the destruction.”The Romans stayed on the Temple Mount for a month after the destruction of the Temple until going on to conquer the upper city [today's Jewish Quarter].

September 2011: The well-preserved ruins of a gladiator school in Austria was mapped out by radar in the Austrian city of Carnuntum. The ruins are part of a city of 50,000 people 28 miles (45 kilometres) east of Vienna that flourished about 1,700 years ago, a major military and trade outpost linking the far-flung Roman empire’s Asian boundaries to its central and northern European lands.

The ruins of the gladiator school remain underground. Officials state the find rivals in its structure, the famous Ludus Magnus, the largest of the gladiatorial training schools in Rome. The Austrian site is more detailed than the well-known Roman ruin, down to the remains of a thick wooden post in the middle of the training area, a mock enemy that young, desperate gladiators hacked away at centuries ago. They lived in cells barely big enough to turn around in and usually fought until they died.

Digging at the city site began around 1870, but less than one per cent of it has been excavated, due to the enormity of what lies beneath and to the painstaking process of restoring what already has been unearthed. “If one has a major injury then you first do a series of CT scans before you let a surgeon do his work,” explained Wolfgang Neubauer, director of the Ludwig Bolzman Institute for Archaeological Prospecting and Virtual Archaeology. Neubauer stated an unusual and unexplained “white spot” on an aerial photograph led experts to scan the area with state-of-the-art radar that shows a three-dimensional image of what lies underground.

“(It’s) a clarity we normally find only in the field of medicine,” he stated. The same machines have been used at Britain’s Stonehenge and other European archaeological sites. A virtual video presentation of the former Carnuntum gladiator school showed images of the ruins underground shifting into what the complex must have looked like in the third century. It was definitely a school of hard knocks.

“A gladiator school was a mixture of a barracks and a prison, kind of a high-security facility,” stated the Roemisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, one of the institutes involved in finding and evaluating the discovery. “The fighters were often convicted criminals, prisoners-of-war, and usually slaves.”

Still, there were some perks for the men who sweated and bled for what they hoped would at least be a few brief moments of glory before their demise. At the end of a dusty and bruising day, they could pamper their bodies in baths with hot, cold and lukewarm water. And hearty meals of meat, grains and cereals were plentiful for the men who burned thousands of calories in battle each day for the entertainment of others.

Thick walls surround 11,000 square meters (13,160 sq. yards) of the site, and the school and its adjacent buildings stretch over 2,800 square meters ((3,350 square yards). Inside, a courtyard was ringed by living quarters and other buildings and contained a round, 19-square meter (23-square yard) training area, a small stadium overlooked by wooden seats and the terrace of the chief trainer.

The complex also contained about 40 tiny sleeping cells for the gladiators; a large bathing area; a training hall with heated floors and assorted administrative buildings. Outside the walls, radar scans show what archeologists believe was a cemetery for those killed during training.

The institute stated the training area was where the men’s “market value and in end effect their fate” was decided. At the same time, it gave them a small chance for survival, fame, and possibly liberty.”If they were successful, they had a chance to advance to ‘superstar’ status and maybe even achieve freedom,” stated Carnuntum park head Franz Humer.

The gladiator complex is part of a 10-square kilometre (3.9-square mile) site over the former city, an archaeological site now visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists a year. Officials state they had no date set for the start of excavations of the gladiator school, stating experts needed time to settle on a plan that conserves as much as possible.

The archaeological park Carnuntum stated the ruins were “unique in the world in their completeness and dimension.” “(This is) a world sensation, in the true meaning of the word,” stated Lower Austrian provincial Governor Erwin Proell.

Cradle of civilization: The earliest civilizations in history were established in the region now known as the Middle East around 3500 BC, in Mesopotamia (Iraq), widely regarded as the cradle of civilization. The Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians all flourished in this region.
Soon after the Sumerian civilization began, the Nile River valley of ancient Egypt was unified under the Pharaohs in the 4th millennium BC, and civilization quickly spread through the Fertile Crescent to the west coast of the Mediterranean Sea and throughout the Levant.

The Phoenicians, Israelites and others later built important states in this region.

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Persian Empire

From the 6th century BC onwards, several empires dominated the region, beginning with the Persian Empire of the Achaemenids, followed by the Macedonian Empire founded by Alexander the Great, and successor kingdoms such as Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid state in Syria.

The Persian Empire was later revived by the Parthians in the 2nd century BC and continued by the Sassanids from the 2nd century AD. This empire would dominate part of what is now considered the Middle East and continue to influence the rest of the Middle East region until the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century.

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Roman Empire

In the 1st century BC, the expanding Roman Republic absorbed the whole Eastern Mediterranean area (which included much of the Near East) and under the Roman Empire the region was united with most of Europe and North Africa in a single political and economic unit. Even areas not directly annexed became strongly influenced by the Empire, which became the most powerful political and cultural entity for centuries.

Although Latin culture spread into the region, the Greek culture and language first established in the region by the Macedonian Empire would continue to dominate throughout the Roman period. Cities in the Middle East, especially Alexandria, became major urban centers for the Empire and the region became the Empire’s “bread basket” as the key agricultural producer.

As the Christian religion spread throughout the Empire it took root in the Middle East and cities such as Alexandria became important centers of Christian scholarship. By the 5th century, Roman Christianity was the dominant religion in the Middle East with other faiths (gradually including heretical Christian sects) being actively repressed.

The Middle East’s ties to the city of Rome would gradually be severed as the Empire split into East and West with the Middle East becoming tied to the new Roman capital of Constantinople. The subsequent fall of Rome and the Western Roman Empire, therefore, had minimal direct impact on the region.

The Eastern Roman Empire, today commonly known as the Byzantine Empire, ruling from the Balkans to the Euphrates, became increasingly defined by and dogmatic about Christianity gradually creating religious rifts between the doctrines dictated by the establishment in Constantinople and believers in many parts of the Middle East.

At the time Greek had turned to the ‘lingua franca’ of the region, although ethnicities such as the Syriacs and the Hebrew continued to exist. Under Byzantine/Greek rule the area of the levant met an era of stability and prosperity.

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