希律王遗址被发现 King Herod Revealed

King Herod Revealed
希律王遗址被发现

Herod: The Holy Land's Visionary Builder
Long reviled as a villain, Herod was one of the most imaginative and energetic builders of the ancient world, guiding his kingdom to new prosperity and power. His unearthed tomb reflects both his cruelty and his brilliance.

大风车带你看真实的世界


在耶路撒冷南方约13公里处，最后几棵矮小的橄榄树和多石的玉米田逐渐融进犹大沙漠光秃秃的不毛之地；一座小山在这儿兀然耸立。这座陡峭的锥形丘少掉了顶颠，状似一座小火山。这就是希律堡，犹太国王希律大帝的建筑杰作之一。他将低矮的小丘变成了一座用雪白石材砌成的高耸纪念碑，并在周围添上提供娱乐的宫殿、戏水池和露台花园。身为精明慷慨的统治者、杰出的将领和古代世界最有创造力、最积极的建筑者之一，希律王带领他的王国成就了新的繁荣与势力。然而，今日他最为人所知的身分却是《马太福音》中那个狡猾凶残的君主；为了除掉刚诞生的耶稣，也就是预言中犹太人的王，他屠杀了伯利恆的每一个男婴，但最后并未达到目的。中世纪时，他成了敌基督的化身：绘制精美的手稿和歌德式滴水嘴都描绘了他疯狂暴怒地扯着自己的鬍子、对不幸的婴孩挥舞着长剑，同时撒旦在他耳边窃窃私语的样子。就这桩罪行而言，希律王几乎可以肯定是无辜的；除了《马太福音》外，没有任何文献记载这件事。不过他确实有残杀婴儿，包括三个他自己的儿子，连同他的妻子、岳母，以及宫廷内的众多成员。在希律王的一生中，他以挑战现代人想像的方式融合了创意与残酷，以及和谐与混乱。


以色列考古学家艾胡德‧内泽过去半个世纪以来都在搜寻真正的希律王，因为能够真实呈现他的不是文字，而是石材建筑。他已经在基督教圣地各处发掘了许多希律王的重要建筑遗迹，探索过这位君王住过的宫殿、打过仗的堡垒，以及最令他感到自在的景致。在希律王诸多富有创意的建筑中，只有希律堡以他为名，可能是他最心爱的作品。他在英勇而血腥的生涯告终时，就是长眠于此，安葬在一座宏伟的陵寝内。
有将近2000年时间，希律王陵墓的确切位置都是个谜，直到2007年4月，内泽和他耶路撒冷希伯来大学的同事才在希律堡高处的坡地找到它。这个发现让我们对古代世界最谜样英才之一有了新的理解——且对于希律王在当代人之间所引起的憎恨，也提供了新的证据。同时，这也成了一桩政治事件：巴勒斯坦人主张这座遗址的文物属于他们；而犹太定居者则表示，陵墓的存在强化了他们对约旦河西岸的所有权。内泽对此争议并不感到意外，因为他在各个希律王遗址进行的工作，几十年来都不断因战争、侵略和暴动而中断。在圣地，考古学和王权与政治的关系可能相当。



希律王诞生于公元前73年，在犹太地长大；这个王国位于受内战摧残、列强环伺的古代巴勒斯坦中心。由于两个王室兄弟（海尔卡努斯二世与阿里斯托布鲁斯二世）激烈争夺王位，统治了犹太地70年的哈希芒王朝陷入了分裂。此外，这个王国还捲进了一场更大的地理政治斗争；一方是西边和北边的罗马军团，另一方则是罗马的歷史宿敌——统治东方的安息人。希律王的父亲是海尔卡努斯的首席顾问，也是个优秀的将领。他投靠了罗马人，后来罗马人驱逐了阿里斯托布鲁斯，让海尔卡努斯成为犹太国王……

King Herod Revealed
The Holy Land's visionary builder.
By Tom Mueller
Photograph by Michael Melford

 Eight miles south of Jerusalem, where the last stunted olive trees and stony cornfields fade into the naked badlands of the Judaean desert, a hill rises abruptly, a steep cone sliced off at the top like a small volcano. This is Herodium, one of the grand architectural creations of Herod the Great, King of Judaea, who raised a low knoll into a towering memorial of snowy stonework and surrounded it with pleasure palaces, splashing pools, and terraced gardens. An astute and generous ruler, a brilliant general, and one of the most imaginative and energetic builders of the ancient world, Herod guided his kingdom to new prosperity and power. Yet today he is best known as the sly and murderous monarch of Matthew's Gospel, who slaughtered every male infant in Bethlehem in an unsuccessful attempt to kill the newborn Jesus, the prophesied King of the Jews. During the Middle Ages he became an image of the Antichrist: Illuminated manuscripts and Gothic gargoyles show him tearing his beard in mad fury and brandishing his sword at the luckless infants, with Satan whispering in his ear. Herod is almost certainly innocent of this crime, of which there is no report apart from Matthew's account. But children he certainly slew, including three of his own sons, along with his wife, his mother-in-law, and numerous other members of his court. Throughout his life, he blended creativity and cruelty, harmony and chaos, in ways that challenge the modern imagination.

Israeli archaeologist Ehud Netzer has spent the past half century searching for the real Herod, as he is portrayed not in words but in stone. He has excavated many of Herod's major building sites throughout the Holy Land, exploring the palaces where the king lived, the fortresses where he fought, the landscapes where he felt most at home. Of Herod's many imaginative building projects, Herodium was the only one that bore his name, and was perhaps the closest to his heart. It was here, at the end of his daring and bloodstained career, that he was laid to rest in a noble mausoleum.

The precise location of Herod's tomb remained a mystery for nearly two millennia, until April 2007, when Netzer and his colleagues at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem unearthed it on the upper slopes of Herodium. The discovery provided new insights into one of the most enigmatic minds of the ancient world—and fresh evidence of the hatred that Herod excited among his contemporaries. It also became a political incident, with Palestinians arguing that the artifacts at the site belonged to them, and Jewish settlers saying that the tomb's presence strengthened their claim to the West Bank. To Netzer, whose work at various Herodian sites has for decades been interrupted by war, invasion, and uprisings, the controversy was hardly surprising. In the Holy Land, archaeology can be as political as kingship.

Herod was born in 73 B.C. and grew up in Judaea, a kingdom in the heart of ancient Palestine that was torn by civil war and caught between powerful enemies. The Hasmonaean monarchy that had ruled Judaea for 70 years was split by a vicious fight for the throne between two princely brothers, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II. The kingdom was in turn caught in a larger geopolitical struggle between the Roman legions to the north and west, and the Parthians, historic enemies of Rome, to the east. Herod's father, the chief adviser to Hyrcanus and a gifted general, threw in his lot with the Romans, who banished Aristobulus and made Hyrcanus king of Judaea.

From boyhood, Herod saw the benefits of entente with the Roman overlords—a stance that has long been judged a betrayal of the Jewish people—and it was the Romans who would eventually make Herod king. Throughout his career he strove to reconcile their demands with those of his Jewish subjects, who jealously guarded their political and religious independence. Maintaining this delicate balance was all the more difficult because of Herod's background; his mother was an ethnic Arab, and his father was an Edomite, and though Herod was raised as a Jew, he lacked the social status of the powerful old families in Jerusalem who were eligible to serve as high priest, as the Hasmonaean kings had traditionally done. Many of his subjects considered Herod an outsider—a "half Jew," as his early biographer, the Jewish soldier and aristocrat Flavius Josephus later wrote—and continued to fight for a Hasmonaean theocracy. In 43 B.C., Herod's father was poisoned by a Hasmonaean agent. Three years later, when the Parthians suddenly invaded Judaea, a rival Hasmonaean faction allied themselves with the invaders, deposed and mutilated Hyrcanus, and turned on Herod.


In this moment of crisis, Herod looked to the Romans for help. He fled Jerusalem with his family under cover of darkness, and after defeating the Parthians and their Jewish allies in a desperate battle at the site where he would later build Herodium, he traveled on to Rome, where the senate, remembering his unswerving loyalty, named him King of Judaea. He walked out of the senate building arm in arm with the two most powerful men in the Roman world: Mark Antony, the soldier and orator who ruled the Roman east, and Octavian, the young patrician who ruled the west, and who, nine years later, would defeat Antony and assume command of the entire empire, subsequently taking the title "Augustus." Then, in an act that symbolized the many accommodations he would have to make to keep his slippery grip on power, Herod led the procession up the Capitoline Hill to the Temple of Jove, Rome's most sacred shrine, and there the King of Judaea offered sacrifice to the gods of pagan Rome.

Now Herod had his kingdom, but he still had to conquer it, which took three years of hard fighting. Finally, in 37 B.C., he captured Jerusalem, and Judaea was his—at least politically. To bolster his social and religious authority, he divorced his first wife, Doris, and married Mariamne, a Hasmonaean princess. But the Hasmonaean threat remained. Two years later, at Passover, Mariamne's teenage brother, the high priest in the Second Temple, received a warm ovation from the crowds of worshippers; Herod, fearing that the young man might one day usurp his throne, had him drowned in a swimming pool in his palace in Jericho.

The Hasmonaeans were not his only concern. From 42 to 31 B.C., while Mark Antony ruled the Roman east, Herod remained his staunch friend and ally, despite the ambitions of An­tony's beautiful Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, who persuaded her love-struck husband to carve out choice portions of Herod's kingdom for her, and even tried to seduce Herod. (He declined her advances.) In 31 B.C., the political landscape was transformed by the Battle of Actium, during which Octavian crushed the combined armies of Antony and Cleopatra and became the first emperor of Rome. Herod, knowing that Octavian would take a dim view of his long-standing friendship with Antony, rushed to the island of Rhodes to meet the emperor and presented himself without his crown, but with all of his kingly dignity. Instead of downplaying his devotion to Antony, he underscored it and promised to serve his new master, Octavian, with the same loyalty in the future. Octavian was so impressed by Herod's frankness and poise that he confirmed him as King of Judaea, and later added other territories to his realm, saying that Herod's megalopsychia—his greatness of spirit—was too large to fit a small kingdom like Judaea.








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[ 本帖最后由 知音 于 2008-12-12 16:33 编辑 ]