BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Medieval Arabs Bathed Like Romans at Yavneh-Yam

Bible and archaeology news

Excavators at the site of Yavneh-Yam along the southern coast of Israel have discovered a Roman-style bathhouse dating to the ninth century C.E., indicating that the site’s medieval Arab inhabitants readily borrowed and adapted earlier technologies. Amid the ruins of the early Islamic fortress that overlooks the Mediterranean, excavators found a beautiful example of a classic Roman-style bathhouse, complete with duplex floors, a water heating system and underground ducts—only the bathhouse dates to several hundred years after the end of the Roman/Byzantine era.

“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,” said excavator Moshe Fischer of Tel Aviv University. “[The bathhouse] was unusual because whoever built it used the technology from an earlier era and it could be one of the lasts uses of this technology we find.”

Excavators at the site of Yavneh-Yam along the southern coast of Israel have discovered a Roman-style bathhouse dating to the ninth century C.E., indicating that the site’s medieval Arab inhabitants readily borrowed and adapted earlier technologies.