Baths and Bathing: The culture of bathing and the baths and thermae in Palestine from the Hasmoneans to the Moslem Conquest: With an appe

ISBN-13: 9781841716923 / Angielski / Miękka / 2005 / 330 str.

Hoss, Stefanie

Opis

At the heart of this study of ancient bathing and bathhouses is an analysis of the culture of bathing in Roman Israel and what this reveals about the Romanisation of the Jewish population. Stephanie Hoss' thesis includes a discussion of of the origins of public baths and the development of bath building types in Hellenistic Palestine, but she focuses on how Jews reconciled (or not) the Roman taste for public bathing and their own distaste for Roman displays of nudity and communal bathing. The study combines documentary evidence with archaeological evidence with much of the book comprising an illustrated catalogue of the large number of bathhouses and baths that have been excavated in the region. The appendix focuses on miqva'ot, or Jewish ritual baths.

In this volume the author studies Roman baths in Israel, including a section on the miqveh (ritual Jewish bath), which first appears in the 2nd century BCE and becomes a fairly common feature both of Hellenistic private baths and other areas such as cemeteries, oil or wine presses and synagogues in Palestine in the 1st century BCE. The geographical limits of this study are set by the ancient identification of Palestine that is Cis- and Transjordania and the scope covers the time between the reign of Alexander Jannai (103-76 BCE) and the Muslim conquest (640 CE). The author draws a picture of the development of Roman baths and thermae in Palestine using a combination of literary and archaeological sources. This includes not only an account of the purely architectural development of the buildings, but also an account of the development of the institution of bathing the Roman way itself and the utilisation of the Roman baths and thermae in Palestine. The book concludes with a complete catalogue of baths in Roman Palestine and a selective catalogue of Miqva'ot in Roman Palestine.