Legion of Destruction

Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The discovery of an illegal cache of ancient tiles and bricks sheds light on a sad chapter in our history

When detectives from the serious crimes unit of the Israel Police came across some covered crates in the trunk of a car in Beit Hanina, an Arab neighborhood in northeast Yerushalayim, they never expected that they had made an archaeological discovery.

But when they opened the crates, they found a large number of 2,000-year-old tiles and bricks stamped with the emblem of the Roman Tenth Legion. Investigators from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) suggested that they might have been part of the heating plant of a bathhouse used by Roman soldiers. The owner of the car admitted that the illegally excavated items had come from a site somewhere near Chevron. Of course, the plan was to sell these antiquities on the black market.

Read the rest of Legion of Destruction in Ami Magazine.