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Religion at Nazareth 8000 years before Christ

Version 1.10

Maximilian O. Baldia

The Comparative Archaeology WEB

Nazareth is revered as the home of Jesus Christ. However, David Keys (2003) reports that ongoing archaeological excavations directed by Nigel Goring-Morris of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at Kibbutz Kfar HaHoresh, provide evidence that the area was the center of much older religious activities dated around 8000 BC. This is the second period in the development of farming in the Near East. It is referred to as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), when the transition from hunting and gathering to farming was nearly completed, although pottery was not yet in use.

Not far from the center of Nazareth the archaeologists are discovering evidence of a large cult center. The graves are covered with up to three tons of white plaster. Thus far remains of 65 individuals have been discovered.

The large number of aurochs bones associated with the cult complex indicate a death ritual, involving a cattle cult. The now extinct auerochs is the wild progenitor of domesticated cattle and figured prominently in the transition from a hunting, gathering and fishing economy to farming in the Old World.

Among the adult and child burials are three human skulls that were covered with plaster to create facial features. As in many cultures around the world, the rituals included red ochre.

A number of kiln-like features have been found, that seem to have been used lime kilns at the site suggests that the plaster used for the skulls and for sealing many of the graves was manufactured locally.

The evidence suggests the significance of color ritual context, possible ancestors worship, or the desire to preserve the dead for an anticipated afterlife, and a cattle cult. The cattle cult is also observable at the Neolithic site of Çatal Hüyük (also, Catal Huyuk, Çatalhüyük, Çatalhöyük), Anatolia, Turkey. This later site is dated to the 8^th millennium BC and exhibits a bullfight. The cult seems to exist throughout the Mediterranean and adjacent region in prehistory. The Spanish bullfights may be the last vestiges of this ancient cult.

References and Credits

Bar-Yosef, O. and A. Belfer-Cohen

1992 From Foraging to Farming. In Gebauer, Anne Birgitte and T. Douglas Price (Eds.) Transitions to Agriculture in Prehistory. Monographs in World Archaeology 4, 1992:21-48.

Bar-Yosef, Ofer and Richard H. Meadow

1995 The Origins of Agriculture in the Near East. In Douglas, Price T. and Anne Birgitte Gebauer (Ed.) Last Hunters – First Farmers: New Perspectives on the Prehistoric Transition to Agriculture. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, N.M. 1995:39-94.

Goring-Morris, Adrian Nigel

2002 Abstracts of Current Projects (with Bibliography). Institute of Archaeology Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Keys, David

2003 NEWSBRIEFS: Pre-Christian Rituals at Nazareth, Archaeology 56/6, November/December 2003. The Archaeological Institute of America, http://www.archaeology.org/0311/newsbriefs/nazareth.html.

Troy, C. S, D. E. MacHugh, J. F. Bailey, et al.

2001 Genetic evidence of Near Eastern Origins of European Cattle. Nature 4/10 2001:1088-1091.

References and Credits

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