Ancient Rome's Galilee garrison found;

by Times of Israel | History

Archaeologists unearth remains of 2,000-year-old Galilee garrison of Sixth Legion Ferrata, where 5,000 men kept order at time of Bar Kochba Revolt — the only permanent Roman military camp ever discovered in region.

The Unique find offers first opportunity to understand how the Roman military was organized in the eastern empire.

The Ancient Roman Garison in Israel.
(Credit: via Times of Israel).

The remains of an imperial Roman legionary camp — the only one of its kind ever to be excavated in Israel or in the entirety of the Eastern Empire from the second and third centuries CE — have come to light at a dig near Megiddo, archaeologists said this week.

Legio, a Roman site situated next to Tel Megiddo in northern Israel, served as the headquarters of the Sixth Legion Ferrata — the Ironclad — in the years following the Jewish Revolt, and would have helped keep order in the Galilee during the Bar Kochba Revolt in 132-135 CE.

“It’s a very, very exciting find,” Yotam Tepper, co-director of the excavation and a field archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority specializing in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, said in a phone interview Monday.

The dig, now in its second season, was conducted by the W.F. Albright Institute  of Archaeological Research with support from Israel Antiquities Authority as part of the Jezreel Valley Regional Project.

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