The Village that Time Forgot: Sumaqa’s Seaborne Trade

Hidden 340 metres up on the spur of a deep ravine within the central Carmel Mountains, Roman Sumaqa is the village that time forgot. Seemingly land-locked away from civilisation in a stunning rural retreat, this Jewish settlement of the 1st century BC to 6th century AD is one of the most remarkable non-urban sites in Israel. 

Excavations directed by Prof. Shimon Dar of the Department of the Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, Bar-Ilan University, between 1983 and 1995 exposed this isolationism to be a mirage. Even though the village is located 11 kilometres inland of the Mediterranean coast, the project uncovered a cosmopolitan picture of specialized agricultural production heavily embedded in the coastal economy and long-distance trade. 

 

A Byzantine wine press with screw installation at Sumaqa, Israel.  

 

Two oil and five wine presses have been discovered at Sumaqa. A further dozen workshops are scattered around the site, all characterised by pressing floors and collecting vats. Unlike wine and oil presses, 30 vast grooved columns (rolling stones with hand indentations) are associated with the installations. Each one needed 750 kilograms of manpower to move. The largest workshop covers an area of 350 square metres. The industry practiced in these enigmatic installations remains unproven, but leather processing and dye production have both been suggested. This technology is completely unlike that associated with thousands of olive and wine presses scattered across the Holy Land, and the rolling stones were clearly intended to extract by crushing a product from a heavy natural resource. High-value oil from a robust nut, such as the almond, is a probable explanation. 

In 1997 Dr. Sean Kingsley of Wreck Watch was invited to study the pottery from Sumaqa, with a special emphasis on quantification: counting relative types (imports versus exports) to determine just how reliant the village was in antiquity on seaborne commerce. 5,505 rims, handles and bases were counted and weighed. 86% proved to derive from Late Roman and Byzantine levels with the remainder associated with small-scale Mamluk occupation. 

 

The synagogue at Byzantine Sumaqa, Israel.  

 

The pottery evidence indicates that life peaked at Sumaqa in the second half of the 4th century AD, when Palestine started to be pampered as the religious flagship of the newly Christian Byzantine Empire. 91% of the amphoras (from a total sample of 2,077 rims, handles and bases) are locally produced LR5 bag-shaped jars, undoubtedly used to store water and export oils and wine. The 8% of imported amphoras from Syria, North Africa, Egypt and the Aegean pointed to sufficient agriculture-based profits for the villagers to enjoy the odd exotic foodstuff. Curiously, the table wares (755 fragments) are dominated by imports: almost all of the bowls and plates came from Turkey (Phocaean Red Slip: 58.6%), Cyprus (CRS: 25.6%) and Tunisia (African Red Slip: 6.3%). 

Despite its land-locked environment well beyond the sight of sea, Sumaqa’s humble pottery leaves no doubt that farmers and villagers prospered as the economic gravitational pull of Late Rome shifted from the Eternal City to Constantinople and, between the mid-4th and mid-7th centuries to the homeland of Judaism and Christianity – the Holy City of Jerusalem. 

S. Dar, Sumaqa. A Roman and Byzantine Village on Mount Carmel, Israel (BAR Int. Series 815, Oxford, 1999). 

S. Kingsley, ‘The Sumaqa Pottery Assemblage: Classification and Quantification’. In S. Dar (ed.), Sumaqa. A Roman and Byzantine Village on Mount Carmel, Israel (BAR Int. Series 815, Oxford, 1999), 263-330.