Faunal fashion of early floor patterns - Roman mosaics at Sepphoris, Israel - Brief Article

Science News, April 12, 1997

Birds may not rate as a source of personal names, but they have inspired place names. Perched on a high hill midway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Sea of Galilee, the Roman settlement of Sepphoris seems to have taken its name from the Hebrew word for bird, zippor. Some 30,000 people lived in Sepphoris, a major city in the fourth century and now a national park in Israel.

A centerpiece of the site is a large public building undergoing excavation by researchers from the University of South Florida in Tampa. The size of a city block, the basilical building is noteworthy for its many mosaics--the floor in every room was patterned with naturally colored stones. "They show a high level of artistic craftsmanship," says zooarchaeologist Arlene Fradkin of the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

Their detail has enabled Fradkin to identify many of the animals incorporated in the mosaics: a cape hare nibbling on grapes, a partridge holding a flower, and seven types of Mediterranean fish, including a dolphin fish and a distinctive conger eel with a starfish.

Fradkin also noted that most of the animals pictured in the mosaic are nondomesticated species that are rare in the archaeological record at the site. Some of the stylized animal motifs, however, including the conger eel and starfish, have turned up in mosaics at other Roman sites in the region.

Fradkin thinks the mosaics are the work of traveling artisans who had books of patterns, as other scholars have suggested. The citizens of Sepphoris might have picked out the designs not because the animals were important to them but because they were fashionable. Says Fradkin, "it was like buying wallpaper."