A Necropolis Drawn From Across the Diaspora

More than thirty separate catacomb systems have been excavated at Beit She'arim, cut into the soft limestone hillside and containing hundreds of individual burials, making the site the largest known concentration of Jewish burials anywhere in the Levant from its period. The catacombs are decorated with an unusually wide mix of imagery for a Jewish burial ground of this era, including menorahs and other unambiguously Jewish religious symbols alongside animal figures, mythological scenes and Greek-style sarcophagi, evidence of a community fluent in and unafraid to draw on the wider visual culture of the Roman eastern Mediterranean even while burying its own according to Jewish practice.

The site's decline followed the Gallus revolt of the mid-fourth century CE, after which it appears to have been destroyed and largely abandoned as a burial destination, bringing its two centuries of prominence to a fairly abrupt close. What survived is unusually legible to modern scholarship precisely because of that abandonment: rather than being continuously reused and altered over subsequent centuries, as many ancient burial sites were, Beit She'arim was left largely undisturbed until modern excavation, preserving its inscriptions and layout in a state that has made it one of the primary archaeological sources for understanding Jewish diaspora communities of the Roman period.