Floors usually stay in one place. Not this one! To be fair, these mosaics stayed put for hundreds of years before traveling the world. And now they’re home for good.
The set of Roman mosaics probably adorned a rich person’s house in the third or fourth century. The tiled images that made up this floor were discovered in Lod, Israel, in 1996. That city is also called Lydda. (In Acts 9:32-35, you can read about Peter healing a man there.) Around A.D. 200, Lod became a Roman colony called Diospolis.
What’s so special about this floor? It’s one of the largest and best-preserved mosaics found in Israel. The collection stretches 56 feet by 30 feet (about the size of half a tennis court). It features sailing ships and a menagerie of animals. Some of the creatures are ordinary, like fish and birds. Others are beasts that would have been exotic to ancient residents of Lod, including an African elephant, a rhinoceros, and a giraffe!
When the artworks were discovered, there wasn’t enough money to finish digging them up. So archaeologists covered the mosaics back up with dirt to keep them protected from weather and damage.
By 2009, officials had decided to build a museum on the site. That meant finishing the job of excavating the mosaic.
Workers cleaned the tesserae (tiles) carefully. Roman mosaic tiles were made of stone, glass, or ceramic. The team took photos to document the mosaic. Then they glued fabric to the mosaic to keep the tesserae in place.
The workers had to divide the mosaic into smaller pieces to remove it from the ground. They carefully levered pieces up from the foundation with crowbars. The team found a few extra discoveries: lines and paint used as a guide to place the tesserae, and hand and foot prints from the craftsmen who created the mosaic.
The pieces were transported on wooden platforms to a laboratory. There, conservators restored the mosaics. They cleaned the tiles again and added new grout.
For more than a decade, Israeli authorities raised money for a museum. The mosaics were sent around the world. People viewed them at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, and The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The mosaics’ new home is at the Shelby White and Leon Levy Mosaic Lod Archaeological Center. The museum is designed to recreate an ancient Roman villa like the one that housed this floor. Visitors from all over the world will come to Lod to see the mosaics.
Why? People have developed techniques to uncover and preserve artifacts like these mosaics. Those artifacts help us understand more about the past.
