The hill of Calvary, a centre of Christian devotion in Jerusalem and throughout the world, has for centuries been enclosed in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was built by Emperor Constantine in 326 to concentrate in a single edifice the hill of Jesus’ death and the tomb of his Resurrection. For the first time, under the guidance of Dr Christos Katsimibinis, appointed to the task by the Greek Orthodox Church, excavations have removed the accretions of ages from behind the mediaeval Greek Orthodox and Latin altars that mark the site, to reveal the bare rock of the eastern slope.
The elongated cone of rock rises abruptly to some twelve metres above general ground level; as it was outside the walls of the Herodian city, it may have been a place of public executions. Subsequently, the area had been overlaid by the buildings of a Roman forum, and a statue of Venus placed on the landmark hill. Layers of rubble from generations of destruction and rebuilding had to be cleared to reach the foot of the rock; there, two smaller caves were found which, in the light of the hill’s configuration, may have given rise — as would the hill’s sinister function — to the name Golgotha, spoken of in John’s Gospel, which is the Hebrew for ‘skull’, Latin ‘calvaria.’
In the course of excavations in an Armenian section of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, an ancient quarry was cleared. Within the cavity, hewn most probably at the end of the Israelite Period (8th to
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7th century BC), three walls were revealed that belong to the substructure of a public building of the Roman forum, probably of Hadrian’s time. Significant enough in themselves, these discoveries became the mere backdrop to a single impressive find that provokes the curiosity of expert and layman alike. Embedded in one of the walls was a smoothly-dressed stone block with a bold drawing of a pilgrim ship of the fourth century, and the inscription DOMINE IVIMUS, ‘Lord, we went.’
Only very rarely have ships featured in the graphic embellishment of churches in the Holy Land — the one clear parallel known is a sixteenth-century
Inscription found in the Armenian section of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
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graffito, also in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Our earlier example may be pinpointed around AD 330. In AD 325 or shortly after, the Roman building was dismantled and a Constantinian basilica took its place: one may presume that, before that time, no pilgrim would have dared, let alone been allowed, to enter what had until then been a pagan edifice, even less to give overt expression of his faith; and after AD 335 the place was inaccessible, having been filled in to form part of the floor-base of the basilica’s central nave. The archaeological evidence for dating is supported by distinctive features of the ship itself, which place it in the first centuries AD.
The vessel is a Roman sailing merchantman of the type that plied the waters of the Mediterranean between different parts of the Empire. Executed in firm, elegant strokes, its bow is on the left and its mast lowered. The furled mainsail and the lines binding it are in red, the rest, including the inscription, is in black. The stern tapers into the cheniscus, or goosehead, the most popular naval ornament in antiquity.
The significance of the words DOMINE IVIMUS, ‘Lord, we went,’ becomes clearer if, accepting a suggestion from Father Pierre Benoit, O.P., we see in them an illusion to the Latin rendering of Psalm CXXII: I ‘In domum Domini ibimus’ —’Let us go into the house of the Lord.’ This is the classical psalm of pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the inscription is apparently the joyous exclamation of Christian pilgrims, who, having sailed from the western part of the empire, Rome, Gaul or Spain, had finally reached the Holy City. That the voyage had been a perilous one is suggested by the lowered mast, damaged, perhaps, in a storm, in which case the tableau may also be an ex-voto — a fulfilment of a vow — commemorating deliverance from danger.
(Reprinted with permission from Christian News From Israel, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, 1976.)
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