When Luigi Maria Caliò, a classical archaeology professor, first brought students from the University of Catania to excavate an area of Ostia Antica, the ancient commercial port of call outside Rome, he wasn’t sure what he might find.
The dig site had not been explored in modern times, despite its central location next to a square that was once the city’s headquarters for shippers and traders and is today renowned for its mosaics.
“We thought we’d find some warehouses or a fluvial port,” he said. Instead, the archaeologists — budding and not — last summer uncovered what may be the oldest existing example in the ancient Roman world of a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath. They have tentatively dated the structure to the late fourth or early fifth century.
“Such an antique mikvah has never been found” outside Israel, “so it’s a very relevant find,” said Riccardo Di Segni, Rome’s chief rabbi. He added that the discovery contributed to further illuminating the rich history of Jews in Rome and Ostia Antica.
Jews first came to Rome in the second century B.C., and inhabited the city and its environs, including Ostia, a half-hour train ride outside the capital city.
Rome and Ostia to this day are pockmarked with remnants of Jewish heritage: a menorah on the bas-relief of the first-century Arch of Titus; Jewish catacombs; sundry Roman-era inscriptions, and a synagogue at Ostia Antica.
The “structural and formal characteristics” of the room found at Ostia, with a pool deep enough for a person to be immersed, are reminiscent of a Jewish ritual bath, said Alessandro D’Alessio, the director of Ostia Antica, today an archaeological site. Also found at the site, at the bottom of the pool, was an oil lamp with a figure of a menorah which archaeologists said helped confirm its identification.
The find emerged from the first excavation campaign in decades directly carried out under the auspices of Ostia Antica archaeologists. The mikvah was located inside a “large and rich domus,” or house, likely two or more stories high, Professor Caliò said. Also excavated were a kitchen, latrines, and two ovens, as well as parts of a portico that opened to other rooms.
The domus was inhabited until the sixth century and then abandoned. Professor Caliò said that over the centuries, the excavated rooms had been filled with “a monstrous amount of material” including fragments of panels with fresco paintings that the archaeologists will attempt to reconstruct.
“We found the mikvah, we hope there will be a synagogue, but I can’t know yet,” the professor said in an interview.
“There’s still much to excavate,” Mr. D’Alessio told reporters. Excavations will commence again in June.
The Jewish presence at Ostia has long been documented. While laying an electricity pipeline southeast of Ostia Antica in 2009, workers came across a first-century inscription attesting to the presence of Jews there. It is believed to be the oldest inscription referring to Jews in Italy, said Marina Lo Blundo, an archaeologist at Ostia Antica.
In 1961, one of the oldest known synagogues in the Roman world was discovered during the construction of a highway to the new Fiumicino airport. That synagogue dates to the mid-fourth century, was likely destroyed in an earthquake in 443, and rebuilt to be used through the sixth, according to L. Michael White, director of the Ostia Synagogue Area Excavations.
“We have a fair amount of evidence that there must be a Jewish community at Ostia from the second century C.E. onward,” he said in a telephone interview. “Our building was converted into a synagogue sometime in the late fourth century” probably using materials from another synagogue in Ostia, he added. “This was a Jewish community that was not hiding out,” he said.
The synagogue is relatively far from the modern-day entrance to Ostia Antica, a bit of a hike to see some of the contemporary art pieces that have been made for the site over the past two decades. Since a synagogue art project began in 2002, dozens of artists have participated.
“It’s a magical place,” Adachiara Zevi, president of the Arte in Memoria association, which organizes the biennial art project. She said she hoped to include the mikvah in future projects.
But not everyone is embracing the new find as further proof of Jewish presence.
Based on his experience at the site, Professor White said he would be “a little cautious about calling” the new find a Jewish ritual bath “until there’s some more evidence.”
At the synagogue, he had excavated a space that had been identified by previous archaeologists as a mikvah and found “a room perhaps for ritual ablutions in its final phase, but it is not a mikvah,” he said. There were all kinds of pools in Roman world, including plunge pools in bath complexes, or nymphaeums, and even Christian baptisteries, he said.
Rabbi Di Segni said at the presentation that he was certain that the new find would raise questions.
Scholars tend to be critical, he said. “I am certain that starting tomorrow we can expect debate among archaeologists.”