En Gedi Royal Estate
About
A royal balsam plantation on the Dead Sea's western shore supplied Rome with opobalsamum, an aromatic resin Pliny the Elder ranked as antiquity's costliest perfume ingredient and one that grew nowhere else on earth. Excavations at Tel Goren uncovered perfume-manufacturing workshops and a fortified settlement spanning Hasmonean, Herodian, and early Roman occupation layers. Legal papyri later stashed nearby in the Cave of Letters show En Gedi still operating as crown land, its rents paid straight into the Roman treasury on the eve of the Bar Kokhba revolt. In 117 CE, the year Trajan died, its balsam groves were already imperial property, worked for Rome rather than Judaea's vanished kings.
What happened here
A working estate with a comfortable house attached, and the proportions vary with how rich the owner is and how often he visits. The farm side has presses for oil and wine, threshing floors, storage sunk into the ground, stables and quarters for the workforce. The residential side has baths, dining rooms sited for the view, mosaics, and a garden with water in it. A manager runs the place year-round and reports; the owner arrives for the vintage and for the summer. Produce goes to market or to the owner's town house, and the accounts are kept in detail. Some villas are pure retreat with no farm at all, built on a cliff or a lake specifically to be looked at from a boat.
Sources
- Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 12.111-123
- Benjamin Mazar and Immanuel Dunayevsky, 'En-Gedi: Third Season of Excavation', Israel Exploration Journal 14 (1964), pp. 121-130
- Hannah M. Cotton and Ada Yardeni (eds.), Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek Documentary Texts from Nahal Hever and Other Sites (Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XXVII), Oxford, 1997
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →