Khirbet el-Hammam

Khirbet el-Hammam (also spelled Khirbet el-Hamam) is an archaeological site in the northwestern Samarian hills, in the modern-day West Bank. The tell preserves the remains of a fortified town occupied from the Iron Age until the early Roman period. Its excavator, archaeologist Adam Zertal, identified the site with two settlements known from ancient texts: the biblical town of Arubboth, named in the Books of Kings as the seat of an administrative district under Solomon, and Narbata, a Jewish town that figures in Josephus's book, The Jewish War. The town occupied two adjacent hilltops separated by a saddle, at the southern end of a spur above a deep riverbed (wadi). The inhabitants relied on rock-cut reservoirs, including one attributed to the Iron Age, and three quarried in the Hasmonean period and used into the 1st century CE. The site reached its greatest extent in the Second Temple period and was destroyed during the First Jewish Revolt. Surrounding it are the remains of a circumvallation wall, several camps, and an assault ramp, which Zertal connected to the revolt and described as closely paralleling those found at Machaerus.

Archaeological site data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).