Day and Night: Illuminating Late Roman Aelia

Like many known elite Roman houses, the Late Roman mansion discovered in the Givʿati Parking Lot excavations in Jerusalem and dated ca. 312–363 CE was primarily illuminated by sunlight. The mansion had two spacious courtyards, one of them with a peristyle, toward which the openings of most of the rooms on the first floor faced. However, those rooms and spaces located away from the ‘natural light’ sources, as well as those that had no windows, needed artificial lighting during the day, and the entire house, together with its open areas, required illumination during the dark hours and seasons. The article discusses the natural and artificial lighting of the house, with a focus on the specific type of oil lamps discovered in the structure, such as round lamps with decorated discuses classified as derivatives of the Broneer XXV/Loeschcke VIII type, the most popular lamps in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Roman Imperial period. For the first time, large quantities of figured discus lamps, including complete ones, were recorded in well-stratified contexts, confirming that the production of these lamps in Jerusalem continued well into the 4th century CE. The discussion includes the chronological, iconographic and distributional patterns of the lamps.