King Herod's Tomb

King Herod wasn't the world's worst ruler. Yet seventy years after his death his tomb was desecrated and forgotten. Learn more about the life and death of King Herod (along with the rediscovery of his tomb) in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And Sarah read
a really cool article that got us thinking about King Herod,
of all people, I did a few months back. National

(00:23):
Geographic had a really neat article about King Herod's tomb,
and then recently Smithsonian just put out one and I
got to thinking, we need to talk about this historical celebrity.
So most of us know King Herod from his biblical reputation,
which is about the Massacre of the Innocence, where in
preparation for the birth of the Messiah, he had all

(00:46):
the male infants in Bethlehem killed. But it's kind of
unlikely that this actually happened. The only recorded instance of
it is in the Gospel of Matthew, so biblical scholars
debate whether this really went down. But even if he
didn't kill all the babies of Bethlehem, he certainly killed
plenty of people on his own time, including his own

(01:08):
children and his favorite wife and mother in law, nobles, really,
anybody who got on his bad side or anyone he
thought might usurp his place on the throne like his
wife's brothers, but with a huge family ten wives and
more than a dozen kids, he had plenty to be
paranoid about. And he was also living in a time

(01:28):
of a lot of conflict and strife. So let's go
back to the beginnings of Herod. He was born in
seventy three b c. And grew up in Judea and Palestine,
which was a time of civil war and plenty of enemies.
The monarchy of Judea that has many and monarchy was
split between two fighting brothers over who would take the throne,
and the Romans and the Parthians and either side of

(01:49):
the kingdom were fighting over Judea as well. Herod's father
was an adviser to one of the brothers who wanted
the kingship, and he was also a general and decided
to sigh with the Romans, which is a thread that
will keep coming up. Parents to the Romans for for
the long haul, definitely, which made a lot of people
feel that he was a traitor to the Jewish people,

(02:11):
but we'll get into that a little bit later. His
mother was an Arab and his father was an Edamite,
so he was what they called a half Jew and
a bit of an outsider, even though he was raised Jewish.
And in forty three b C, his father was poisoned
and the Parthians invaded Judea, and considering that Herod's family
was on the Roman side, this didn't go over well

(02:32):
for them. The Parthians mutilated and killed the king, and
they came after Herod, who left Jerusalem with his family
and went to Rome for help, but at the site
that would later become Herodium, he defeated the Parthians and
went to Rome, where the senate named him the Judean King.
And if you can picture this, picture him walking out
of the senate with Mark Antony on one side and

(02:52):
Octavian on the other, that's a celebrity crowd. The paparazzim
as that one. And he Proceedd did to make a
sacrifice at the Temple of Jove, which of course was
a pagan thing to do and being a Jew, a
bit scandalous. He had the kingship, but he had to
fight for years to actually get control of his kingdom,

(03:13):
and he finally captured Jerusalem in thirty seven BC, divorced
his wife and married as Many and princess, hoping that
he would get in better with the people, and then
he had a brother drowned, so that probably didn't go
over so great. So another famous monarch living at this time, Cleopatra,
is also involved with Herod. She tries to get bits

(03:34):
of his kingdom from Mark Anthony, who gives them to
her because they're in a relationship, and she also tries
to seduce Herod, which really feels Cleopatra's reputation, and it
didn't work. He said no. But in thirty one BC,
at the Battle of acting m, Octavian crushes Mark Anthony
and Cleopatra's armies, and this isn't looking great for Herod

(03:57):
because he's Marc Anthony's good buddy, so he runs off
to Rhods to see Octavian and to pledge his allegiance.
He goes without his crown, and Octavian not only confirmed
him king but gave him even more land, and this
is when the good stuff starts. Despite his reputation, Herod
was actually a pretty great ruler, and two decades of
prosperity and peace follow his kingship. He gets very cultural

(04:20):
and invites poets and artists and architects and He's a
lot of time for building, doesn't it, which he really
really loves. He builds a deep water harbor on the
north coast of Judea, and also and the Northern Palace
at Massada, which goes down a cliff face on terraces
and rebuilds the Second Temple. But that's not the only

(04:41):
thing he builds. He also builds a huge fortress and
pleasure palace at her Audium. It's basically on top of
this volcano type mountain. It's not really a volcano, it
just but it looks like one. It's a steep mountain
with a flat top, and uh at the bottom of
it is the pleasure palace sort of area Lower Herodium.

(05:03):
It fills forty acres. It has homes and gardens and stables,
and this huge pool that's about as big as a
soccer field that even has an island in the middle.
It's all very luxurious and Upper Herodium at the top
used to have a five story tower and that was
the palace and fortress. But Herodium is located pretty far

(05:26):
outside of Jerusalem, and Herod actually moves his whole operation there,
his whole city um. It takes about three or four
hours on horseback to get there. So this is an
inconvenient location, an odd spot to chew. Well, it didn't
remind you, Verstal a little locating your capital to this

(05:46):
sort of out of the way place and surrounding yourself
with loyal families and building the ideal city, and as
far as urban planning goes, Herodium was very well set out.
Yet has this royal theater with beautiful secco landscapes done
very symmetrical. There's clearly some sort of master plan that
put everything together. It wasn't just built willy nilly. Yeah.

(06:09):
So despite her Audium looking like it's a pretty nice place,
it's surrounded by desert and it is out of the way.
Like we said, so why would Herod build his fortress
and his palace in the middle of nowhere? This is
a good part of the story. Yeah, So it turns
out that it wasn't anything about strategy. This wasn't just

(06:32):
a good location to build a fortress. It was all
personal with Herod. And when he had been governor of
Galilee and the Parthians invaded, he got out because of
the new king being named right and tried to fleet
to Rome, and he had declared his allegiance and everything,
and he fled with five thousand of his people. And

(06:52):
during this this escape, his mother's wagon flips over and
Harod thinks she's dead. He's about to commit suicide when
he realizes that she's actually okay. And later he returns
to the site and fights like Katie talked about earlier,
and he makes a promise that he'll be buried there
as a tribute both to his victory and to his

(07:14):
mother's survival. So if he says that he'll be buried there,
where exactly is his tomb Because we've talked about Herodium,
but we haven't actually talked about Herod's tomb and Haradium.
People have actually known about it for a while. Obviously,
it's sort of faded off the map um some time
after Herod's death. This is his spot, after all. But

(07:37):
it was positively identified in eighteen thirty eight by an
American scholar, Edward Robinson, who compared it to a Roman
Greco Roman historians accounts and identified it as the historic site.
But people still didn't know where the tomb was, and

(07:57):
it has kind of become this biblic whole quest for
archaeologists to positively i d Herod's tomb, but we didn't
find it until April of two thousand seven, when Hood
nuts Or, an archaeologist, said that after thirty five years
of archaeological work, he had positively found the tomb. Was

(08:19):
absolutely sure that he found it, and lots of folks
have been looking for this tomb. The eighteen sixties of
French explorer was focusing on that uh that island in
the middle of the pool. He thought that would be
the place Herod Herod was resting um. Another archaeologists checked
out the Summit of Herodium and later Lambert Dolls, in

(08:45):
which I thought Katie might like not related who was
from the Silicon Valley, thought that the tomb must be
located on the at the base of the highest tower
on the mountaintop. But nuts Er wasn't swayed by any
of these previous expeditions well, and he wasn't looking for
Herod's tomb when he even started excavating different locations. But

(09:11):
at some point it turned into an obsession, and in
two thousand and six he saw an irregularity in a
wall and decided that again since everything looked so planned out,
if something was irregular, that must mean something bigger and
decided that's where they should look. And he had already
so thoroughly covered the lower complex. He was pretty sure
the comb was not there. He just he looked everywhere

(09:33):
it could be. So in two thousand and seven they
found fragments of hard pink limestone with rosettes on it
and thought, there's a good chance that might be his sarcophagus.
And then later in April they found giant blocks of
white limestone which would have been part of a structure
that was eight feet high and according to the National

(09:55):
Geographic article, there was a cube shaped first floor, cylindrical
second floor, and a high peaked roof. And they also
found two other sarcopha guy that weren't quite as nice,
along with some human bones, sonser suspects. Herod probably changed
his mind about the burial spot. This halfway up the
mountain location is kind of surprising. Um, it is the

(10:18):
last place everyone looked, obviously, but um, there's still a
little question about whether this is for sure Herod's tomb.
It's definitely a royal person's tomb, but there's no inscription,
which is the kind of positive identification you really want.
But part of the problem with that was that the
Sarcopha guy had been destroyed about seventy years after Herod's

(10:41):
death during one of the Jewish revolts against the Romans,
and it's clearly been smashed to pieces with hammers, So
even if there had been some sort of identification, it
may have been purposefully destroyed. So while Herod was obviously
unpopular enough to get his tomb smashed seventy or so
years after or he died, he wasn't super well liked

(11:03):
even immediately after he died. Part of that comes from
his great deathbed idea to imprison a lot of the
local notables Jewish notables and ordering them to be killed
after he died, because that way everyone would be even
sadder that he was dead. Not only had you lost

(11:24):
your king, you lost all of your notable g d
and citizens. But obviously Harod dies and these guys are
let go, and everybody celebrates because hey, you know, all
of our notable citizens are alive, and there were none
too impressed with their king at that point. Although we've
talked about Herod's too, and we haven't talked about his
actual death and it's a bit grizzly. He has a

(11:46):
pretty remarkable, if disgusting death. Uh. I love these modern
day diagnostics where, yeah, it happened recently with Mozart, Mozart
and stripped up hacus Um. Just where modern doctors go
back and look at the case history of some famous

(12:08):
long dead patient and try to diagnose how they died.
And this happened a few years ago. Um A doctor
Jan Hirshman made a diagnosis based on the biography of
Herod by Flavius Josephus, which was itself based on account
of Herod's court historian, and Josephus had written that Herod

(12:31):
had a fever, though not a raging one, an intolerable
itching of the whole skin, continuous pains and the intestiness
of the feet, inflammation of the abdomen, and gangrene of
the privy parts. Also he had asthma, loom convulsions, and
bad breath. I saw the bad breathing too, and putrified

(12:54):
and worm eaten genitals, along with a ravenous appetite and
an ulcerated colon. So some people have thought that Herod
died of gonorrhea or syphilis. Hirshman figured that all the symptoms,
except for the genital gang green, signified chronic kidney disease,
figured that the gang green was actually caused by a

(13:16):
rare infection called for neiers gang green. But some people
have said that these may all have been a figment
of his biographer's imagination, because again, Harod wasn't so popular
at that particular time. He was called Herod the Great
a bit sarcastically, so he may have just listed all

(13:36):
of the things that could happen to you if you
had incurred the wrath of God, which they assumed that
Herod had. He was looked at as the Antichrist during
the Middle Ages, so you might not put it past
a biographer after the fact to make his death as
disgusting as possible. Yeah, if you really didn't like somebody,
these are the symptoms I think you would probably give
them were I'm eating genitals, remember that one. But regardless

(13:58):
of how it went down, Harod in Jericho, which was
his winter palace, and his people carried him twenty five
miles on a golden beer. His family army in full
battle gear, five hundred servants and freed slaves all just
walk into Herodium l he promised to be buried. He

(14:18):
had gemstones and purple drapes and his crown and scepter,
so he was still shown a royal dignity in death again,
even if he wasn't the favorite. And after he died,
everything in Judea just completely fell apart. His fortune was
spent by his family, harmony was destroyed, things started to
get into conflict again, and Harod's son was so bad

(14:41):
at ruling that the Romans finally put someone else in
there to rule, which just intensified the conflict between the
Jews and the Romans. So the Jews first revolted in
the sixties a d and vandalized Herod's tomb, changed his
dining room into a synagogue Dug Mikvah's in the courtyard,
and they lost, and at Sata said they killed themselves

(15:02):
to avoid becoming Roman slaves on. The second revolt was
in the one thirties, where they again used to Rodium
and Masada as fortresses and dead tunnels into the hills
at Herodium, which you can still see today. So if
you like to learn more about Jerusalem, Jerusalem syndrome, archaeology,
and the Battle of Actim can go to our homepage

(15:22):
at www dot how stuff works dot com and type
into the search bar, and also take a look at
our blog and if you have any comments or questions,
send us an email at History Podcast at how staff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Let us
know what you think. Send an email to podcast at

(15:44):
how stuff works dot com, and be sure to check
out the stuff you missed in History Class blog on
the how stuff works dot com home page