Now one of Israel’s most impressive archaeological sites, Tzipori National Park was, in ancient times, a prosperous and well-endowed city with stone-paved roadways (rutted over time by wagons and chariots), an amazing water-supply system, a marketplace, bathhouses, synagogues, churches and a 4500-seat theatre. For many modern visitors, though, the star attraction is a mosaic portrait of a contemplative young woman nicknamed the Mona Lisa of the Galilee, one of several superb early-3rd-century mosaics discovered here in the 1980s.
In the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE – a generation or two after the Bar Kochba Revolt (132 to 135 CE) against Rome – Tzipori was one of the most important centres of Jewish life in the Land of Israel. It was here that Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi is believed to have redacted the Mishnah (the earliest codification of Jewish law), and later on Tzipori scholars contributed to the Jerusalem (Palestinian) Talmud.
