In September 2025, archaeologists announced that they had uncovered a substantial Samaritan estate at Kafr Qasim, in central Israel. The floors of its decorated rooms were paved with mosaics depicting grapes, dates, watermelons, artichokes and asparagus, set among acanthus leaves and geometric designs. Nearby were storerooms, ritual baths and equipment for producing olive oil. The complex was occupied and remodelled between the fourth and seventh centuries CE, when this part of Palestine passed from late Roman into Byzantine rule.
Elaborate mosaics survive in other ancient buildings, as do olive presses at farming settlements. At Kafr Qasim, the decorated living spaces and working installations belonged to the same property. They also preserve evidence of changes over time. Walls were later built across some of the mosaics, and architectural stone was put to new uses, suggesting that the people occupying the site no longer had quite the same priorities as those who commissioned its finest rooms.
For Samaritan history, the discovery brings everyday life into view alongside the religious disputes that dominate much of the written record. The community is familiar from accounts of Mount Gerizim, its sacred texts and confrontations with imperial rulers. At this estate, people continued to occupy a wider settlement during centuries of political and religious upheaval. The decorated floors express an interest in prosperity and display, while lamps, baths and agricultural buildings allow us to investigate the work and practices of its inhabitants.
The excavation at Khirbet Kafr Hatta
The remains were found in a rescue excavation undertaken before a residential development in Kafr Qasim, roughly 20 kilometres east of Tel Aviv. The locality is identified as Khirbet Kafr Hatta, already known to archaeologists through earlier surveys. On 2 September 2025, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced the results of work directed by Alla Nagorsky and Daniel Leahy Griswold, with support from Israel’s Ministry of Construction and Housing. Calling the complex an estate reflects the combination of domestic rooms and agricultural facilities. It does not establish that every building belonged to one family or formed an unchanging Roman-style villa.
The extent of the remains surprised the excavators. In an interview published after the announcement, Leahy Griswold recalled that a small trial excavation some years earlier had identified buildings. When the main excavation began in February 2025, the team expected a comparatively ordinary settlement; some of the first structures even seemed to belong to a monastery. Mosaic pavements, installations used for ritual immersion and, above all, pottery lamps associated with Samaritans led the archaeologists to reconsider that initial impression.
Kafr Qasim lies near the western approaches to the Samarian highlands, between settlements farther inland and the coastal plain. In antiquity, villages, cultivated land and roads connected this area with local markets. The estate was therefore well placed within an agricultural landscape, although it stood beyond the Samaritan community’s traditional centre around Mount Gerizim. Leahy Griswold described its extent as exceptional for a Samaritan site outside that heartland. A final excavation plan will be needed, however, before its size can be compared precisely with other sites.
Reports of the discovery, including the September 2025 account in Archaeology magazine, generally agree about the main finds and the broad dates. Most draw on the preliminary IAA announcement, rather than independent excavation publications. They cannot yet answer detailed questions about the archaeological layers, how many rooms belonged to each period of occupation or precisely when the principal rebuilding took place. Those questions depend on the excavators’ full report.
Who were the Samaritans?
The Samaritans are an Israelite religious community for whom Mount Gerizim, overlooking the city of Nablus, is the central holy place. Their sanctuary is there rather than in Jerusalem. They preserve the Samaritan Pentateuch, their own textual tradition of the Bible’s first five books, and maintain a priesthood and religious festivals that include Passover. Gerizim remains their divinely chosen place of worship. Samaritans still practise their religion today, so the Kafr Qasim buildings form part of the history of a living community, rather than that of a people who simply disappeared.
Samaritan and Jewish traditions developed from the religious world of ancient Israel. Their relationship cannot be explained as one community separating from another at a single, securely dated moment; differences emerged across the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods. Excavations at Mount Gerizim have added archaeological evidence to the study of this long development. Reinhard Pummer’s study of Samaritan origins places the sanctuary’s archaeological evidence at the centre of the discussion, while acknowledging continuing disagreements about the date and nature of its earliest temple.
By the fourth century CE, Samaritan communities had spread beyond the vicinity of Gerizim. Their members took part in the commercial and cultural life of Roman Palestine while preserving their religious traditions. They did not live in complete separation from Jewish and Christian neighbours. Greek writing, pottery, building techniques and agricultural machinery crossed communal boundaries. For that reason, archaeologists do not generally regard one bath, mosaic or press as proof of Samaritan identity. They look for several kinds of evidence occurring together.
Mount Gerizim had its own complicated history by the time the Kafr Qasim buildings were occupied. Its sanctuary had been transformed long before the fourth century, yet the mountain retained its religious importance during the Roman and Christian imperial periods. Even the form of the original sanctuary remains contested. In Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme’s study of Gerizim, the assumption that its architecture simply copied the Jerusalem temple is questioned. At Kafr Qasim, the houses and working installations provide evidence of Samaritan life some distance from the religious centre.
The mosaic floors and their extraordinary produce
The most widely reported discovery is an elaborate mosaic floor. Its patterns were formed from tesserae, small pieces of stone fixed into mortar. Geometric ornament surrounds acanthus leaves and depictions that the excavators identified as grapes, dates, watermelons, artichokes and asparagus. Grape imagery is familiar from late antique mosaics, as are birds and hunting scenes, but the vegetables are less commonly encountered. For now, those identifications come from the preliminary excavation announcement, not from a published botanical examination of each motif.
The fruit and vegetables should not be read as an inventory of what this particular estate grew. Mosaic artists could draw on conventional imagery, admired plants, gardens or ideals of abundance without depicting the fields outside the building. Grapes and dates were certainly important in the wider agricultural economy of Roman Palestine. Even so, their appearance on the floor cannot demonstrate that the occupants cultivated them, much less that they grew all the other plants depicted. The designs offer firmer evidence about taste, display and the patron’s aspirations than about the property’s crop yields.
A floor made for a reception or living room had a different purpose from one laid around a working olive press. Pressing demanded surfaces that could tolerate oil, water and repeated cleaning. A mosaic visible to visitors could advertise the resources of its patron. Such floors were expensive because their manufacture required more than purchasing coloured stone: artisans prepared the bedding, designed the composition, selected and arranged tesserae and set them securely in mortar. Complex multicoloured work took time and skill even where stone was readily available. The surviving decoration therefore fits the excavators’ interpretation of an affluent period at the estate.
That wealth was expressed through an artistic language shared across the region. Geometric and plant mosaics appeared in Byzantine-period churches, synagogues, monasteries and private houses. Itai Elad’s study of a fifth-century villa at Herzliyya Bet describes a luxurious building with a Greek mosaic inscription and a possible Samaritan association. The identification of the Herzliyya Bet building is itself uncertain. Non-figurative decoration, a ritual bath and an inscription may collectively point towards a Samaritan patron, but none is decisive on its own.
A Greek greeting in a Samaritan house
Near the entrance to one decorated room, the archaeologists uncovered part of a Greek inscription wishing good fortune to a named person. Early news accounts translated the greeting as “Good luck”; in an interview, the excavation director instead explained it as a congratulatory formula followed by a personal name that survives only in part. Without a specialist publication of the inscription, its precise wording and the missing letters should not be treated as settled. An inscription can reveal what kind of message was intended even when too little survives to reconstruct every word.
Greek appears here in a household setting associated with Samaritans. Samaritans had their own script and Aramaic traditions, but they lived within the wider Greek-speaking culture and administration of the eastern Roman Empire. A Samaritan householder could choose Greek for a visible inscription without changing religious allegiance. Leahy Griswold nevertheless regarded its appearance here as noteworthy. Its use at Kafr Hatta does not establish that Greek was the usual language of Samaritan household inscriptions.
Another mosaic helps place the Kafr Hatta inscription in context. In Oren Tal’s study of a possible Samaritan synagogue at Apollonia-Arsuf, a pavement carries an inscription in both Greek and Samaritan. Tal weighs the writing alongside the remains of the building and its orientation, and the synagogue identification is still provisional. The bilingual text records Greek and Samaritan in the same religious setting. A few words cannot establish conversion or cultural assimilation without the building’s archaeological context.
The greeting at Kafr Hatta occupied a position where visitors would see it as they entered. A wish for prosperity or well-being could contribute to the way the patron presented the room. Beyond that, the circumstances are unknown. The public excavation accounts do not identify the full name, explain who paid for the inscription or establish whether it commemorated construction, renovation or a gift. Its place in the decorated entrance is clear; the occasion for placing it there is not.
How the estate made olive oil
The olive-oil facilities stood north of the finer rooms. Excavators identified a crushing installation, two screw presses and adjoining rooms used in the work. Making olive oil involved a sequence of operations, using different parts of the installation. The harvested fruit was broken into pulp, which was then squeezed to release liquid for collection and separation. A large crushing basin served the first stage. The screws exerted pressure on the pulp in the second, probably while it was held in baskets or other containers through which the liquid could pass.
Olive processing required a concentrated period of work each year. In the eastern Mediterranean, harvesting generally takes place in autumn and early winter, and the fruit needs to be pressed promptly before it deteriorates. Workers brought olives to the complex, crushed them, loaded the pulp and handled the liquid from which oil had to be separated. Containers, storage space and regular attention to the machinery were also necessary. The scale of the Kafr Hatta equipment points to output greater than the requirements of a small household, though the presses alone do not allow us to calculate an annual total.
Comparable presses have been found at settlements with different religious and social histories. Excavations at Khirbat Din‘ila in the western Galilee, for example, document Roman and Byzantine installations using lever-and-screw mechanisms. Their lever-and-screw mechanisms provide a technological comparison with Kafr Hatta, though the same machinery served settlements with different religious identities. Screws offered a way to maintain pressure on olive pulp, and regional presses combined them with beams and levers in different arrangements.
Once the oil had been produced, a substantial estate needed somewhere to keep it. Oil could supply cooking and other domestic uses, lamps, religious requirements or trade. Storage buildings might indicate dealings with neighbours or more distant markets, but the preliminary reports do not quantify their capacity or describe marked transport jars tracing particular sales routes. The available evidence does not trace sales directly to Jaffa or another coastal port. Organised production is visible in the archaeological remains; the reach of the estate’s customers is not.
Why were ritual baths built beside the press?
A large immersion bath was excavated close to the oil-producing area, with a smaller bath elsewhere in the complex. Such installations are often described as a mikveh or miqveh. The position of the larger one raises the possibility that making oil involved rules of ritual purity. In some ancient communities, foodstuffs and the people processing them were expected to meet religious requirements, and immersion could prepare workers for those activities. The excavators think the proximity may have been deliberate. The masonry itself, however, cannot tell us precisely what procedures the estate’s occupants followed.
The larger bath was built with steps descending around its perimeter rather than from just one side. Leahy Griswold called this a peripheral mikveh, a form known from much earlier periods but, in his experience, not previously documented in a Byzantine setting. Coins and pottery supported a late antique date for the complex. Its unusual arrangement could reflect the adaptation of an older bath or the revival of an earlier architectural form. The excavators preferred the latter explanation, that the installation belonged to the late antique building phase, although its detailed stratigraphy is still unpublished.
The smaller installation is harder to interpret. Its steps were covered with mosaic, and the arrangement of pools is ambiguous. The remains could be one bath beside a reservoir, two baths belonging to different periods, or a more involved sequence of rebuilding. These possibilities matter. Simply labelling each plastered basin a ritual bath would give a false impression of how securely the site’s religious practices have been reconstructed. There is nevertheless an unmistakable spatial relationship between a major immersion installation and the production complex.
Other excavations document possible connections between ritual purity and agricultural work. Yonatan Adler’s study of Second Temple-period baths beside agricultural installations examines Jewish practices concerning the purity of oil and wine. It does not prove that Samaritans at Kafr Hatta observed the same rules several centuries later. It does show that a bath adjoining a press need not have been installed simply to let agricultural workers wash off the day’s dirt.
What identifies the estate as Samaritan?
The clearest indication of Samaritan occupation comes from the pottery. The archaeologists recovered numerous oil lamps belonging to types associated with Samaritan communities. Characteristic examples have distinctive handles and closely packed geometric decoration, and lack the crosses or other imagery found on some contemporary Christian lamps. Leahy Griswold regarded this assemblage as the strongest evidence for identifying the estate. Individual lamps could change hands, of course. What carries weight is the number recovered and the contexts in which they were found, rather than an assumption that such objects were owned exclusively by Samaritans.
The baths and mosaics contribute to the same interpretation without settling it independently. Geometric and plant decoration is consistent with known Samaritan tastes, and immersion baths are consistent with the community’s concern for ritual purity. Similar designs appear in Jewish and Christian buildings, however, and neither presses nor bathing installations were restricted to one faith. The attribution depends on examining the pottery, inscriptions, architecture and location together. Several associated features make a stronger case than any isolated object.
Similar uncertainties appear in published reports of other settlements. Etan Ayalon and Yossi Levy’s report on Horbat Gelilot describes an olive press, a bath and other features in a Roman-Byzantine settlement where Samaritans may have lived. In Yardenna Alexandre’s 2024 study of Horbat Sahar, Samaritan-type lamps also suggest a community, but the religious identification is deliberately left uncertain. Pottery and buildings can support an attribution. They cannot provide the definitive personal identities that a census or an inscription naming the inhabitants might supply.
The illustrated late antique lamp with a cross belongs to the region’s Christian visual culture. It should not be confused with the characteristic Samaritan lamp types reported from Kafr Hatta. Photographs of the excavated examples show other forms; the cross on this separate object does not connect it to the Samaritan estate. The comparison is useful for showing how religious imagery could appear on everyday lamps, not for identifying the estate’s own finds.
What the estate reveals about work and wealth
At Kafr Hatta, expensive domestic floors and agricultural equipment appear in the occupation history of the same site. The decorated rooms also depended on the labour of people whose names have not survived in the archaeological record. Labourers picked and transported olives, operated the presses, cared for storage rooms and repaired roofs, walls and water systems. Baths needed attention, and lamps required fuel. We cannot establish the size of the resident population, the balance between permanent and seasonal labour or whether the people doing this work were free or enslaved. The decoration makes wealth visible; the everyday work that supported it is harder to reconstruct.
The rooms also leave the patrons’ precise social standing uncertain. Landowners in Roman Palestine included prosperous local families as well as investors whose holdings extended well beyond a single village. Skilled craftsmen and elaborate pavements demonstrate access to substantial resources, but they do not identify an aristocratic owner. There are no published account books, inscriptions naming the proprietor or complete plan sufficient to establish the estate’s organisation. Its decorated spaces represented a considerable investment. Who controlled that wealth, and how it was divided, remain unanswered questions.
The estate was placed to take part in the wider agricultural economy of Roman and Byzantine Palestine. Olives, grapes and grain were important across the region, although the balance differed locally. Some produce might be consumed at home and some exchanged for ceramics, tools, building supplies or services. Leahy Griswold suggested that neighbouring cultivators may have used the presses during a later phase, but no contract, price list or equivalent evidence establishes who had access or on what terms.
The presses and storerooms point to recurring production and organised seasonal work. In the living rooms, mosaics made by skilled craftsmen displayed the resources available to an affluent household. The residence may also have been a place where the owners maintained the personal relationships important to their enterprise. That is a plausible reading of the complex, rather than a documented account of any particular family’s wealth or commercial partners.
The estate changed during the Samaritan revolts
The estate was occupied during a troubled period in Samaritan history. In the fifth and sixth centuries, members of the community repeatedly came into conflict with the Christian imperial government. The best-known uprisings took place under Emperor Zeno in 484 and under Justinian I from 529. Christian writers describe religious restrictions, rebellions, attacks and harsh reprisals. Their testimony reflects the positions of authors involved in these religious and political disputes. The violence should not be dismissed, but exact death tolls and claims that all Samaritan countryside was left deserted cannot be accepted without further evidence.
Writing in the sixth century, Procopius described the suffering of agricultural communities during a Samaritan uprising after Justinian’s religious laws. His account in the Secret History 11.24–30 comes from near the period in question, but the work is sharply hostile to the emperor. Its numerical claims require particular caution. Matt Chalmers’s overview of the revolts and imperial legislation considers the conflicts in terms of the reach and limitations of Byzantine authority in Palestine. Imperial laws record the authorities’ intentions; hostile narratives describe events from the authors’ particular positions. Neither gives a complete account of what happened in every rural settlement.
The archaeological sequence at Kafr Hatta records substantial changes to the buildings. Later walls crossed rooms whose floors had once been covered with mosaics, while older capitals and columns were reused. Agricultural production came to occupy a more prominent place. Those alterations can be observed directly. The excavators suggest that the economic and political aftermath of the Samaritan revolts may help explain them. At present, however, there is no published evidence tying an individual wall or conversion of a room to a particular uprising. A possible connection should not be presented as a demonstrated cause.
People continued to use the complex after its most elaborate rooms changed function. Samaritan-type lamps were reported from later phases, suggesting the continued presence of people associated with that community. Their occupation makes it harder to sustain a picture of every Samaritan settlement outside the highlands disappearing after the revolts. The buildings had certainly changed: rooms acquired other uses, and production displaced some domestic display. What survives is evidence for both disruption and continued use, rather than for either complete stability or a clean break.
Changes in the household or business could also account for the remodelling. A property might have been divided within a family or transferred to new owners. The oil-making operation might have expanded, or an already damaged floor might have been covered when a room acquired another function. Dating the wall construction against coins and pottery will help test whether the changes coincide with the uprisings or belong to a more gradual economic development. The value of Kafr Hatta is that its archaeology may allow a broad historical account to be checked against the fortunes of a particular settlement.
A connection with Menander, or just an ancient place-name?
There is a proposed connection between Khirbet Kafr Hatta and Capparetaea, a village named by early Christian authors as the birthplace of Menander. This first-century CE Samaritan religious teacher was associated by hostile Christian writers with Simon Magus and accused of magic and of misleading his followers. Reports about the 2025 excavation sometimes repeat the connection without explaining its limits. Identifying Capparetaea with the present locality is a proposal in historical geography, not an established fact. Moreover, Menander lived centuries before the principal surviving buildings at the estate were occupied.
The earliest explicit written account comes from Justin Martyr’s First Apology, chapter 26, composed in the second century. Justin describes Menander as a Samaritan from Capparetaea and attributes to him the claim that his followers would not die. The later writer Eusebius repeats the tradition in Ecclesiastical History 3.26. Both sources preserve Christian accounts of Menander rather than his own biography. Neither names a room at the excavated estate or shows that he visited the property, let alone lived in it.
The suggested place-name nonetheless draws attention to a settlement history longer than the surviving late antique complex. Literary texts may retain the name of a village, while excavation can identify traces of different phases of occupation. Linking those records demands evidence of location as well as date. The estate cannot responsibly be called Menander’s house, and accounts of a first-century religious dispute cannot establish the ownership of buildings occupied from the fourth century onwards.
How the archaeologists date the buildings
The public excavation accounts give the occupation a broad span from the fourth to the seventh century CE. That covers several centuries of late Roman and Byzantine history, rather than the date of one construction campaign. Doors, floors and installations within the same complex may belong to different episodes of rebuilding. The archaeologists report pottery and coins among their dating evidence, but the complete sequence of finds has not yet been made public. That long period of occupation cannot supply an exact construction date for any particular room.
The dating methods operate at different levels. Pottery changes in shape, decoration and manufacture over time, allowing archaeologists to compare vessels with dated sequences. A coin supplies a date after which the deposit containing it must have formed, though coins could circulate for years after minting. Physical relationships between structures provide another sequence: a wall built through a mosaic must be younger than the floor, while a later mosaic might have been laid against an existing wall. Combining those observations, the excavators can establish building phases before asking how they relate to political events.
Mosaic designs and pressing equipment offer further clues, but neither can securely date a building on its own. Geometric and vegetal motifs continued in use across many places and generations, and screw presses were likewise not confined to a single decade. A more precise history will depend on the published relationship between finds, floors and walls. For now, occupation from the fourth to the seventh century is better supported than assigning narrow dates to individual buildings.
Other Samaritan mosaics and why comparisons matter
Many religious and domestic buildings across the southern Levant had mosaic floors in late antiquity. Samaritan synagogues might show geometric designs, inscriptions or ritual imagery, while Jewish synagogues and Christian churches often employed some of the same visual forms. Comparisons can therefore help identify regional patterns, but images require careful labelling. A tree depicted in a floor from Caesarea does not document the actual mosaic at Kafr Hatta, and plant imagery alone is insufficient to determine the patron’s religion.
For Samaritan material specifically, Yitzhak Magen’s published collection of synagogue mosaics offers an extensive body of comparisons. The bilingual mosaic inscription discussed by Oren Tal at Apollonia contributes another kind of evidence, joining writing to the architecture and orientation of a building. Together, these studies help distinguish artistic conventions shared across the region from features whose Samaritan association grows stronger when supported by other evidence.
The illustrated comparison belongs to that wider archaeological record, not to the Kafr Hatta excavation of 2025. Even where its attribution is secure, it cannot stand in for photographs or analysis of the estate’s own floors. Claims about Kafr Hatta’s decoration and date have to rest on the objects and contexts actually uncovered there.
What remains unknown about the estate
The full excavation report will be needed to answer several basic questions. A complete plan should show which structures operated together and which were separated by centuries. Study of the presses and storage vessels may clarify whether oil was made chiefly for the estate, for nearby cultivators or for a wider market. The layout and sequence of the baths could help establish how practices of immersion changed. The Greek inscription still requires a specialist reading that identifies the surviving letters and explains precisely where it was found.
The largest historical question concerns the relationship between alterations at the estate and changes affecting Samaritan communities more widely. Floors, lamps, baths and presses document a substantial property with its own cultural practices and agricultural production. Walls cutting those floors and architectural pieces put to new uses demonstrate that its occupants changed the buildings. The excavated alterations themselves are clear. Whether imperial laws, revolts, population movement or a transfer of ownership drove a specific alteration remains to be established.
The estate discovered in 2025 gives us a substantial Samaritan-associated agricultural settlement beyond the community’s traditional centre, occupied during centuries when written accounts repeatedly describe persecution and violence. Its mosaics are the most immediately striking finds, but the continued use of the property may prove more important. The inhabitants repaired, repurposed and worked in these buildings as circumstances changed, preserving traces of a community whose ordinary rural life is far less visible in the surviving literary sources.
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