The Estate in Western Samaria
From 1971 to 1981 the team of S. Dar conducted a survey in Samaria. One of the most pervasive phenomena that the survey team discovered was the field towers. The team counted 962 towers scattered from just north of Jerusalem in the south to north of Sebaste. The towers were built with large quarried stones without mortar. The towers averaged 2.3 meters to 3.7 meters in height, were 3 to 4 meters square, and had walls .7 to .8 meters thick. The team excavated forty five towers and found (based on the pottery) that they were erected in the Hellenistic period (third to second century BC) and continued in use through the Herodian period (31 BC to AD 70) which includes the reigns of Herod the Great, his sons, and grandsons. The towers would have required an immense amount of labor (300 to 400 days of labor by one person to build each one). So many towers requiring so much labor indicate, surmises Dar, that their erection was a governmental project. Thus the Ptolemies paid huge sums of money in labor costs to begin building towers in Samaria in the third century BC.
Why were the towers built? Dar suggests that they were fermentation towers for wine production. They were not observation towers since few of them have windows or observation points on the roof of the tower. Each tower is attached to a plot of ground which argues that the towers had an agricultural use. Thus if Dar is correct, the Ptolemies had a huge area of land in Samaria in vineyards.
We may actually have a record of one of these vineyards. The Zenon papyri, part of which were written in Palestine in 259 BC to a bureaucrat in Egypt, attest to an estate at Beth Anath. The location of Beth Anath has been debated. Some think this village was in Galilee but M. Avi-Yonah the famous geographer believed it was located in Samaria , in the area of the field towers. The estate, evidently, was given by Ptolemy to a man called Apollonius. Kings often gave portions of their lands to their faithful civil servants. The papyri refer to crops such as grain, fruit orchards and especially vineyards which produced a special “Syrian wine”. The vineyards of this particular small estate had 80,000 vines which would require perhaps forty acres of land and twenty five tenant farmers (according to Hengel). One of the letters describes a disagreement between the tenant farmers and the rent collector. The tenant farmers want their rent reduced since the harvest that year was poor.
Another small estate in this area, again a village, is reported in Josephus in the time of Herod the Great (Josephus, War 2.69, Antiquities 17.289). This was a village and its surrounding land, and presumably the peasants to work the land, called Arus (Arabic site of Haris) which lay south of Sebaste [map 1]. Herod had given the land to a bureaucrat from his inner circle of government, doubtless as a reward for faithful service. Thus Herod the Great seems to have inherited the extensive estate in Samaria that the Hellenistic kings owned. Like the Ptolemies, Herod parceled out small portions of this estate to his favorite people.
We also read in Josephus that Herod the Great settled his veteran soldiers after their tour of duty around the city of Sebaste (Josephus, War 1.403; Antiquities 15.296). Herod gave farm plots to six thousand veterans. If each soldier received only six acres (about average for a small freeholder) that means that Herod gave away 36,000 acres! When we consider that the total land area of Samaria was around 350,000 acres we realize that Herod gave away more than ten percent of Samaria to his soldiers. Since we should probably assume that Herod never gave away all of his land in any particular region, we conclude that he owned considerably more than those 36,000 acres in Samaria.