Lavish West Bank tomb thought to be King Herod's

HERODIUM, West Bank — King Herod may have been buried in a crypt with lavish Roman-style wall paintings of a kind previously unseen in the Middle East, Israeli archaeologists said Wednesday.

Experts found such paintings and signs of a two-story mausoleum, bolstering their conviction the ancient Jewish monarch was buried there.

Ehud Netzer, head of Jerusalem's Hebrew University excavation team, which uncovered the site of the king's winter palace in the Judean desert in 2007, said the latest finds show work and funding fit for a king.

"What we found here, spread all around, are architectural fragments that enable us to restore a monument of 25 meters high — 75 feet high — very elegant, which fits Herod's taste and status," he said at the hillside dig in an Israeli-controlled part of the West Bank.

No human remains or inscriptions have been found to prove conclusively that the tomb was Herod's, but excavation continues.

Herod, who died in the first century B.C., is known for extensive building throughout the Holy Land.

Netzer said that since finding fragments of one ornately carved sarcophagus in 2007, he and his team have found two more, suggesting the monumental tomb may have been a royal family vault.

Herod was the Jewish proxy ruler of the Holy Land under imperial Roman occupation from 37 B.C. and reigned for more than six decades.

Netzer described the winter palace as a kind of "country club," with a pool, baths, gardens and a 650-seat theater.

In Herod's private box at the auditorium, diggers discovered frescoes depicting windows opening on to painted landscapes, one of which shows what appears to be an Italian farm.

Site surveyor Rachel Chachy-Laureys said techniques used in the paintings were unknown in the Holy Land at the time and must have been done by Roman artisans.

Gidon Foerster, a professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University and not connected with this dig, agreed that the art is "unique" for the region. "King Herod is said to have been buried there, and this proves it as much as it can possibly be proved," he said.

The Herod of Christian tradition was a bloodthirsty megalomanic, who flew into a frenzy when he met the three wise men on the way to Bethlehem.

Herod purportedly ordered the slaying of all children in his realm younger than 2. But historians are not convinced of the story's accuracy.