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Ritual bath or bathing tub? Excavator Eric Meyers believes that this Roman period water installation at Sepphoris is a mikveh, or ritual bath. He explains that the reservoir pool (on the lower left) provided ritually pure water to the stepped pool at right. Meyers, countering the claims of Hanan Eshel, suggests that the other stepped pools at Sepphoris, including those without a reservoir pool, were also mikva’ot and that they provide strong evidence that Sepphoris was a Jewish city in the first century C.E.