It was said that the Roman Emperor, Hadrian, was so deaf that he had to cup behind his ear to listen to peoples or riding into battles. Or so it was said. However, there is nothing to substantiate Hadrian being deaf anywhere in the Internet searches other than a mere statement from the Earliest Known Deaf People. Contemporary court descriptions may mean it could from a novelization or unnamed historical documentation about Hadrian's life published in the modern time, not in the age of Antiquity.

Yet, a stunning discovery in Turkey of a giant statue of Hadrian (at least parts of the statue) was announced in the news recently. According to the experts, if all the pieces were intact, the statue would have stood at least nearly 13 to 15 feet tall. He was known as one of the Five Good Emperors of the Roman Empire. However he was known for his role in the crushing of the Simon bar Kochba revolt, which led to the near-destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple, the mass murder and enslavement of the Jews and forced the widespread diaspora of the Jewish people from the Holy Land. He was also best known for renaming and remapping of the long-held Jewish land of Judah (or Judae) into "Syria Palestinia", the name that eventually and permanently became Palestine. The very name having long been the heart of a serious dispute, to this day, between the descendants of the ancient Jews and the Arabs who have lived in the land since then.

Hadrian also renamed Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina and made a permanent law forbidding Jews from entering it. Since the rise of Constantine the Great until the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in the 7th century and onward, there have been small numbers of relative Jewish communities living outside Jerusalem, awaiting for the day of the end of the Diaspora and the return of the Jewish people, eventually leading to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

Syria Palestinia is a Romanized term for Philistine, the former land of the Philistines, long-time enemy of the Jews.

UPDATE ~ 8.30.2007: Remains of the Second Temple discovered under the al-Aqsa mosque compound. This could be the start of everything coming full circles.