The Gabriel Stone Goes on Display in Jerusalem

Also called Gabriel’s Revelation. The Huffington Post reports in typical sensational fashion:

An ancient stone with mysterious Hebrew writing and featuring the archangel Gabriel is going on display in Jerusalem as scholars debate the inscription’s meaning.

The so-called Gabriel Stone, said to have been found 13 years ago in Jordan, features an unknown prophetic text from the time of the Second Jewish Temple.

The tablet made a splash in 2008 when an Israeli scholar theorized the inscription would revolutionize the understanding of early Christianity, claiming it referenced a messianic resurrection pre-dating Jesus.

Curators at the Israel Museum said on Tuesday that it’s the most important inscription found in the area since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Israel Museum exhibit, opening Wednesday, also features ancient New Testament and Quran texts referencing the archangel Gabriel.

Wikipedia has more on the unprovenanced tablet here.

 

Using Inscriptions from the Antiquities Market: Polarized Positions and Pragmatic Proposals

Dr Christopher Rollston writes:

Archaeological sites in the Middle East have been ransacked, pillaged, and plundered for many decades. The motivations of the actual pillaging are normally economic: the pursuit of marketable artifacts. That is, the pillagers wish to find objects that can be sold to collectors. Of course, the motivations of the collectors who purchase these pillaged antiquities range from the desire to possess a piece of ancient history to having putative proof for a cherished belief. Among the artifacts most prized by collectors are ancient inscriptions.

Think briefly about scientific archaeological excavations. Complete pots and potsherds are carefully collected, catalogued, documented, and analyzed, while broken pots are often restored. Organic materials are meticulously bagged and tagged and sent to be carbon dated. Animal bones and seeds are studied to learn about animal husbandry, agriculture, and ancient diets. Grinding stones, needles, and pins are photographed and studied carefully to shed light on aspects of daily life. Metal objects are sent to laboratories for scientific analyses. Stone tools such as arrowheads are sent to specialists for analysis. And inscriptions are sent to epigraphers to be read and analyzed. The result is that knowledge is gained about ancient languages and dialects, and about ancient social structures, and religious practices and ideas. The final result is that scientific excavations yield an enormous amount of information about the ebb and flow of ancient lives.

In contrast, those pillaging sites for marketable objects do not have the resources, time, desire, or the training to do any of these things. This is despite the fact many looters have experience working on excavations, sometimes as skilled laborers. Rather, looters rifle through sites and collect nothing except the most marketable of objects. The rest are disturbed, broken, and ignored. After all, the primary goal of the pillager is finding something that will sell, something that will satisfy the appetite of the black market in pillaged antiquities. What then about inscriptions found by looters?

Read on at the ASOR Blog.

 

Undecipherable Inscription

HT

 

Israeli Experts Decode Only Arabic Crusader Inscription ever Found

Name of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and date ’1229′ found on 800-year-old Jaffa wall long thought by archaeologists to be artifact of relatively recent Ottoman period.

Haaretz reports:

Archaeologists have deciphered a grey marble slab whose 800-year-old Arabic inscription makes it the only Crusader artifact in that language ever found in the Middle East, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said Monday.

The inscription bears the name of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and the date “1229 of the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus the Messiah,” leading the IAA to proclaim it “a rare archaeological find.”

The inscription was found years ago on a wall in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv, but thought to have been from the Ottoman Period, and so not given priority by archaeologists.

Only when they began deciphering it, did they realize the inscription dated from the Crusader period of the Middle Ages, Professor Moshe Sharon, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said.

Frederick II, who led the Sixth Crusade (1228-29) fortified the castle of Jaffa and left in its walls two inscriptions, one in Latin and the other in Arabic.

“The Arabic inscription was drafted by Frederick’s officials, or possibly even the emperor himself, and it is the one which has been now deciphered,” said Sharon, one of the two archaeologists who deciphered the inscription.

The inscription is almost completely intact…

More here.

 

World’s Earliest Christian Engraving Identified

Live Science:

Researchers have identified what is believed to be the world’s earliest surviving Christian inscription, shedding light on an ancient sect that followed the teachings of a second-century philosopher named Valentinus.

Officially called NCE 156, the inscription is written in Greek and is dated to the latter half of the second century, a time when the Roman Empire was at the height of its power.

An inscription is an artifact containing writing that is carved on stone. The only other written Christian remains that survive from that time period are fragments of papyri that quote part of the gospels and are written in ink. Stone inscriptions are more durable than papyri and are easier to display. NCE 156 also doesn’t quote the gospels directly, instead its inscription alludes to Christian beliefs.

UPDATE:   Fox News has it.

 

Ancient Shabbat Boundary Rock Discovered

In Lower Galilee:

Inscription, discovered by chance by visitor in Lower Galilee, appears to date from the Roman or Byzantine period.

An ancient rock inscription of the word “Shabbat” was uncovered near Lake Kinneret this week – the first and only discovery of a stone Shabbat boundary in Hebrew.

The etching in the Lower Galilee community of Timrat appears to date from the Roman or Byzantine period.

News of the inscription, discovered by chance Sunday by a visitor strolling the community grounds, quickly reached Mordechai Aviam, head of the Institute for Galilean Archeology at Kinneret College.

“This is the first time we’ve found a Shabbat boundary inscription in Hebrew,” he said. “The letters are so clear that there is no doubt that the word is ‘Shabbat.’”

Aviam said Jews living in the area in the Roman or Byzantine era (1st-7th centuries CE) likely used the stone to denote bounds within which Jews could travel on Shabbat. The Lower Galilee of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages had a Jewish majority – many of the Talmudic sages bore toponyms indicative of Galilee communities.The engraving uncovered in Timrat is the first and only Shabbat boundary marker yet discovered in Hebrew – a similar inscription was found in the vicinity of the ancient Western Galilee village of Usha, but its text was written in Greek.

Aviam and his colleagues plan to enlist local help in scouring neighboring areas to locate additional inscriptions, and eventually to publish their findings in an academic journal…

There’s more here.