The tablet of the Ten Commandments that is up for auction.
A marble tablet touted by Sotheby’s as the world’s oldest engraved with the Ten Commandments sold for more than $5 million on Wednesday despite multiple questions about authenticity.
After a battle that lasted several minutes at the company’s headquarters, the 52-kilogram object was sold for around 5 million dollars (4.8 million euros) including costs. Sotheby’s estimated the value at between $1 million and $2 million.
It is estimated that this is the board oldest in the world with the Ten Commandments and dates back to a period between the years 300 and 800 during the Byzantine Roman period.
Discovered in 1913 during excavations for the construction of a railway in the current territory of Israelthe tombstone features the inscription, in Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, of verses from nine of the ten commandments that appear in the Bible and the Torah.
“Whoever dug it up didn’t realize the importance and took it home to use as flooring. It remained there for around thirty years, until an archaeologist based in Israel, Jacob Kaplan, recognized its importance and bought it,” Sharon Liberman Mintz, a specialist in Jewish texts at Sotheby’s in New York, told France-Presse (AFP). York, during the presentation of the object in early December.
Experts believe that the stone originally belonged to a synagogue destroyed during one of two possible historical periods: the Roman invasions between 400 and 600 AD or the Crusades in the 11th century.
The stone recently passed through the Torah Museum in Brooklyn and was purchased by a private collector, its last owner before the sale.
According to the Sotheby’s expert, “There is no other stone of this type in private hands (…) all other pieces are small fragments” and are found in museums.
Doubts about authenticity
However, other experts cited by the New York Times called, before the sale, caution given the difficulty of authenticating such an object.
“The objects in this region are full of fakes”indicated the director of research at the Penn Cultural Heritage Center in Philadelphia, Brian Daniels, although he believed that the latter could be “authentic”.
“There is no way of knowing” the stone age, added Christopher Rollston, Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at George Washington University.
In the press release announcing the sale results, Sotheby’s stated that “this historical object has been studied by the greatest experts in the area and cited in numerous articles and scientific works, the most recent of which was published at the beginning of this year”.
Around 1,500 years old, weighing 52 kilograms and measuring around 60 centimeters tall, the tablet has twenty lines of paleo-Hebrew texta script that stopped being used centuries ago.
The text is largely aligned with biblical verses familiar to Jewish and Christian traditions, but one variation includes a commandment specific to Samaritan practices, instructing prayer at Mount Gerizim, a sacred site for the Samaritan community.
