Victor Avery .com   Interesting , Informative , Entertaining

Ancient Stone Mug Found

Mysterious Mug Found

Sept '09

Archaeologists in Jerusalem found a 2,000-year-old stone mug, with ten lines of mysterious script. "These were common stone mugs that appear in all Jewish households" of the time, said lead excavator Shimon Gibson of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "But this is the first time an inscription has been found on a stone vessel" of this type. Deciphering the writing could provide a window into daily life or religious ritual in Jerusalem around the time of Jesus . Working on historic Mount Zion—site of King David's tomb and the Last Supper—the archaeologists found the cup near a ritual pool this summer. The site is in what had been an elite residential area near the palace of King Herod.

The cup which dates from some time between 37 B.C. and A.D. 70 was found in three fragments. Stone mugs were popular among Jews at the time, because purity rules required that mugs that had been contaminated by contact with a forbidden food had to be broken and discarded. But "according to Jewish law, stone cannot become ritually impure," said archaeologist Odin Magness, an expert on daily life in biblical Jerusalem.

What sets the newfound cup apart is its inscription, which is still sharply etched but so far impossible to understand. Similar to intentionally enigmatic writing in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the cup's script appears to be a secret code, written in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, the two written languages used in Jerusalem at the time. "They wrote it intending it to be cryptic," Gibson said. In hopes the script can be deciphered, Gibson's team is sharing pictures of the cup with experts on the writing of the period. The researchers also plan to post detailed photos of the cup and its inscriptions online soon.