Photo by: Institute for Galilean Archeology
Posted on 07/22/2011 3:31:33 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
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.
"This represents a beautiful, fascinating link between our modern world and antiquity, both emotional and archeological," Aviam said. "Certainly for those of us who are religiously observant, but also for the secular among us who enjoy a stroll on Shabbat to know that we're walking in places where Jewish history lived two thousand years ago."
(Excerpt) Read more at jpost.com ...
Photo by: Institute for Galilean Archeology
Cool. Thanks for posting.
It’s a one-time ping. :’)
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My pleasure.
That's like the Spanish boundary stones. (I'm busy looking up earlier Roman stones ~ their later ones are dedicated to the god Terminus and are quite finished ~ many with carved heads on them).
This particular stone (even though we can't see the whole thing since the writer was more concerned with the word on it than the shape) appears to be a boundary marker.
Wow this is realy cool. It is just so interesting when something like this is found that links history together.
Archaeological ping!
Nowadays they use power lines to designate the borders of an eruv. There’s one right around the corner from where I used to go to school. Makes it easier to get around and carry stuff during the Sabbath.
Recently I plucked a file off the Zahi Hawass blog site showing one of the Akhetaten city boundary stones. Akhenaten decided he was divine, but set up the boundary stones beyond which he would never again go. My favorites though are the Pillars of Ashoka; two or three of them up in Afghanistan are in Aramaic.
Thanks!
Definitely.
This photo doesn’t do it justice. It’s quite large.
Yep, Shabbat is clear. Great find!
Good grief. No one had ever noticed it before?
Don’t worry, I’m sure it will be condemned as a fake, if it hasn’t already.
(You really have to be batsh#t crazy to believe a lot of the stuff they believe in the Middle East.)
Well, by a weird coincidence...
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