Posted on 08/26/2008 5:18:38 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Radiocarbon dating of two Jewish ritual instruments found in London a century and a half ago has dashed hopes that they date from the period before the Jewish community was expelled in 1290. They are postmedieval and one of them may never have been finished or used in the synagogue.
The shofar is a ritual instrument often made from a ram's horn, Tamara Chase and her colleagues explain in London Archaeologist... The first occurrence is in the book of Exodus, and they were also blown at Jericho on Joshua's orders, whereupon the walls fell down. Shofarot are used in the synagogue during the month of Elul, which commemorates Moses's time on Mount Sinai and they are played on the holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Of the examples found in London, the first was found at Vauxhall during dredging of the Thames in 1850 and is preserved in the Cuming Museum in Southwark. The other discovery was in Leadenhall Street in the City in 1855, where the Bricklayers' Hall was used as a synagogue from 1761; the horn now belongs to the Jewish Museum in Camden Town.
Jews were excluded from England from the time of Edward I until Cromwell's rule in the 1650s, and it seemed a good idea to see if the shofarot belonged to the earlier or later period. Tiny samples of horn were subjected to AMS (accelerator mass spectrometer) dating at Oxford.
The Vauxhall shofar, with a shaped mouthpiece and zigzag-decorated bell, is more than 95 per cent certain to date from the period 1630-1939, with a two-thirds chance of dating from after 1800...The Leadenhall Street shofar yielded the same date ranges, but its provenance remains a mystery.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
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seems like I just posted this, and it’s nearly a month old:
Harrari Harps Recreates Biblical Instruments
IsraelNN.com | Wednesday, July 23, 2008 | interview by Ben Bresky
Posted on 07/28/2008 8:51:11 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2052540/posts
So, you’ve figured out I’m really Dennis Kucinich. I guess the politically correct substitute is up.
Note: this topic is from . Just an update.
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