Posted on 01/31/2003 7:29:52 PM PST by blam
Temple tablet or forger's art? Patina fits, words don't
Joseph Brean and Simcha Jacobovici
National Post
Friday, January 31, 2003
Rarely do politics and carbon-dating mix, but when an ancient stone plaque was sent from Jerusalem to a Florida laboratory for analysis a little over a year ago, a nation's identity literally hung in the balance.
The tablet, with its ancient Hebrew inscription, is believed by some to have once hung in the long-lost First Temple of Judaism, built by King Solomon to house the Ten Commandments and burned to the ground by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.
The plaque's owner, who has yet to surface except through a lawyer, claims it was found near Jerusalem's Old City, a Muslim-controlled area of Jerusalem that includes the Al-Aqsa mosque. The last remaining wall of the Second Temple, known as the Western Wall, is nearby.
Jews claim the First Temple once stood here. Arabs are equally strong in their denial, but neither side has been able to provide conclusive archaeological proof, which is why the plaque has generated so much attention and suspicion since the carbon dating results were announced earlier this month.
As one collector in the notoriously cutthroat Israeli antiquities market said, the tablet "is being guarded like a nuclear secret."
If the tablet is indeed genuine, and if scientists could prove it was discovered near the Temple Mount as the owner claims, the dispute would be settled. But not everyone believes the tablet is genuine. Chief among the objections is that the grammar of the inscriptions seems, in parts, to be closer to Aramaic or Phoenician than ancient Hebrew.
"It could only be made in modern times," said Dr. Yosef Naveh, a world-renowned expert on alphabets and one of the very few people to have seen the tablet. "It is not genuine."
If the 30-centimetre-long plaque is a fake, the forger has fooled the Florida laboratory as well as a team of respected scientists from the Geological Survey of Israel.
The results of carbon-dating on tiny flecks of organic matter in the patina -- the dirt and film that collect on artifacts over time -- suggests this film started to form as early as 400 BC. The analysis of the rock revealed it to be a black sedimentary rock with a distinctive chemical composition. The closest exposed deposit of similar rock is in southwest Jordan, east of the Dead Sea.
The Israeli team also found tiny beads of gold embedded in the plaque's patina -- an exceedingly rare thing to find in the dirt and silt that settles over the ground of Israel.
"Such globules of pure gold can be formed by intense burning of pure gold," the report says. Its presence "is possibly evidence of conflagration of buildings decorated with gold, such as the First Temple ... the patina that covers the tablet, including the letters, crack and fractures, was formed after this tablet was buried in a soil containing gold globules and carbon particles."
Dr. Shimon Ilani, a member of the Israeli scientific team, said a single person could not have carried out such a convincing forgery. He said that it would require five expert forgers: one in epigraphy (ancient writing), one in the content of Old Testament, one in carbon-14 (the isotope used in carbon dating), one in patina-formation and one in the chemistry of gold.
Dr. Ilani and his colleagues theorized that the plaque hung on one of the the gilt walls of the First Temple, which was built of stone and cypress. When it burned in the Babylonians' attack, tiny globules of gold -- just one micrometre wide -- settled in the dirt of the surrounding area. The plaque lay in this dirt and the patina formed over it until a Jerusalem man discovered it a few years ago in a Muslim graveyard near the eastern wall of the Old City.
The plaque's owner is rumoured to be Arab, and frightened of the retribution he may face if he is seen to be promoting the first and only archeological evidence that the First Temple once stood on the Temple Mount.
The Second Temple, completed in 515 BC, stood at this site in Jerusalem for nearly 500 years before it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. All that remains is the Western, or "Wailing" Wall, the holiest site of prayer for Jews.
The plaque describes the efforts of Yehoash, King of Judea, to renovate the First Temple, with its cypress and stone walls, gallery, spiral stairs and niches. It is described with the same turns of phrase used in Kings II, 12:1-6 and 11-17.
In the mid-1990s, an Israeli scholar named Nadav Na'aman speculated in a journal article that the scribe who compiled the book of Kings II in the 7th century BC was working from information contained in a plaque from the First Temple.
"Here this plaque shows up," said Hershel Shanks, the editor of the Biblical Archeology Review, a scientific journal that plans to feature the plaque in an upcoming issue. "Maybe the forger knew about [Na'aman's] article, but if he didn't, then it's a remarkable confirmation of biblical text."
The Israeli scientists, Dr. Ilani, Dr. Amnon Rosenfeld and Dr. Michael Dvorachek, wrote that the dark stone plaque would have been "unique, conspicuous and majestic when placed on the backdrop of a light limestone wall, the typical building stone of Jerusalem."
Dr. Naveh, however, says the content of the script is just too good -- and the grammar too bad -- to be true.
In the late summer of 2001, he was summoned by the owner to a clandestine meeting at a Jerusalem hotel. The owner was not there. In his place was an Israeli man named Isaac Tzur and a young Arab boy.
After swearing Dr. Naveh to secrecy, they showed him the plaque and said it had been discovered in a graveyard, with the inscription facing down.
Dr. Naveh said he judged it to be a forgery.
"There are modern usages of some verbs, there are letter forms that cannot go together; they are not ancient Hebrew. They are either Aramaic or Phoenician," he said. "There are other letters that have more developed forms fitting 7th century Hebrew."
A few weeks later, on Sept. 24, 2001, the owner delivered it to the Geological Survey for carbon-dating. Dr. Naveh broke his silence only after this team announced its findings.
Jerusalem's Old City is often the source of archeological disputes; it is maintained by a Muslim endowment, the Waqf, which has been accused of irresponsible and politically motivated excavation. For example, in creating an emergency exit to an underground mosque there in 1999, the Waqf allowed parts of the supposed site of the First Temple to be dug up, and the remains dumped in the Kidron Valley to the east.
Mr. Shanks said the plaque has sparked "a storm in the archeological world."
"You have this tremendous divide [in the scholarly community]. More than I've ever seen," he said, adding that geologists, in general, are convinced the artifact is genuine, with most of the objection coming from archeologists, who note how no supervised excavation was ever carried out at the plaque's supposed site of discovery.
"Nothing is certain about this," Mr. Shanks said. "How did the gold get in the patina? Maybe the forger was smart enough to put it there. On the other hand, it could have been the fire that destroyed the Temple."
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Blast from the Past. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. |
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