A 1,500-year-old stone tablet with the earliest known chiseled inscription of the Ten Commandments was sold on Wednesday at a US auction for US$850,000.
The 61cm square slab of white marble that weighs about 50kg was sold in Beverly Hills, California, by Dallas-based Heritage Auctions to a buyer who was not to be immediately identified.
The tablet was put up for sale by Rabbi Shaul Deutsch, founder of the Living Torah Museum, in Brooklyn, New York, with the stipulation that the buyer must put it on public display, the auction house said.
The tablet is chiseled with 20 lines of Samaritan script with principles that are fundamental to Judaism and Christianity.
The inscription lists nine of the 10 commandments in the Book of Exodus, omitting “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” and replacing it with a rule for Samaritan worshipers, the auction house said.
It was probably chiseled during the late Roman or Byzantine era, between 300 AD and 500 AD, and marked the entrance of an ancient synagogue that was likely destroyed by the Romans, the auction house said.
The tablet was discovered in 1913 during excavation for a railroad line near the city of Yavneh in western Israel. Someone, possibly a construction worker, acquired it and set it in a courtyard where it remained until 1943 when it was acquired by an archeologist, who owned it until his death in 2000.
Deutsch acquired the tablet for temporary display through an agreement with the Israel Antiquities Authority and then bought it outright after a legal settlement, Heritage officials said.
Deutsch said he wanted to sell the tablet and other artifacts from his collection to raise money for a makeover of his museum to give it more hands-on exhibits to attract younger visitors.
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