"Archaeology: Ever Heard Of The Jeselsohn Stone?" Topic

I hadn't. Until tonight.

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Weird stuff. Of course, it could simply be one more fake, as with some other similar "discoveries" in the last quarter century.

Dan

You're watching NatGeo, too, eh? I got tired of the surmises and leaps in logic, and turned back to Boise State's football game.

Uhm… how the heck do you establish a date for a stone? It's stone. It's billions of years old. You can't carbon date it, as it's not (and never was) organic. So the idea that either it or the inscription can be placed within a given human time period, especially as precisely as the articles imply, seems more than a bit "iffy" to me. I smell a hoax.

Weird, but not inconsistent with a period that many biblical scholars relate is rife with messiahs. The Monty Python movie "Life of Brian" is not so off the mark. You are not fully dead until you are 3 days dead. As far as I understand it, that is ancient Jewish custom, but it might spring from a tradition as written on this stone. I don't recall many stone tablets bearing ink inscriptions. It would be an amazing survivor if it is real. At any rate, this is certainly fodder for a nice pulp plot for a game set in the pre-WWII time period Palestine.

I was just surprised that National Geographic chose to air it now, instead of waiting for the customary Easter or Christmas.

Dating would be by the linguistic contecnt and the stylistics of the carving. There are shed loads of stones and scrolls etc from the Dead sea region from this period.

It sounds like an Essene item though. (the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls)

Sounds tenuous. Lets hope it wasn't the last copy!

Heh, we watched that right after watching "Da Vinci Code" so it seemed a little suspicious from the start.

That was interesting. Thanks for posting it.

John

Hi

You can also date stone based on the conditions of the find. Lets use as a simple example that you are digging out a building that collapsed during a war as a known event, say 100BC and then under it, you find the stone, you know it cannot be more modern than 100.

Also the chemistry based on refraction spectrum from the ink might have some specific marker that is datable.

There might be organic material filling in an inscription that is datable and so on.

Rocky

No it ain't real unless it's CARVED in stone. I have a Sharpie and a rock, I'm making history.

Like the Kensington Rune stone. Templars in Minnesota

kensingtonrunestone.com

I remember reading somewhere that someone once counted the number of so called mesiahs cruxified by the Romans in this time period and it came to over a 1000. So I guess sooner or later you are going to get lucky with one.

Doubt it. Try half a dozen?

Interesting about the number of crucifixions. I saw recently on the Naked Archaeologist that they have just ONE piece of skeletal proof for the practice. If so many had been done, why so few remains.

Just wondering aloud.

I think there is only one known crucified remain found because the Romans did not allow the condemned to be removed. The body was to remain until scavengers and excreta did the work. It was a further insult to Jews, with their strict burial practices. The Jewish revolt saw a huge number of crucifixions, in the many thousands. That only one skeleton has been uncovered with marks of crucifixion would indicate that Roman law was strictly observed.

Only "one piece of skeletal proof" of crucifixion = bones found with nail embedded:
i) It is quite possible that many, if not most, crucifixions were done simply with rope lashing;
ii) When nails were used, they were quite probably issued from army stores, and had to be returned afterwards.

The articles imply the date of the ink is unknown. Linguistic style, etc., is easy to fake:

Forsooth hast thou not seen the stone

There, I just set this thread in the late sixteenth century.

So all they have supposedly "dated" is the stone, and how they are able to claim this date is never mentioned or explained. Nor does that dating do anything to authenticate the date of the inscription, or explain why a Jewish scribe would paint such a passage on a piece of stone to begin with. (What, he was out of vellum?) Are there other examples of this practice from the period? None stand out in my mind, but I haven't researched it.

As for the interpretation of what the phrase is or what it means… well, someone is doing a lot of interpretive stretching here to make the claims they make. That, in itself, raises an eyebrow or two.

Combine all these factors and to me it begins to smell more and more like a forgery, especially when it is well known by antiquities forgers that including a biblical name or practice in a forgery really ups the sales potential and value of a piece, particularly to a certain segment of collectors. The infamous "James" ossuary comes to mind…

Romans respected the Jewish practice of not leaving executed men hanging after sundown. Hence Jesus' colleagues having their legs broken. LIFE OF BRIAN with its festering skeletons gets this wrong.

Of course, during Jewish revolts all bets were off, & presumably they got left up.

LIFE OF BRIAN with its festering skeletons gets this wrong.

I don't think it was a documentary mate.

Hi

Parzival, there is a difference between some public bit reflecting science, and the actual science. I suspect that if you do a pubs search you will find long specialized papers discussing how they date this stuff.

I outlined how this is done. But I am not going to do the research for you. The public press doesn't fact check. Actual scientists start in the library researching every paper ever published on this subject BEFORE they write their own.

Rocky

<<Forsooth hast thou not seen the stone

<<There, I just set this thread in the late sixteenth <<century.

Nope, this thread is now set in 1930's Hollywood.

I outlined how this is done. But I am not going to do the research for you.

I wasn't asking you to. I was observing that, going by the articles, we have a stone with a claimed provenance with no real proof of that provenance presented. Since there seems to be a question of whether or not the inscription really is of the time period, that implies to me that whomever supposedly "discovered" the stone did not do so under the conditions of an archeological dig that would establish the time at which the stone was cut or at least placed/discarded in the location in which it was supposedly found, as such a discovery would also record the presence of the inscription at that time. As there seems to be some doubt as to the age of the inscription, one can only conclude that no record exists that the inscription was present on the stone. So we have an "amateur" find (or "grave robber" find) at best, which is inherently unreliable. Now, one can check such things as stone cutting techniques, but that means nothing in terms of precision dating; almost any ancient craft technique is duplicatable, and even if authentic could come within a very wide range of time periods (especially stone cutting, which has gone on since the dawn of history; I seriously doubt there was any significant change in the method during the time claimed for the artifact). Weathering, etc., can be faked. So I find the "dating" of the stone somewhat dubious. Add in the other elements I also mentioned above, and I remain suspicious of the claims about this artifact.

As to whether or not "popular media" presents or understands anything about science, I heartily acknowledge the truth of your observation. In fact, I leave you with the image of the late, supposedly great, Peter Jennings, staring seriously into the camera and gravely announcing that one of the "dangerous chemicals" found in the Unabomber's cabin was (gasp) "sodium chloride."

I believe that says it all.

@ Nikator:

The writing on this stone is in ink – not carved. According to the wiki article carbon-14 dating "failed" link – presumably it was unable to date the ink.

As to whether or not "popular media" presents or understands anything about science, I heartily acknowledge the truth of your observation. In fact, I leave you with the image of the late, supposedly great, Peter Jennings, staring seriously into the camera and gravely announcing that one of the "dangerous chemicals" found in the Unabomber's cabin was (gasp) "sodium chloride."

Or Al Gore claiming quite recently that the temperature of the Earth's interior is "several million degrees": YouTube link

Some more solid news articles on the stone:

Biblical Archaeology Review (January/February 2008, updated July 8, 2008): link
Dr. Yardeni's transcription of the Hebrew text: picture
Dr. Yardeni's translation of her transcription into English: PDF link
New York Times (July 6, 2008): link
Time (July 7, 2008): link
Dr. Jim West's blog entry with numerous links (July 7, 2008): link
Yale Alumni Magazine (September/October 2008): link

Cheers,
Scott

cool, did anyone see the special on the Iranian mummy--iranian princess entombed in egyptian fashion turned out to be an elaborate well done hoax

Saw a docu on that, they got to the point where they established the 'Persian Princess' was a modern corpse, & I thought, "Ah, last we'll see of her then…" No… sawed through the bandages & dumped the naked old woman, certainly a victim of crime & possibly murdered, out on the slab for us all to see… utterly bizarre

Connard Sage- Ironically Life of Brian is one of the most authentic bible films in many aspects!

From the blog entry sited above: ". . . I must remind you – an UNPROVENANCED artifact. Without provenance, the thing is meaningless. "

Exactly.

If the stone was wrtten-on at the date it was supposed to have been so what ? If it is fake so what ? It is fantasy either way.Just old fantasy. Let others waste thier money on it.Now, about this wargaming thing……or perhaps we are essentialy discussing a revision of the composition of a JPLF army ?

I think its not just the fact of "unprovenanced".
Any artifact that is unique is often treated with caution and/or discounted.
The Phaistos disk for example.