In auction in New York the oldest known table with the Ten Commandments

In December, Sotheby’s will auction at its New York headquarters a singular item: the oldest stone tablet engraved with the Ten Commandments. Dating from the late Byzantine period, this artifact is about 1,500 years old and is the only complete tablet of the Ten Commandments still in existence from this ancient era. It will be offered as a single lot sale on Dec. 18. Estimate: between $1 million and $2 million.

Weighing about 52 kilograms and standing about 60 cm tall, the marble tablet engraved in paleoebraic characters was discovered in 1913 during railroad excavations along Israel’s southern coast, near the sites of early synagogues, mosques and churches. The significance of the discovery was not recognized for many decades, and for thirty years it served as a paving stone at the entrance to a local house, with the inscription facing upward and exposed to foot traffic. Then, in 1943, the tablet was sold to a scholar who recognized it as an important Samaritan Decalogue containing divine precepts that are central to many faiths-perhaps in ancient times it was displayed in a synagogue or private home. The original site of the tablet was probably destroyed during the Roman invasions of AD 400-600, or during the Crusades in the 11th century.

The twenty lines of text engraved on the stone closely follow biblical verses familiar to both Christian and Jewish traditions. However, this tablet contains only nine of the commandments as found in the Book of Exodus, omitting the admonition “Thou shalt not take the name of God in vain” and including a new directive: to worship God on Mount Gerizim, a sacred place specifically for the Samaritans.

“This extraordinary tablet,” says Richard Austin, global head of books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s, “is not only an enormously important historical artifact, but also a tangible link to the beliefs that helped shape Western civilization. To encounter this shared piece of cultural heritage is to travel across millennia and connect with cultures and faiths told through one of humanity’s earliest and most enduring moral codes.”

In auction in New York the oldest known table with the Ten Commandments

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