My great uncle Bill, dead for many years, fought in First World War in the Palestine campaign and brought many souvenirs back, including numerous antiquities, some of which were quite valuable. His son Jack died a last year, and as he had no children and his wife had predeceased him he bequeathed me some of his father’s war loot. Two of the most interesting and puzzling items are a beautifully made large inlaid box with some kind of written script as part of the inlay, and a very ancient looking hand written book or codex which is written in a similar script. The codex is delicate but in quite good condition. Jack told me that his father said it had been originally obtained in a tightly sealed pottery jar, but was unaware what had become of the jar. Bill had referred to these to artefacts as the Jewish things, which is significant as they were obtained before the state of Israel existed, when there were very few Jews in Palestine.
I forwarded some photographs of both items, including close-ups of the first few pages of the Codex’s text to an expert on Middle East languages, who identified the script as Aramaic, an almost extinct Semitic script and gave me an approximate translation of the text. The explanation of approximate is that there are not exact translations to English of some ancient
Aramaic words and some of the phonetic sounds are not the same or unknown as Aramaic has no vowels. It is not obvious who the Codex is written by or who it is about but it appears to be refer to a difficult journey with a group of people and their leader, their leader is ill or injured and there are references to ‘the brothers’.
The box is identified as an ossuary, a box for the storage of the bones of the dead, as per the custom of the Jews of the first century. The inscription on it translates as Josua, son of Yusef. Due to this inscription I believe that possibly have some very important early Christian artefacts. It is even possible that the ossuary is that of Jesus, as Jesus is a Greek form of the Hebrew Josua and Yusef is the ancient form of Joseph. However both names were extremely common amongst 1st century Jews.
What should I do with these artefacts? I am nominally Christian and would not want to be the source of religious conflict. It is possible that the items are forgeries but this is unlikely as most forgery of Christian/Judaic artifacts in recent times has been after 1948. If they are as ancient as I believe, and that should be easy to date scientifically they are extremely valuable, but I am unsure if my ownership of them is valid. If they are Christian artefacts I would like them to be studied not disappear into a private collection or the Vatican cellars.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to get ripped off either, but the deciding what to do is beyond my experience and skills.
2006-07-23
16:15:10
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9 answers
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asked by
deviANT
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