A piece of history is up for auction. This December, Sotheby’s will offer the oldest known stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Dating back 1,500 years to the Late Byzantine period, it’s the only complete tablet of its kind from that era. It is expected to fetch as much as $2 million at auction.
Weighing 115 pounds and measuring approximately two feet in height, the marble tablet inscribed in Paleo-Hebrew script (ancient Hebrew), was unearthed in 1913 during railway excavations along the southern coast of the Land of Israel, near the sites of early synagogues, mosques, and churches. The significance of the discovery went unrecognized for many decades, and for thirty years it served as a paving stone at the entrance to a local home, with the inscription facing upwards and exposed to foot traffic.
In 1943, a scholar made a groundbreaking discovery: a Samaritan Decalogue, a tablet inscribed with divine precepts central to many faiths. This ancient artifact, likely once displayed in a synagogue or private home, may have been lost to history during the Roman invasions or the Crusades.
The twenty lines of text incised on the stone closely follow the 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 the Lord in vain” while including a new directive – to worship on Mount Gerizim, a holy site specific to the Samaritans.
“This remarkable tablet is not only a vastly important historic artifact, but a tangible link to the beliefs that helped shape Western civilization,” Richard Austin, Sotheby’s Global Head of Books & Manuscripts, said in a statement. “To encounter this shared piece of cultural heritage is to journey through millennia and connect with cultures and faiths told through one of humanity’s earliest and most enduring moral codes.”
