THE AUSTRIAN SHEMA AMULET is covered in Haaretz, and the article contains some new details:

The scroll's inscription was incomprehensible at first, according to Prof. Nives Doneus, who discovered it. She says it might have been purchased for the boy by his parents as protection against evil spirits.

"The pendant was unearthed as early as 2000," Doneus told Haaretz last week in telephone conversation, "but because of the backlog we have, it wasn't examined before 2006. I found a hollow silver ornament. I extracted the golden scroll from inside the ornament, but I didn't notice the lettering the first time I examined it."

Only after reexamining the object was Doneus able to observe the Greek lettering. She then gave it to a linguist, who established that the text on the tiny scroll - which can be transliterated as "suma Istrahl adwne elwh adawt n a" - was Jewish in origin. Doneus then passed it on to Prof. Dr. Armin Lange, who heads the university's department of Jewish studies.

The bizarre-looking transcription of the sentence, which appears in Deuteronomy 6:4 ("Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one") owes, according to Lange, to the writer's decision to substitute the word "one" with the first letter of the Greek alphabet, alpha. Lange postulates this was done because of space considerations.

Other mis-transliterations are due to the difference between Hebrew and Greek, which lacks Hebrew's guttural ain and shin, says Lange, who is "completely certain" that the wording on the scroll is the "Shema."

"There are a number of things which set this pendant aside from others like it, which are dated from later periods," he explains. "Usually we see a longer prayer, and it's almost never engraved on a golden scroll."

This scroll, Lange adds, was written by a Jew for a Jew. "If the pendant was meant to protect [a person] from evil spirits, then only someone who knows the prayer and believes in the verse would be content to have such a short version of it," he says.

I think a Christian or a well-informed pagan magician might well have been content with it for the same purpose. I have further comments here.