Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Ancient ring found on pilgrim's road

ARTIFACT: 2,000-year-old Ring Found in Pilgrim's Road to Temple Mount. Ring seems to have been found in ritual bath, either slipped off somebody's finger or was forgotten, archaeologists excavating the City of David suggest (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz premium).
It's annoying to lose your precious baubles in a public pool and probably was just as irksome 2,000 years ago too, when a ring seems to have slipped off the finger of an unwary bather in a mikveh. Or maybe it was taken off for the purposes of the ritual purifying bath, and was forgotten there.

[...]
"Precious?" Oh no.

The story is also covered by Amanda Borschel-Dan in the Times of Israel: Misplaced 2,000-year-old ring discovered in Jerusalem’s City of David.

For more on those two ancient gold earrings, see here and links. For that Byzantine-era hoard of gold coins, see here and here. And for the recently discovered "Pilate" ring from the same period as Precious, see here and here.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.