The oldest table of the Ten Commandments is auctioned for more than 5 million dollars

This Monday, December 18, the Sotheby’s auction house in New York (United States) sold the oldest known stone tablet of the Ten Commandments for $5,040,000 million, dating from 300 to 800 AD. c.

According to him Sotheby’s official sitethis tablet was engraved during the late Roman-Byzantine era, approximately 1,500 years ago, in the Holy Land. Its initial price was estimated between 1 million and 2 million dollars, but it was greatly exceeded and sold at a estimated time 10 minutes.

The table is made of white marble, weighs 52 kilos and has a height of 60 centimeters. It is meticulously chiseled with the Ten Commandments in their Israelite Samaritan version and contains 20 lines in Paleo-Hebrew script.

According to Sotheby’, this marble slab was “accidentally discovered during excavations for a railway that passed through the land of Israel towards Egypt. The importance of the find was not recognized for many decades, and for 30 years it served as a paving stone in a local house.”

In 1947, Jacob Kaplan, a respected Tel Aviv municipal archaeologist, published an article in the newsletter of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society about the acquisition of this tablet four years earlier, providing additional information about its provenance.

“Kaplan described how in 1943, an Arab man from Yavne sold him a white marble tablet with an inscription engraved on it. According to the seller, his father found the panel in 1913 during excavation for the railroad and moved it to his home where he placed it on the threshold of one of the rooms in the interior patio,” the publication says.

Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a historian and Israel’s second and longest-serving president, also referred to this table according to Sotheby’s. Using Paleo-Hebrew writing and paleography, Ben-Zvi dated the tablet to the Byzantine era and attributed its creation to the Israelite Samaritans, an ethno-religious people who lived in Samaria, Israel.

According to additional information received by Kaplan, the tablet was first discovered buried east of the central Jama mosque on the same spot where a Samaritan church and synagogue once stood.

Richard Austin, global head of books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s, said in a statement shared with CNN: “This remarkable plaque is not only a historical artifact of enormous importance, but also a tangible link to the beliefs that helped shape Western civilization.”

“To encounter this shared piece of cultural heritage is to travel through millennia and connect with cultures and beliefs told through one of humanity’s oldest and most enduring moral codes,” he said.

Before arriving at Sotheby’s, the Ten Commandments table came into the hands of an Israeli antiquarian in 1995 and then to the Museum of the Living Torah in Brooklyn. In 2016, a collector and its last owner, Mitchell S. Cappell, bought it for $850,000.